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Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU
- femto 2mo ago1) Does applying a copyright message warrant that the content has not been generated by an AI? 2) If one applies a copyright message to AI generated output, is that fraudulent?
- bediger4000 2mo agoInteresting. In addition to Anthropic's watermark use to prevent model collapse, we can definitively call something copyrighted or not copyrighted. This is a boon to everyone who consumes culture.
- jefftk 2mo agoThat doesn't actually work. Say you took a book and used an AI to translate it into another language. The translation wouldn't have an additional copyright, the way it would if a human had done the work, but the output would still be restricted by the original copyright. So the presence of the watermark does not tell you that the text is public domain.
- pizzly 2mo agoI thought translations can be copyrighted separately. Their are translators for instance who translate very old texts from other countries/languages and then sell that book/translation using copyright to protect this business models? Not sure but does this mean if you as a human wrote a book in English and then used AI to translate to another language say French then that translated work would not be copyrighted. Not sure how this would work.
- freeone3000 2mo agoTranslation, in and of itself, is viewed as a creative work. A translated work has two copyrights: the original, and the translation, with permission needed from all rightsholders to redistribute. A new translation of a public domain work (Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey) has one copyright holder, the translator. An existing work (the English translation of The Three Body Problem) has at least two: the original author and the translator. However! Since AI work is noncopyrightable, the AI’s effort in translation is simply ignored. Claude’s The Odyssey would have zero rightsholders, and remain public domain. ChatGPT’s translation of The Three Body Problem would still be under Liu Cixin’s copyright.
- chungusamongus 2mo agoLmao. No. Content that is wholesale generated by AI is also not subject to copyright in the US. It relies on the honor system and you can always modify the material juuuust enough that you can claim the copyright. In practical terms, this changes nothing.
- bahmboo 2mo agoI will add a pixel by "hand" with software on my computer.
- Retric 2mo agoThat’s not enough to generate copyright protection. The creativity requirements may seem arbitrary but there’s a legal distinction between a sculpture and a standard brick.
- gruez 2mo ago>The creativity requirements may seem arbitrary but there’s a legal distinction between a sculpture and a standard brick. Or more relevantly, a recipe find on recipe sites (with the author's entire backstory) vs a sequence of instructions. The latter is not copyrightable, even if there was some creativity that went into it (eg. word choice).
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- aurmc 2mo agoJudges are not at all stupid enough to fall for that. You would get laughed out of court for that. Judges are not computers, and they can not be tricked with these kinds of technicalities. In fact, the defense of "I wrote the prompts that led to the code that the LLM wrote" would be a much better defense.
- Ekaros 2mo agoMy bet would be to build anything from multiple independently generated pieces of AI code. Thus the software build from AI generated blocks by human would at least have protection on basis of the structure and work put into that.
- dgellow 2mo agoYou will have copyright of that single change
- consoleable 2mo agoIf copyright does not protect AI-generated content, then AI should not be restricted from generating content that falls under copyright protection; yet, the reality is otherwise.
- jraph 2mo agoThese two things that are quite distinct. Whether something is protected by copyright, it should not be counterfeiting regardless.
- phoronixrly 2mo ago> If copyright does not protect AI-generated content, then AI should not be restricted from generating content that falls under copyright protection What in the world makes you think that? What is this implication based upon? Where does it say in copyright law that if no copyright arises for your work then it does not infringe the copyright holders' rights? This is completely devoid of logic...
- VanTheBrand 2mo agoThat’s not how that would work at all. The copyright of a derivative work has no effect on the existing copyright of an underlying work. If you record yourself reading a book, you own the audio recording copyright but it would be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without a license for the underlying rights. In this situation: If the AI generates the audio recording of a book, no one owns the copyright of the audio recording but it would still be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without the underlying rights.
- harimau777 2mo agoI'm not sure that logic holds. If I create a frame for frame copy of Star Wars then I cannot copyright it. However, that doesn't mean that I can still distribute my copy.
- t-writescode 2mo agoThis matches historical precedent in other nations where copyright was not extended to a photographer when a primate took a photo of themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
- randyrand 2mo agoThat was a terrible ruling. It should be about who got the camera there and set it up, not who pushed the button. With automated recording (dashcams) there isn't even "a button." Hopefully no judge uses that as precedence.
- trickypr 2mo agoWhat if it was a human who took the photo, would the copyright still be owned by the equipment owner / person who set it up? What if this applied in a photography class? The instructor owns the equipment and helped “set up” the photo. Does the instructor own the copyright?
- tossaway0 2mo agoAfter this ruling, I had an idea for a photo where I set up the entire set, camera, etc, but the photo entailed the model clicking the shutter while we were both in the shot. Just in case, I had the model write a quick note ceding the rights. It's fine, I guess. How does it work in cinema? A director who is the creator of the project must have to get rights from every camera/mic operator.
- chungusamongus 2mo agoThe same is true in the US. This is a nothing burger.
- phoronixrly 2mo agoIt may be a nothing burger for US companies/persons, but the EU is fortunately not governed by US law. This is big news for us here.
- mod50ack 2mo agoIt's not surprising, though, since the ECJ held in the Infopaq case that copyright (under the EU Directives) can only exist for something which is the intellectual creation of an author.
- chungusamongus 2mo agoIt's not big news if you know anything about Europe in relation to IP law. No one expected a different result.
- VanTheBrand 2mo agoIt hadn’t been established yet in the EU. It would be a big deal if it went the other way in Europe so it being the same isn’t a nothing burger.
- chungusamongus 2mo agoDid anyone expect it to go the other way? Europe is more hardcore about copyright than the US, and that's saying something. Germany is practically...well I was going to say they're nazis about it but perhaps that's in poor taste.
- semiquaver 2mo agoIt hasn’t been established in the US either, despite how desperately some people want to misinterpret the handful of cases so far.
- generationP 2mo agoWhy should anyone want to have copyright on AI-generated content?
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoTo profit under intellectual property constructs. As it stands, AI output is effectively in the public domain.
- phoronixrly 2mo agoProbably unless it infringes on others' copyright as it does...
- derektank 2mo agoGiven the cost of generating images/text/etc. is much lower when using an AI system, as compared to a human, this seems appropriate. The purpose of intellectual property is to encourage people to invest that time into creating works that benefit others. Perhaps there’s an argument for a shorter copyright period to cover the cost of the compute spent, but certainly one wouldn’t expect AI intellectual property to require a similar level of incentive to produce.
- thfuran 2mo agoFor the same reason they'd want copyright on anything else.
- xphos 2mo agoI feel like this question is typed wrong but the same reason someone wants copyright on human work to make money by prevent other people from stealing your work
- dgellow 2mo agoNot just money, FLOSS relies on copyright laws
- dgellow 2mo ago
- efficax 2mo agoDoes this apply to software?
- dgellow 2mo agoyes, why wouldn’t it?
- pizzly 2mo agoAs software, creative works, science, etc become more and more contributed via AI does that mean all future works will not be copyrighted or patented? Under our current copyright culture and laws obviously not but that does open the question to how much does a human have to contribute and what evidence is required to show that a human contributed enough so that it can be copyrighted and patented. Some time in the future (may be many years) science may become to complicated for humans to understand fully with AI systems researching themselves. Current patent laws in many places including US says inventions created entirely by artificial intelligence cannot be patented. This future may be coming. What will the new copyright and patent laws look like in the future? Do we need copyrights and patents anymore?
- raincole 2mo agoIt means as long as you can find a few employees who testify that they made "creative input" during the process and nobody can disprove that, you're fine. It's like things that are already in public domain. Even if you make a coloring book out of paintings in public domain, it doesn't necessarily mean others can just print your book as-is.
- Obscurity4340 2mo agoLike being an executive producer
- pizzly 2mo agoPerhaps but what about individual works done not via a company. Say you are a author and someone falsely detects a AI watermark in your book. Is the testimony you provide enough to override that falsely detected AI watermark? My feeling is that there will be an industry that arises that proves you contributed to the works you want copyrighted.
- raincole 2mo ago(I think) the case depends on what AI watermarks are. As far as I know, things like SynthID has practically zero false positives.
- bbor 2mo agoThank god! A victory for everyone who believes in the freedom of information, regardless of what you think about AI. Copyright didn't always exist, nor should it continue to. Hell; it must not. I think the words (read: hilarious 1.25pp pamphlet) of Aaron Swartz on the topic are just too poignant to ignore, given the paths of Reddit (corrupted yet democratic), IP law (malignant yet showing cracks), and government survellience have taken in the Trump era. Despite the dated context... he really says it best: https://ia800101.us.archive.org/1/items/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf https://ia800101.us.archive.org/1/items/GuerillaOpenAccessMa...
- jongjong 2mo ago> When you put your name on an article that's written by ChatGPT or Claude, you're basically putting a provenance mark on it saying: I take responsibility for this. I haven't written it, but I'm putting my name on it. That doesn't give you copyright, but it does give you liability for the content If the AI is treated as an agent during inference, distinct from its user and not merely as a tool, then this should also apply during training too. Based on this, it seems that AI agents are consuming people's code without permission. The MIT license only gives rights to "any person obtaining a copy of this software". So the rights are given to a 'person', and the rights pertain specifically to a person who performed the act of 'obtaining a copy of this software'. MIT license says 'obtaining a copy' and uses the word 'software', not 'code'. 'Software' is to 'code' what 'shop' is to 'building'; if you bought the shop, it doesn't necessarily mean you own the building. These are two different things and require different clauses. MIT explicitly separates the two and emphasizes that the author of the software retains copyrights (presumably over the code as this is the only thing over which they could claim copyright). The code is different from the software; you can write the exact same software which behaves in the exact same way using completely different code; can be poorly written or well written. The difference is extremely meaningful to the person who invested effort to write the code in a clean way. If we say that the agent is a separate entity from the person who ran it during inference, surely the same distinction can be made concerning the person who ran the agent during training. So the term 'person' from the MIT clause doesn't seem to apply here since the person running the agent has been factored out (just as they were during inference). Also, the agent is not obtaining a copy of the software; it's obtaining copies of the code which is copyright and independent of the software (as the MIT license clearly asserts).
- killix 2mo ago[flagged]
- Balooga 2mo agoThis then implies that in the EU, AI-generated content cannot have a license applied? MIT, GPL, CC, etc?
- lg5689 2mo agoIANAL, but yes, I'd assume the license is unenforceable on the AI content.
- Ekaros 2mo agoYes. Also CC is complicated in EU. A creator can not "give up" their copy right. Work can not put to "Public Domain" as creator.
- dgellow 2mo agoIs that for the whole EU? I understood it was country specific, for example France doesn’t let you give up your copyright, but other EU members do
- Ekaros 2mo agoMakes it even worse. Basically it hugely depends. For example Finland allows letting go of commercial exploitation rights and even make binding statement on that. But still there always remains right for them to be informed if copies are being published. Not to even mention moral rights on how such work can or can not be changed if it would be disparaging for example...
- dgellow 2mo agoYep, it’s a mess. I’m sure it’s also something pretty complicated if you take in account Asian countries, and look at distinctions between US states. IP laws is a real mess.
- redwall_hp 2mo agoThis has already also been implied in the US. Courts upheld the Copyright Office's stance on human creation in the context of AI image generation. There's no reason to expect something that fundamental to copyright to be any different for other media, such as source code. It's reasonable to expect this to hold for all Berne Convention countries. All licenses are unenforceable if you don't hold the copyright, since you don't have a copyright to license. And attempting to do so would probably be perjury.
- apatheticonion 2mo agoDoes this mean someone could develop a switch emulator using an AI and Nintendo couldn't win a lawsuit against them? Does it enable decompilation remasters of classic games? It feels like AI is a cleanroom laundromat
- jdswain 2mo agoNot a lawyer, but I'd expect that decompilation creates a derived work which is still subject to the copyright of the original.
- unified101 2mo agoIf you engineer a clean room process, it does not. Already proven with an open source project that went from GPL to MIT via clean room (chardet).
- apatheticonion 2mo agoExactly this. Using an LLM to study the decompiled output then another LLM to implement an emulator/engine/etc That sounds similar to how LLMs have been trained on GPL code and yet output is not (yet) considered derivative work
- smilespray 2mo agoDefinitely not clean room, quite the opposite.
- cwillu 2mo ago“That doesn't give you copyright, but it does give you liability for the content.”
- lg5689 2mo agoNo, an AI's output can still violate copyright.
- dgellow 2mo agoIm not sure it’s really a copyright issue here, and not patent or trademark related, or something else. Copyright is really only one aspect of IP laws and they all have their own legal nuances
- jmward01 2mo agoI don't see an easy test here. Worse, I see the beginnings of a test that is technical and very likely to not match the future of how we will interact with these things. We have to start somewhere but I'm not sure 'Neither mere prompting nor the selection between several AI suggestions is sufficient as a human creative contribution.' is the right place to start. I think we need more examples of what does constitute 'human-centric' and work from there. I also don't think that any system that says 'you didn't do enough work so it isn't human-centric' works. Any system like that will require a reexamining of copyright in general. There is a lot of low work copyrighted material out there. Just because 'AI' didn't build it doesn't mean the same tests shouldn't apply. Some examples of why I think this is really hard: Say I build a story generation system. I work hard on building an agent swarm of actors, critics, editors, researchers. I craft into the various agents concepts of story arcs, outlining techniques, character development. I build a huge well thought out process for how to agentically write an actually good story, so long as you give it a title. Heck, I even design and train my own custom LLM with original layer ideas and novel training techniques to use on this system. After all that I then take that final step and give it a title. Do I have no claim to that? I probably put more work and creativity into it than an author would have a book. What if I then gave it 500 titles? 5,000? Would my claim degrade the more titles I fed it? Is it a percentage of work question? What is the core concept here that defines 'human-centric'? What is the cut-off here? Let's go even further. I don't prompt. I live in a world with unlimited context models. I have a conversation about the book I want it to write. During that process I reject some ideas and accept others. I didn't give it a 'system prompt' but essentially all I did was prompt it and select versions I liked. Is that not human centric? How about if I asked it for advice and it did some editing work on my story? Did that make it not human centric even though the starting text was mine? What if that starting text was 99% replaced with a version 10x as verbose. Defining based on how you interacted with the model (prompted and selected) just seems way to weak to be a clear test.
- harimau777 2mo agoMy test would be: Until the AI companies pay back what they have already stolen, then anything that uses AI at all cannot be copyrighted.
- zmmmmm 2mo agoit's sort of non-controversial at the extreme end I think - where there is no human contribution, why should there be protection? But it just begs the actual question of how much human contribution there needs to be: - I wrote the prompt (not enough) - I wrote many prompts and iteratively refined them using distinctly human skill (open question, but loosely seems still not enough, potentially in the EU but maybe in the US?) - I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough) - I made equal or more contribution to the final result (this better clearly have copyright protection or we are in real trouble)
- harimau777 2mo agoI'd say that any use of an AI trained on people's creations without (real) consent and compensation should not be protected.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- somerandom2407 2mo agoIs it fair to say, then, that artists who have trained on the work of prior artists should also not be able to protect their works unless they have directly received consent and have compensated all the artists whose works they have viewed and potentially learned from over their lifetime?
- harimau777 2mo agoThere's some big differences: Artist are human There is a dramatic difference between learning from or being inspired by an artist and incorporating it wholesale into an LLM Artists can use human judgement and knowledge of social norms to decide what art is or is not appropriate to utilize. (e.g. a painting in the museum versus someone's tribute to a dead loved one on DeviantArt) There's a big difference both in the amount of learning and the amount of output between an AI and a human. There's a big difference between an artist and a megacorporation. Andy Warhol did in fact compensate the artists whose work he incorporated into his art. So there is definitely precident.
- socalgal2 2mo agoSo this means you can not use AI for the majority of open source projects since GPL, MIT, BSD, etc are all copyright declarations and they'd be being made for code which you can not copyright.
- pornel 2mo agoYou can't enforce those licenses against AI-generated parts, because enforcement relies on the recipient having no other way to avoid copyright infringement. However, there's no issue with including non-copyrightable code in otherwise copyrighted projects. There's already plenty of non-copyrightable code like auto-generated boilerplate.
- Joel_Mckay 2mo ago>no issue with including non-copyrightable code in otherwise copyrighted projects That is not how copyright/trademark/contract laws work, and isomorphic plagiarism is not a long-term business model. People also loved Napster at first too. Good luck =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhgYMH6n004 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhgYMH6n004
- randyrand 2mo agoNo it would mean the license does not apply to the parts of code written by AI.
- Joel_Mckay 2mo agoNo, GPL is a contaminating license contract, so "AI" slop means you are probably in GPL violation by including isomorphic plagiarized uncopyrightable code. =3
- Ekaros 2mo agoI find it hard to find correct terminology in this case. AI generated content is copy right wise in state of nothingness. It simply does not have copy right status like other material can have. As such maybe best I can formulate is that you can't enforce license violations against ai generated material as you do not have ownership. So no license is enforceable with code written by AI.
- dools 2mo agoCreate an “assign copyright” skill? I mean the copyright has to belong to somebody right?
- harimau777 2mo agoThe argument could probably be made that we currently don't recognize AI as a person and therefore no one created the work.
- solid_fuel 2mo ago> I mean the copyright has to belong to somebody right? Why would it? It’s generated by blending together ~ every bit of content on the internet and in books that they could steal. Why would the operator of the blending machine suddenly get copyright? Does a gambler own the copyright on the symbols generated by a slot machine?
- dools 2mo agoThere is the potential for a solid piece of artwork here, ie. at what point does a string of words become an artistic product. Imagine a slot machine in a gallery that produces a 4 word sentence. Visitors press the button, and the artist copies the 4 words onto a piece of paper and puts it on the wall. EDIT: my point being that causing a machine to generate words doesn’t give you copyright over the words but if you then do something with the words they become your work.
- Ekaros 2mo agoThere does not have to be copyright. Nothing mandates that piece of data has one.
- mindcandy 2mo agoLots of wild guesses about mixed human-AI copyright in here. Last time I read the copyright office’s statements in this, their stance was basically: The human owns exactly what they contribute. The rest is public domain. Yes, that is vague. I think the examples were like: If you paint a symbol and use an AI filter over that to stylize it, you own the symbol aspect of the image but not the stylized final result. You can own a book of AI images as a curated collection. But, not the individual images.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- dfedbeef 2mo agoSeems about right. Copyright is supposed to literally prevent outright copying. The output from an LLM is not a creative work of the prompter. It's genuinely the opposite, I use them when I don't care about something but have to do it anyway for whatever reason. It makes more time for me to do the things I like working on. It feels shitty that they have been trained on the life sums of all of our work and online presences with absolutely no credit given... But then again, I'm not sure I'd want to know what parts of the weights were from me and which weren't.
- dfedbeef 2mo agoI feel like people will be upset by this take... But you don't get credit for the creativity of an idea alone. Every asshole has ideas. It's called a work of art for a reason, emphasis on WORK.
- mindcandy 2mo agoI’m trying to imaging what giving credit would look like… “Credit: Everyone who has made anything freely observable on the internet.” Would folks be less upset if that was included? Frankly, I should have been putting something similar attached to any drawings or paintings I make physically. My entire life I’ve been training my brain on countless works of others. And, I’ve never asked one of them for permission or given anyone any credit.
- chupchap 2mo agoMicrosoft is using AI generated code in their OS, so does that mean they lose copyright protection in Europe?
- Ekaros 2mo agoOnce it becomes too substantial and there is not enough human oversight in process. Say I would prompt Unix like system in few prompts or started agent chain to make it. That OS wouldn't have a protection.
- kstenerud 2mo agoThis post is glossing over most of the nuance in EU law. The AI system must function merely as a tool or instrument (like a camera or Photoshop) guided by the human, rather than acting as the creator itself. The line may get a bit fuzzy case-by-case, but effectively the human must be the creative one, not the AI. This is not unprecedented. Machine generated technical data, sensor outputs, automated surveilance photography, monkey selfies, purely algorithmic or generative music and such were already disqualified long before AI came along.
- swrrt 2mo agoDoes a photo/image that generated/modified by a human-being using photoshop got protected by copyright? I think previously someone does this...
- whartung 2mo agoYear ago, there was a painter, Thomas Kinkade, the "Painter of light". He became a bit of a pop phenomenon, with stores dedicated to selling high quality prints of his works. And one of the things, so I'm told, that could happen, was that you could buy one of his prints, but someone at the store, an artist, would dab some paint onto the print. Add some "light" to it. Obviously this is a commercial endeavor, so I doubt the provenance of the rights holder was in doubt (such as through an employment agreement). But it's, perhaps, an interesting case study about who owns what in a time of augmented and manipulated media.
- mysterydip 2mo agoI believe those are called “embellishments”, and they’re semi-common as a way to make a print “unique”, but still cost way less than the original the print was copied from. From the couple artists I talked to about them, their students do these at their studios, rather than the artist themselves.
- harimau777 2mo agoYes it does because there's is still direct control from a human. When working with LLMs, even interactive prompting does not provide that level of control.
- _davide_ 2mo agoUnder this interpretation models themselves do not have copyright protection either
- Ekaros 2mo agoFunnily I think copyright protection for LLM model is 15 years. As to me it just looks like very fancy database and that is the protection for those...
- _davide_ 2mo agoNot a layer but a bit nerdy on the law but specially on the copyright side. Copyright is a framework to protect creative work. One could easily argue that an LLM model is just weights automatically produced from data and there is no creative work involved. The counterpart would argue that the body of training is itself a curated body that is reflected in the model and that the pipeline training is a creative process required to obtain the final model, like some artist work; But it feels like a weak argument to me. But then again, let's stop pretending law in US has any meaning other than what the billionaires or the dictator wants.
- karim79 2mo agoWe've reached the stage where copyright has become impossible. Let's just accept it and move on.
- Lazare 2mo agoInteresting thought experiment is to consider an author who writes a novel in English, but wants to translate it into German. They have a copyright on the original, and if they hire a human, the human would have a copyright on the translation (which would generally be licensed or transferred back to the author in some way). If they use an AI for the translation, by the logic here, the translation wouldn't have its own independent copyright, but (based on other long established principles of copyright) it would still be a derived work of the original, so even if this decision holds it would not be legal to make unauthorised AI translations, pirate authorised AI translations, make further translations into other languages (or back to English), etc. Which seems fairly reasonable! But consider: If you start with, say, a 90,000 word novel, and ask for a translated novel, you (presumably) have sufficient rights to stop someone making unauthorised copies of the AI translated version. If you start with a 300 word prompt, and ask for a logo, you (apparently) do not have sufficient rights to stop someone from using it without authorisation. So some combination of the input (0.3k vs 90k) and the output (logo versus novel) crosses an inflection point between these two extremes, and I think it's interesting to wonder what the boundaries are. Like, in theory you could graph input size versus output complexity, and sketch a frontier between "the author's protected expression survives in the output" and "the author's protected expression does not survive in the output". And I don't have the slightest idea what I think a fair frontier would look like.
- raincole 2mo ago> Some combination of the input (0.3k vs 90k) and the output (logo versus novel) crosses an inflection point, and it's interesting to wonder what the boundaries are It has always been like that though. Copyright is just that arbitrary. You really can't tell if Android violates Oracle's copyright over Java by reading law text.
- kijin 2mo agoIt's supposed to be arbitrary. Copyright is not some sort of human right or divine commandment that creators have. It's a legal device to incentivize a certain type of behavior. Like tax cuts and subsidies, governments can dangle it in front of people whenever it wants. Monkeys and LLMs (so far) either don't understand or don't need such incentives, so they don't get copyright.
- kazinator 2mo agoSuppose that an artist trains an AI model purely on their own works, and then the AI generates something similar to that artist's work. I would say that the artist must be allowed to assert copyright over that. The artist has copyright over all the training data, and the output of the AI is a derived work of that.
- somerandom2407 2mo agoWhat do you think should happen if an artist views a lot of arts over their lifetime and then themself generates something similar to another artist's work? I would argue that collectively humans have been standing on the backs of other humans all throughout history. An artist today does not simply come out of the womb knowing how to make great art - they learn it by observing other art, learning about art and practicing (not altogether dissimilar to model training) over many, many hours.
- wotamess 2mo agoDoes it matter? The set of possible and desirable non-copyrighted text/audio/visual states to render is effectively infinite. Laws don't prevent Scrabble clones; tropes are not protected. Endless remixes of public domain content are an option as well. If an iPhone with model weights in chip, a local Mac mini with similar but more powerful model on chip ends up capable of generating endless content copyrights won't provide a moat.
- protocolture 2mo ago>Content that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence is not protected by copyright. entirely is the plank supporting this.
- m-s-y 2mo agoGood luck proving the origin of these created works
- hn_submit 2mo agoDoes this also extend to generated source code? I mean, this upend the business models of many A.I. companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. In addition, many ISVs would probably stop using A.I. if their products could lose their copyright. And what about A.I. generated code which has been altered by a human? Is the derived work copyrightable?
- somerandom2407 2mo agoAnd this is one of the reasons some people are up in arms about Anthropic's recent inclusion of watermarking against anything Claude models touch. It will even take human-generated code that it works on and apply watermarks to it which can be then used to prove it was AI processed and perhaps invalidate any copyright on even human-written code.
- hn_submit 2mo agoBut even if it wasn't watermarked and someone later found out or a whistleblower revealed that the code was A.I. generated it could lead to the loss of copyright. Imagine what this would do to a product like Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office!
- EagnaIonat 2mo agoYou can copyright the instructions file, as long as you wrote it.
- yodon 2mo agoThere was some related discussions of US law recently[0]. [0]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49353603#49354813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49353603#49354813
- Brenndalampe1 2mo ago[flagged]
- M95D 2mo ago> AI generated logos do not enjoy copyright protection But they can still be registered as trademarks.
- dredmorbius 2mo agoThe thought occurred a few days ago that presumed copyright assignment might be a further casualty of our Brave New World of Ubiquitous AI Content. Under most Berne Convention nations, copyright exists in all works "of original authorship" without any further registration requirement. That copyright persists for extraordinarily extended periods of time, generally many decades beyond the death of the author (if known). Such protections apply to any authorship, including the comments posted here to HN, a jotted grocery list, or an audio recording. But the protection presumes authorship. Today, increasingly, ubiquitous AI tools take over the role of writing in many contexts: texts, emails, HN comments (somewhat frequently given mod comments: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20please%20not%20post%20AI-generated%20&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>), and whole articles and books. Absent some work-factor suggesting probable original authorship (say, an original, handwritten or typewritten draft), there seems at least a faint possibility that AI might server as an incentive to require some positive act (e.g., registration, with a sworn statement of authorship) for copyright protection to be applied. This might be a positive step back from the copyright absolutism of the past century or so. Earlier: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/117069264529174644 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/117069264529174644>