4 ms·

As 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

by pizzly 2mo ago

As 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 ago
It 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 ago
  Like being an executive producer
- pizzly 2mo ago
  Perhaps 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.
    - pizzly 2mo ago
      My understanding is that you get back a percentage from SynthID regarding how confident it thinks the text is generated by AI or not. The question is what percentage would be considered undeniable that it is AI generated or require more than just your testimony to prove that you actually did the work yourself. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 (Google Deepmind) was using a "Watermark detectability is measured using the true-positive rate (TPR) when the false-positive rate (FPR) is set to 1%" for instance in their research paper. This 1% was set arbitrary just for the research paper but what percentage should it be set to?
    - gls2ro 2mo ago
      I think you need to provide independent sources for the "SynthID has practically zero false positives". Except a paper written by Google authors about SynthID for images I have not found any study about zero false positives.
- asdfsa32 2mo ago
  You can blame the governments for all sort of inefficiencies but any operation that impacts taxes runs a tight ship in most developed nations, this include things like copyright law, census, and anything statistics. If companies get slope with creative output to the point that "a few employees" can reproduce it in shadow markets, don't expect to get copyright protection without giving governments revenue and speech-control.
- unknownfuture 2mo ago
  > It 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. Have you been involved in copyright or patent litigation? Because it's not that easy.
  - raincole 2mo ago
    It's usually easier than that, as one by default hold the copyright of their works. Typically a company doesn't need to provide the whole working process and files to the court to claim copyright over their published products / to accuse pirates for violation. If you're on the defendant side of a copyright violation case, it's extremely hard to use "well the original author didn't really make it...* as a defense. (Patent cases are often defended with this argument though, as a patent grants far boarder protection than copyright and can be rejected on prior art. But still it's very different from "AI made this actually.")
    - unknownfuture 2mo ago
      > It's usually easier than that, as one by default hold the copyright of their works. That's not what we're talking about. This is a question of copyright eligibility in the first place. An excellent recent(ish) example is Oracle v Google wherein the former claimed copyright over the Java APIs. That particular litigation went on for years and ultimately went to the Supreme Court (though it ultimately ended on a fair use argument and the issue of API copyright eligibility was never settled). We can probably assume similar high profile cases in the future that turn on quantifying the level of human contribution in code produced through the use of AI. As for patents, it's literally that easy. Attacking authorship of a patent is an excellent way to invalidate it. It's why any company with a serious patent program requires staff to keep supporting notes for their work and confirm authorship in writing as part of the filing process.
dev1ycan 2mo ago
Why would copyright and patents exist when the US blatantly stole the entire world's knowledge to train their AI models (and China distillled from it)
- benjismith 2mo ago
  Knowledge cannot be "stolen"
  - sebastiennight 2mo ago
    You wrote your house's security code on a Post-It note. Somebody came in as a houseparty guest and located the note, and discretely copied it onto their hand to get access to the house during your next vacation. Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?
    - gruez 2mo ago
      "eavesdropped"? "spied"? Whatever it is, slapping "steal" on it because what was done is wrong, and stealing is wrong, is the same sloppy logic that the copyright lobby used in the 80s/90s.
      - Planktonne 2mo ago
        If 'steal' doesn't fit, then neither do 'eavesdrop' or 'spied'.
    - mitaphane 2mo ago
      learned
      - sebastiennight 2mo ago
        After a bit of thinking, I agree that "learned" is the most appropriate. I stand corrected.
    - koolala 2mo ago
qotgalaxy 2mo ago
[dead]
sva_ 2mo ago
> Content that is entirely generated [...] Take note of the qualifier entirely. If you're working with an agent steering it to produce the results you want, it would be an entirely different story.
- colordrops 2mo ago
  Where is this qualification in the legal language?
  - _aavaa_ 2mo ago
    Where is the legal language?
    - colordrops 2mo ago
      Exactly, I don't know how the person I was replying to was making such confident statements about the situation.
      - _aavaa_ 1mo ago
        I think that’s simple. The submitted title is more absolute than the thing it leads to. The article is talking about content that’s exclusively generated by AI. That’s very different than work that contains, or is derived from, AI output, or anything along those lines.
- pizzly 2mo ago
  Wheres the limit. Would a prompt "Create a system that does x" and no other feedback count? Or do need to do 10 prompts to steer your agent to the results you want. What about just 1 additional prompt. Somewhere there will be a line.
  - oblio 2mo ago
    Legal systems are fuzzy. The limit will be what courtrooms decide. There will never be a ">75% of content" law, everything will be left to interpretation, laws are not source code.
Eridrus 2mo ago
This is less relevant for logos & creative works, but things that enable companies to do production will go back to being closely guarded and sharded secrets, which is what the patent system was trying to resolve (though we can certainly argue the success of it). If companies fail to protect their investments in generating IP, they will stop investing in generating it. And unless IP generation costs (all in, including the humans telling them what to generate) fall close to zero, it will be bad for the world if companies cannot recoup investments in generating new IP. We would expect this to hit those industries relying on IP protections the most, e.g. pharma.
0x20cowboy 2mo ago
"Content that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence is not protected by copyright." If that is faithful reading of the law, that makes sense. I know a number of people who use AI, but none of them (that are making anything actually useful) have the output "entirely generated" (aside from some POC tests that never see the light of day). I have a hard time believing anything of value, anything worth copyrighting, could be entirely generated by AI.
- spudlyo 2mo ago
  > I have a hard time believing anything of value, anything worth copyrighting, could be entirely generated by AI. Perhaps you're not stretching your imagination enough. What if an expert novelist used an AI like it were a fancy auto-completing dictation machine to write the next great American novel? AI may have "entirely generated" all the text, but what if they micromanaged the shit out it? I can imagine the difference between someone who fires off a lazy 5 minute prompt, and someone who labors for months and months to get exactly the results they want.
  - elictronic 2mo ago
    It’s almost like laboring for months and months would have draft revisions, dozens of changes, and many other interactions they could prove as theirs defeating your entire argument.
- rackp 2mo ago
  [dead]
- dgellow 2mo ago
  The current trend (since months now) is to have everything done through agentic loops. Meaning humans are only here to provide the initial prompt and do a few back and forth during the implementation.
  - 0x20cowboy 1mo ago
    Most of the people I see doing that ship nothing. They just seemingly loop for the sake of looping. However, I just saw a product yesterday that was released and being built as you described. Interesting times.
dredmorbius 2mo ago
Pretty much my thought: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49388777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49388777>.
tripzilch 1mo ago
> As software, creative works, science, etc become more and more contributed via AI does that mean all future works will not be copyrighted or patented? No, just the stuff from people who think whatever they prompted from an AI is a contribution to creative works, science, etc.

by pizzly 2mo ago

raincole 2mo ago

It 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 ago
Like being an executive producer
pizzly 2mo ago
Perhaps 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.
  - pizzly 2mo ago
    My understanding is that you get back a percentage from SynthID regarding how confident it thinks the text is generated by AI or not. The question is what percentage would be considered undeniable that it is AI generated or require more than just your testimony to prove that you actually did the work yourself. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 (Google Deepmind) was using a "Watermark detectability is measured using the true-positive rate (TPR) when the false-positive rate (FPR) is set to 1%" for instance in their research paper. This 1% was set arbitrary just for the research paper but what percentage should it be set to?
  - gls2ro 2mo ago
    I think you need to provide independent sources for the "SynthID has practically zero false positives". Except a paper written by Google authors about SynthID for images I have not found any study about zero false positives.
asdfsa32 2mo ago
You can blame the governments for all sort of inefficiencies but any operation that impacts taxes runs a tight ship in most developed nations, this include things like copyright law, census, and anything statistics. If companies get slope with creative output to the point that "a few employees" can reproduce it in shadow markets, don't expect to get copyright protection without giving governments revenue and speech-control.
unknownfuture 2mo ago
> It 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. Have you been involved in copyright or patent litigation? Because it's not that easy.
- raincole 2mo ago
  It's usually easier than that, as one by default hold the copyright of their works. Typically a company doesn't need to provide the whole working process and files to the court to claim copyright over their published products / to accuse pirates for violation. If you're on the defendant side of a copyright violation case, it's extremely hard to use "well the original author didn't really make it...* as a defense. (Patent cases are often defended with this argument though, as a patent grants far boarder protection than copyright and can be rejected on prior art. But still it's very different from "AI made this actually.")
  - unknownfuture 2mo ago
    > It's usually easier than that, as one by default hold the copyright of their works. That's not what we're talking about. This is a question of copyright eligibility in the first place. An excellent recent(ish) example is Oracle v Google wherein the former claimed copyright over the Java APIs. That particular litigation went on for years and ultimately went to the Supreme Court (though it ultimately ended on a fair use argument and the issue of API copyright eligibility was never settled). We can probably assume similar high profile cases in the future that turn on quantifying the level of human contribution in code produced through the use of AI. As for patents, it's literally that easy. Attacking authorship of a patent is an excellent way to invalidate it. It's why any company with a serious patent program requires staff to keep supporting notes for their work and confirm authorship in writing as part of the filing process.

dev1ycan 2mo ago

Why would copyright and patents exist when the US blatantly stole the entire world's knowledge to train their AI models (and China distillled from it)

benjismith 2mo ago
Knowledge cannot be "stolen"
- sebastiennight 2mo ago
  You wrote your house's security code on a Post-It note. Somebody came in as a houseparty guest and located the note, and discretely copied it onto their hand to get access to the house during your next vacation. Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?
  - gruez 2mo ago
    "eavesdropped"? "spied"? Whatever it is, slapping "steal" on it because what was done is wrong, and stealing is wrong, is the same sloppy logic that the copyright lobby used in the 80s/90s.
    - Planktonne 2mo ago
      If 'steal' doesn't fit, then neither do 'eavesdrop' or 'spied'.
  - mitaphane 2mo ago
    learned
    - sebastiennight 2mo ago
      After a bit of thinking, I agree that "learned" is the most appropriate. I stand corrected.
  - koolala 2mo ago

qotgalaxy 2mo ago

[dead]

sva_ 2mo ago

> Content that is entirely generated [...] Take note of the qualifier entirely. If you're working with an agent steering it to produce the results you want, it would be an entirely different story.

colordrops 2mo ago
Where is this qualification in the legal language?
- _aavaa_ 2mo ago
  Where is the legal language?
  - colordrops 2mo ago
    Exactly, I don't know how the person I was replying to was making such confident statements about the situation.
    - _aavaa_ 1mo ago
      I think that’s simple. The submitted title is more absolute than the thing it leads to. The article is talking about content that’s exclusively generated by AI. That’s very different than work that contains, or is derived from, AI output, or anything along those lines.
pizzly 2mo ago
Wheres the limit. Would a prompt "Create a system that does x" and no other feedback count? Or do need to do 10 prompts to steer your agent to the results you want. What about just 1 additional prompt. Somewhere there will be a line.
- oblio 2mo ago
  Legal systems are fuzzy. The limit will be what courtrooms decide. There will never be a ">75% of content" law, everything will be left to interpretation, laws are not source code.

Eridrus 2mo ago

This is less relevant for logos & creative works, but things that enable companies to do production will go back to being closely guarded and sharded secrets, which is what the patent system was trying to resolve (though we can certainly argue the success of it). If companies fail to protect their investments in generating IP, they will stop investing in generating it. And unless IP generation costs (all in, including the humans telling them what to generate) fall close to zero, it will be bad for the world if companies cannot recoup investments in generating new IP. We would expect this to hit those industries relying on IP protections the most, e.g. pharma.

0x20cowboy 2mo ago

"Content that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence is not protected by copyright." If that is faithful reading of the law, that makes sense. I know a number of people who use AI, but none of them (that are making anything actually useful) have the output "entirely generated" (aside from some POC tests that never see the light of day). I have a hard time believing anything of value, anything worth copyrighting, could be entirely generated by AI.

spudlyo 2mo ago
> I have a hard time believing anything of value, anything worth copyrighting, could be entirely generated by AI. Perhaps you're not stretching your imagination enough. What if an expert novelist used an AI like it were a fancy auto-completing dictation machine to write the next great American novel? AI may have "entirely generated" all the text, but what if they micromanaged the shit out it? I can imagine the difference between someone who fires off a lazy 5 minute prompt, and someone who labors for months and months to get exactly the results they want.
- elictronic 2mo ago
  It’s almost like laboring for months and months would have draft revisions, dozens of changes, and many other interactions they could prove as theirs defeating your entire argument.
rackp 2mo ago
[dead]
dgellow 2mo ago
The current trend (since months now) is to have everything done through agentic loops. Meaning humans are only here to provide the initial prompt and do a few back and forth during the implementation.
- 0x20cowboy 1mo ago
  Most of the people I see doing that ship nothing. They just seemingly loop for the sake of looping. However, I just saw a product yesterday that was released and being built as you described. Interesting times.

dredmorbius 2mo ago

Pretty much my thought: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49388777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49388777>.

tripzilch 1mo ago

> As software, creative works, science, etc become more and more contributed via AI does that mean all future works will not be copyrighted or patented? No, just the stuff from people who think whatever they prompted from an AI is a contribution to creative works, science, etc.