this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Just thinking out loud: how would this impact AI-generated videos, or stuff like AI-generated actors and AI-written scripts? Does this suggest that stuff made by AI would, by default, belong to the public domain? If true, that could do quite a bit in forcing the movie studios to get off their asses and bring them back to the negotiating table with the actors and writers.
The ruling says the AI itself can't hold a copyright, but humans using them can still be copyright holders of any qualifying works.
So we'll hear this case been wrongly cited forever. AI art is often human guided and sometimes involve editing and adjusting. Rarely ever I get something good the first prompt. But I bet people will say lol no copyright.
Eh I think it would have been worse if this guy won. To my knowledge he was trying to get the AI to be considered the author and then himself to be the owner of the copyright via the "work for hire" clause. As I understand it that would have been catastrophic. It would have likely meant that anything users prompt from these generators would automatically be the copyright of the people running the AI.
The process you describe could likely still be protected under this ruling since there's human involvement in the selection of output to use and the altering of it afterward to fit whatever creative vision the person had. If this had won a person doing that it seems would at best be making a derivative work and still not be able to protect it.
If they had won then copyright trolls like prenda law would have flooded the internet with AI crap and sued everybody that ever make anything resembling any of their outputs, claiming copyright infringement.
This ruling strongly throttles the ability of copyright trolls to use ML that way because the defendant can much more easily argue they are producing far too many works (and with to many ML-ish obvious errors) to be human made, thus no copyright protection and then you don't even have to prove you didn't copy it anymore (but of course you should still try to argue both when you're the defendant).
Sidenote - derivative works can be protected separately if the addition itself holds creative height. Your copyright only covers your own addition.
Yeah you're right about the derivative works thing. I glossed over it mostly because that seemed pretty much useless to me in the realm of visual art. But I suppose there are a few scenarios where that ability to get protection is meaningful.
Either way, I can't see a way that this would have been good for anyone if this guy got what he wanted.
Please correct me if I am misunderstanding something here, then: Doesn’t the ruling here state that the human using the AI tried to apply for a copyright listing himself as the copyright holder and the AI as the author that worked on a commission for him, which is what was denied? Or are you saying that the reason it was denied is because he listed the AI as the author?
Here's the relevant part from a different article:
Got it, thanks!
Without human authorship you cannot have a copyright. If something has no copyright protection, it is public domain.
However, the public domain is not viral. A work made with public domain elements can itself be copyrighted. However the copyright will only protect the creative expression added to the public domain work. Everyone else is free to make their own works from the public domain elements.
But...
Holders of public domain works are NOT obligated to publish or make available public domain works in their possession.
So if you use AI generation as part of your process you still have a valid copyright. Unless the audience can extract the unprotectable elements from your final product, you have the same copyright protection as a fully human produced work.
This ruling only applies to fully AI produced works. Using AI to modify a human performance to look or sound like someone else, still copyrightable. Human filming from an AI script, still copyrightable except for the script itself.
If AI makes the final output is where there's trouble. AI's aren't human, their expression isn't copyrightable. The prompt you give the AI is most likely factual rather than creative, which would make that uncopyrightable as well.
Copyright protects humans' creative expression, and nothing else.
This was a great summary, hope more people read this.
I am not convinced by that. I don't think any lines have been drawn on how much creativity you put into a prompt for the resultant image to be considered copyrightable. This case is about someone trying to get the AI to claim copyright, and have that transferred to him as the owner of the AI. Which is like the cases where someone tried and failed to claim copyright over an image of a monkey that the monkey took because it was taken on his camera. He had no creative input into the shot so the image was not copyrightable.
You could condisider the AI like a camera - you have control over its input, what you point it at, the lighting levels, even creating the scene you point it at. All of which are creative elements. You did not actually create the image - light hitting a film did that. You just set it up to capture the picture you wanted.
So I could see the prompt being similar to setting up a shot for a camera and the AI being like a camera. With enough creative work being put into setting up a good prompt I can see a valid claim for copyright being made - though I am not aware of anyone testing this out i court yet.
Copyright laws have a standards for minimal creativity needed to create a copyrightable work. You don't have to be very creative to qualify, but you need a minimal amount. There's no good reason to think the US copyright office will not apply these same standards to AI art prompts.
The US copyright office specifically lists "listings of ingredients or contents" as not sufficiently creative to qualify for copyright protection. This is why there is no legal recourse within copyright to prevent someone from copying the ingredients and quantities of your cooking recipe. If the prompt you give your AI is more than a list, you will not have a copyrightable work. For example, if you open up an AI image generator and type: "paved road on a cliff-face overlooking a pine forest," the resultant output would likely be ineligible for copyright because the prompt was little more than a list of the image's contents.
If your use of AI is creative enough to reach the level of "minimally creative" in the eyes of the US copyright office, the work is copyrightable.
When taking a photograph, you chose the settings, you chose the framing, you chose the equipment. That is enough to be eligible for copyright, unless the shot was taken by a macaque or a grizzly bear.
I assume you mean legible here.
But I can still see the argument going either way. You are right that the prompt might not be copyrightable. Just like a recipe or algorithm is not. But I don't think many are trying to claim copyright on the prompts. It is the output that is of interest and there things become grey. Is choosing a prompt more like picking the settings of a camera, its framing, subject etc? Those are the important part of taking a photo, like a prompt is to creating an AI generated image. There are parallels here that can give a good argument in court I think. And IMO it is more similar to taking a photograph, than it is to a simple recipe.
The prompt is the part that has human input. If the human's input is not minimally creative, than the AI generated whole cannot be minimally creative. If the human's input is minimally creative, the AI output will likely be minimally creative.
If you use software to position objects in a the frame, and then you ask an AI to generate the objects and a background with the framing that you specified, you will almost certainly have a copyrightable work, because deciding where things are positioned in a picture is enough to rise to the level of minimum creativity.
What matters is the human's input. You can create uncopyrightable works using any tool, and you can use any tool to create copyrightable works. What matters is how much human expression is involved.
And if you simply describe the position via a prompt (among other things) then is that not also minimally creative?
Yes, that has basically been my argument - the human input has to be creative in some way and IMO and prompt can be. But not all prompts used will meet that bar. Where the line lies on what meets that bar is still up for debate and AFAIK no court has laid any groupd work for this yet. But a prompt alone can IMO contain enough creativity to allow the AI generated work to be copyrightable.
Copyright laws are written vaguely so they can be applied to all human expression even those that haven't been invented yet.
Obviously there are boarder cases where things are not clear cut. That's true for anything. But when courts make those decisions, they are going to do so using legal frameworks that already exist. The courts are not going to invent new standards to determine whether AI usage is copyrightable or not.
I never suggested they were going to make up new standards based on nothing. All my arguments are related things to existing situations.
I pray it means that Disney is screwed on their plans to make their productions fully autonomous and fire their writers, animators, other artists, line producers, ... I could go on, but you get the idea.
I don't need confirmation that they are working towards that goal, it is the inevitability of their existence and greed. All profit, no overhead.
Good questions. Might be the case. I really appreciate that this decision strengthened the authorship as originally a human authorship. Otherwise many other ownerships might be taken over by computers. With ownership reliability and consequences came hand in hand, but a computer gives a shit about consequences.
IMO more importantly that copyright of the work does not go to the owner of the AI systems that created it. Which strengthens the copyright claims for anyone that came up with a creative enough prompt that was used to generate the image. And drastically weakens it for those running the servers or training the AI.