That 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."
>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".
I'm actually having a bit of trouble thinking of what sufficient societal good there is/would be in granting copyright on raw dashcam or security camera or the like footage? None of those purely mechanical automated systems need a subsidy or encouragement to generate more. Certainly someone can use that sort of thing in the creation of a copyrighted work but what would be the issue with the underlying material in that case being unprotected?
I am in favor of copyright reform so eventually it becomes something like two years automatic with a one time two year extension possible an I agree with you because of one key word — raw. Once the footage is used in a package, be it a movie, a news report, or a music video, that package can be copyrighted. The problem is there is no way the owner of a dashcam can prohibit commercial use of a video they own if it cannot be copyrighted in the US. In a way, we have conflated copyrights with other so called intellectual property (details). Maybe the solution is to strengthen privacy rights somehow? I'm not sure.
Thinking more about monkeys, I think that case was made relatively easy because there was a normal living recipient for copyright, but that wasn't eligible for such. I'm fairly certain that dashcam footage, which is 100% automated, as you mention, is copyrighted by default. It's a fairly common source of footage of novel events like a meteorite, rocket impact, or whatever else. And that footage is licensed to media companies.
In any case, any country that decides neural network generated media isn't copyrighted then faces a major, and probably impossible, problem of trying to prove it wasn't made by a human.
After 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.
I think the issue you then run into is imagine another human came, picked up the camera, and used it to take a picture of whatever. It'd be fairly self evident that that the photographer would own the copyright to that work, but in your take - it'd be the camera owner.
So you're more of trying to create a special rule where if the normal recipient of a copyright would be invalid, then it slides to the 'nearest' most appropriate individual, but that seems extremely fragile and difficult to define.
Dashcams and security footage definitely don’t have copyright protection. Are you seriously thinking that the construction worker who set up the camera would then have copyright over everything it records?
Really? Regardless of the debate on what should and shouldn't be copyrighted, in the current system there is no way to set up a continuous camera with intention to create something and not be afforded the same rights as if I took a snapshot?
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?
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.
> 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?
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.")
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.
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.
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 (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?
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that you might be taking "knowledge" too literally. As I read it, the parent's post was using "knowledge" poetically for the various works that AI companies stole.
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?
The knowledge wasn't obtained illegally or illicitly, immorally perhaps.
Illegal entry/trespass is a crime regardless of the method used however.
In your analogy copying the code (online content) isn't necessarily illegal, however using that knowledge without compensation, permission or attribution may be a crime (depending on copyright law, judges rulings etc).
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.
So 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.
You 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.
>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
I 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.
No, GPL is a contaminating license contract, so "AI" slop means you are probably in GPL violation by including isomorphic plagiarized uncopyrightable code. =3
wasnt there a case a while back, where GPL or LGPL code made its way into MIT licensed software via LLM? And they were forced to remove the copyleft code. I dont remember the details though.
Usually what I have seen is someone writes a Perl library, Claude mostly ports it to Python with isomorphic plagiarism, and a bunch of Brogrammers proclaim "AI" magic is real.
The issue is most GPL license fall under contract law, and scraped code can't legally have assigned "copy" rights on an "AI" vector search compaction output.
Indeed, but people will continue to think vector search compaction similarity absolves folks of Trademark and Copyright liability.
As the dark specter of Disney Mickey Mouse looms over every LLM model involved in isomorphic and character plagiarism. Yes, even motion capture is considered a performance act in the guilds, so video reskinning an unlicensed performance act people make is also a liability.
It would sure save a lot of money if you don't get caught, so people are gonna try it for sure. =3
It is actually pretty easy when the area is very specific like 1 guys Perl library, and Claude ports it to Python for a group unaware of what happened.
All models know what Disney Mickey Mouse looks like too. =3
Interesting 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.
> 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.
It'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.
Input size and output complexity are not necessarily the only two dimensions involved. There’s no reason to think that such graph would show a continuous frontier.
it'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)
> I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough)
Hmm I don't think that would be enough. I'd expect that would only make the modifications themselves copyrightable, but not the whole modified work including the AI parts.
Compare for example the case where the US copyright office ruled that, when assembling AI-generated images and human-written text into a comic book, only the human-made elements themselves (text, arrangement) get copyright protection, but not the images.
E.g. if you generate an AI photo and color grade it, i expect only the color grading would be protected (if that is even significant enough to be protectable), not the rest. And someone else could re-color-grade the same image without infringing your copyright.
Suppose 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.
I 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.
Information wants to be free. We should simply dispose of copyright. With LLMs, waters that were already muddy are now a thick slurry. And it's only going to get worse.
It's an antiquated mechanism and is far more abused than it is actually used at this point.
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.
This 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.
Lots 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.
Seems 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.
I 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.
Year 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.
I 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.
Yes 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.
Funnily 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...
I 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
Given 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.
>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).
Judges 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.
Interesting. 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.
That 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.
I 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.
Translation, 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.
Lmao. 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.
> 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).
It’s been established in the DC circuit, where basically any challenges to copyright office decisions would need to be brought. For all intents and purposes, until the Supreme Court or Congress decide to weigh in, it’s pretty well established that AI generated content cannot receive copyright. There will probably be some decisions around the edges regarding when human editorial input might result in a copyright being awarded to the editor, but it would be very surprising to see the precedent overturned completely, particularly given its grounding in previous caselaw.
Did 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.
It'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.
Thank 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:
> 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?
If 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.
That’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.
I'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.
> 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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Hopefully no judge uses that as precedence.
I'm actually having a bit of trouble thinking of what sufficient societal good there is/would be in granting copyright on raw dashcam or security camera or the like footage? None of those purely mechanical automated systems need a subsidy or encouragement to generate more. Certainly someone can use that sort of thing in the creation of a copyrighted work but what would be the issue with the underlying material in that case being unprotected?
Details https://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/gnu/www/philosophy/words-to-avoid.h...
In any case, any country that decides neural network generated media isn't copyrighted then faces a major, and probably impossible, problem of trying to prove it wasn't made by a human.
For what it’s worth, dashcam footage can absolutely be copyrightable.
The ruling is more about “only humans can get copyright protection”, not so much anything about whether a button is pressed or not.
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?
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.
So you're more of trying to create a special rule where if the normal recipient of a copyright would be invalid, then it slides to the 'nearest' most appropriate individual, but that seems extremely fragile and difficult to define.
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.
Have you been involved in copyright or patent litigation?
Because it's not that easy.
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.")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?
The knowledge wasn't obtained illegally or illicitly, immorally perhaps.
Illegal entry/trespass is a crime regardless of the method used however.
In your analogy copying the code (online content) isn't necessarily illegal, however using that knowledge without compensation, permission or attribution may be a crime (depending on copyright law, judges rulings etc).
What about using torrents to acquire that content?
"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.
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.
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
So no license is enforceable with code written by AI.
The issue is most GPL license fall under contract law, and scraped code can't legally have assigned "copy" rights on an "AI" vector search compaction output.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhgYMH6n004
Indeed, these rules obviously don't apply in places like India, Russia, Iran, and China. =3
As the dark specter of Disney Mickey Mouse looms over every LLM model involved in isomorphic and character plagiarism. Yes, even motion capture is considered a performance act in the guilds, so video reskinning an unlicensed performance act people make is also a liability.
It would sure save a lot of money if you don't get caught, so people are gonna try it for sure. =3
Perhaps we'll have new iterations of FOSS licenses to adjust to legal declarations.
All models know what Disney Mickey Mouse looks like too. =3
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.
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.
Monkeys and LLMs (so far) either don't understand or don't need such incentives, so they don't get copyright.
Unfortunately, The Walt Disney Company seems to disagree.
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)
Hmm I don't think that would be enough. I'd expect that would only make the modifications themselves copyrightable, but not the whole modified work including the AI parts.
Compare for example the case where the US copyright office ruled that, when assembling AI-generated images and human-written text into a comic book, only the human-made elements themselves (text, arrangement) get copyright protection, but not the images.
E.g. if you generate an AI photo and color grade it, i expect only the color grading would be protected (if that is even significant enough to be protectable), not the rest. And someone else could re-color-grade the same image without infringing your copyright.
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.
If we go back 10 years and your friend says “I have an idea for an app, here it is,” and you build it, you own the copyright because you wrote it.
You give an idea to the pile of math calculated of the stolen work of humanity, the math owns it (which it can’t, so no one owns it).
No matter how detailed of a conversation you have with a friend, I don’t think they have justification to claim copyright over code written by you.
Based on your logic that should not qualify, but it currently clearly does: https://quayola.com/selected-unfinished-sculptures/
But if the tool is created from collective human creation, the copyright should belong to all humanity, not the person who triggered the tool.
If you trained an LLM entirely on your own input, I think you should own the output, but that is not the case for any widely-used llm.
It's an antiquated mechanism and is far more abused than it is actually used at this point.
Does it enable decompilation remasters of classic games?
It feels like AI is a cleanroom laundromat
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.
2) If one applies a copyright message to AI generated output, is that fraudulent?
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.
https://fmhy.net
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.
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.
Say I would prompt Unix like system in few prompts or started agent chain to make it. That OS wouldn't have a protection.
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.
entirely is the plank supporting this.
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).
In fact, the defense of "I wrote the prompts that led to the code that the LLM wrote" would be a much better defense.
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.
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).
AI only = no copyright.
“A Single Piece of American Cheese” got a copyright because it had human involvement in compositing.
Theatre D’Opera did not because it was primarily prompt driven.
Thaler didn’t because he said it was machine derived.
Humans must be involved for a copyright.
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/GuerillaOpenAccessMa...
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?
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.
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...