Now, this is US law. Much of the world does have "sweat of the brow" copyright. But the US does not. See "Feist vs. Rural Telephone". There must be human creativity because the US constitution reads "(Congress shall have the power) To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." That limits the power of Congress to change this.
So a lot of things are uncopyrightable in the US. Feist is the big case, and it was about telephone directories. No copyright. Useful objects are not copyrightable, which is why there are third party auto parts. Facts are not copyrightable, nor are databases of facts. Nor are pictures of public domain art. Nor is automotive sheet metal, despite lobbying by automakers.
That's what leads to AI-generated content not being copyrightable. Model weights don't seem to be copyrightable either.
It cannot be this clean cut or Google v Oracle would have been trivial to decide.
A telephone directory can be copyright protected, too. The facts within it cannot. Exactly like recipes. A particular presentation of a recipe is absolutely copyright protected. But this doesn’t mean no one can publish the same recipe in their own presentation
A recipe book can have copyright because it's for the specific combination of recipes, layout, etc... Not for a recipe or more generally a recipe book.
I think that's consistent with his the supreme court ruled in Google v Oracle.
The US Constitution grants Congress the power to grant copyrights "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts." Creative expression that is not useful therefore is not constitutionally copyrightable.
But that aside, I agree with the author that the Copyright Office refusing to further expand the already vastly over-expanded scope of copyrights is a rare positive ruling.
The position taken by the courts and the administration is that "authors and inventors" means "human". The monkey could not be the author of its own selfie photograph, for instance.
Maybe this doesn't reflect the intentions of the Framers, but it certainly should color any modern discussion surrounding the purpose of copyright law.
There is another clause later tha clarifies it a bit. It does NOT mean that an invention must be useful, and it's pretty clear that purely l utilitarian objects actually can not be copyrighted.
How will the USPTO draw a legal distinction between AI-generated and GPU-generated?
Also you have to account for the PB of training data which consists of copyrighted works that goes into the model and is interpolated to produce the result. Personally this tips the balance to AI output being new work that's not copyrightable for me because otherwise all of the people who own copyright on the training data should have joint copyright of the output too because in a sense all of the training data is part of the prompt too.
Your prompt doesn't really contain all of the decisions that were made in the final output most of the time. When you use a rendering engine it does contain only your decisions and you have a license to use the work of all the people who created the software and other assets you're using to make the film.
Patents and trademarks are not copyrights. The U.S. Copyright office handles copyrights, the USPTO handles the other two.
In the spirit of your question, though, the concern predates AI.
Programs that you can use a stylus to draw with - in a similar manner as pen/ink and paper - have been around a long time, and are getting better.
Let the definition of human art be human effort put into creating something. If I put "etymology of the word art" into Google I get "The word art comes from the Latin noun ars (meaning practical skill, craft, or work of art)."
If I spend an hour drawing something in a program - strokes in the same exact manner as physical paint and canvas, but digitally adjustable and editable afterward - this is still art. But it's hard to prove that from just the output file alone. It's even worse for 3d model creation - someone who painstakingly molds/creates a 3d model in Blender is definitely doing art, even if there is no physical artifact until it's printed or projected.
Perhaps art programs will need to start authenticating input devices and movement sensors and recording their stream during the artistic process, and including that as part of the output file. This will only be worse if you want to create art but not train AI. The only solution to that is not create digital art.
[0] https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...
> That means that companies that want to protect their commercial interests aren't just going to get more protection based on how much work they get humans to do; they're also going to have to treat copyright's government-enforceable monopoly over expressive speech with the gravitas it deserves: not something you get automatically, but something you have to do real administrative work for.
Assuming this happens, wouldn't this mean that copyright becomes significantly less useful for people who aren't corporations and don't have the legal, financial, and administrative resources to produce this kind of bookkeeping?
That seems true.
But also: generate all you like and then have humans edit, and keep a record of it, seems plausibly defensible too.
The current state of a lot of AI generated content material, not all / not necessarily program code, seems to really benefit from human editing.
I'm having a real hard time, feeling sorry for them.
For media bosses, copyright is a pseudo-property† right
Regardless, 'I agree with these people I always disagree with are somehow right this time despite acting like they always do' should be a sign that some reflection is needed!
Based on that perspective, intellectual property is a construct, an illusion, newspeak, and thus “pseudo”.
> AI slop isn't copyrightable, but there can be copyrightable elements in an AI-generated image. The most obvious element is the prompt. So long as your prompt contains some quantum of creativity (e.g. "Make me a beautiful flower whose loveliness is reminiscent of a newborn baby", but not "make me a beautiful flower"), that prompt is copyrightable. That means you can use copyright to challenge others' rights to present the same prompt to a chatbot. But while the prompt can be copyrighted, the image it gives rise to isn't. So you can spend a month iteratively refining your prompt, consuming all your town's water along with 200,000 gallons of diesel and that prompt will be yours for your life plus 70 years, but the image it generates is in the public domain, and anyone can copy it, sell it or give it away
There should be a difference between asking AI to "draw a funny picture of a donkey", and spending a month iteratively refining your prompt.
https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig...
Obviously courts will cheat, or should I say "keep cheating", until the output of AI models is covered by copyright while the input is not, because if AI output isn't covered, then most tech companies have nothing of value in their entire AI investment. Anything to cheat individuals out of their rights into the deep pockets of billionaire companies.
"The coders describe an AI tool that doesn’t look up and reproduce stored work, U.S. Circuit Judge Eric Miller determined, but rather creates new work. That new work, the Donald Trump appointee said, may or may not infringe plaintiffs’ copyrights in their code, but it cannot reasonably be described as a copy of that code from which the copyright management information has been removed or altered."