This is misleading. The copyright office simply needs the work to be registered under a human name, since a machine or AI cannot hold copyright. The process used to create it is irrelevant.
Key quote: "The Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine."
Machine generated works cannot be copyrighted.
Edit: and gee, did you get hn to rewrite the headline on the strength of your false claim? Sigh...
Where, exactly, does the line lie that was crossed?
Plus: you've replied to some point other than what I actually said twice now, what's up with that?
I understand your point about mass text generation as well, that's why I wonder where that line is that makes it "machine generated" in the eyes of the copyright office (although another commenter mentioned that this was admitted by the filer)
A work generated by a human-created algorithm with a human name on the application will still be accepted. In fact this describes almost every modern company logo. A lot of art created today is inputs to a computer rather than pen on paper, and the copyright office isn't rejecting any of them for that reason.
What is the lie? If you give loose instructions to another person to create a work, who holds the copyright, you or the person who created it? Giving input is irrelevant to being the copyright holder.
Of course a human needs to set up a program and run it. But I think that this policy is saying "you can't show up with an enumeration of a bunch of things in an attempt to 100% speedrun patents". Like at least prove you tried the thing out a bit!
"Did you come up with this idea?" can have different answers. "Yes" is one. "I wrote a program for a computer to apply a bunch of regression on other ideas and spit this out for me" is also "yes", but a different flavor that is closer to "No".
After all, there have been computer-generated writings and music for even longer than that.
In "Computer Music", Scientific American, Vol. 201, No. 6 (December 1959), pp. 109-121 , available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/24941187.pdf we can read about 'chance' and 'almost random' music:
> A second and rather well-known example of chance music is Mozart's "A Musical Dice Game." This piece, one of many similar "compositions" produced as parlor games in the late 18th century, consists essentially of several dozen assorted measures of music, the order of which is determined by rolling dice. A more modern random work, "Imaginary Landscape" by the American composer John Cage, is "scored" for 12 radios and thus derives a strong element of randomness from regional and temporal variations in radio programs. ..
> John R. Pierce of Bell Telephone Laboratories, an authority on information theory, has demonstrated other approaches to the composition of simple "probability music." In one, a sequence of chords is chosen by means of dice rolls and a table of random numbers; in another, a series of volunteers each contributes a measure. A number of European composers have produced more elaborate random music electronically by causing random sequences of electrical signals to trigger sequences of tones. ...
It then goes on to describe how the author worked on the Illiac Suite for String Quartet.
Again, this is the 1950s.
What would that count as?
The answer to your question is, if an artist teams with someone telling them what to draw, ownership might depend on whether they have a written contract addressing this, whether they are in an employer/ employee relationship,or the implied nature of the collaboration. Depending on these factors, they may co-own the copyright, one of them may own it, or neither of them may own it (for example, ownership might be with their employer).
But, if no human is involved, there is nothing that may be copyrighted. This came up when a gorilla grabbed a camera and took a selfie. As I recall, it was deemed no human was involved so the picture was not copyrightable.
But whoever performs those instructions should have the copyright to the "performance" I think. So in principle I could think that the computer performs the instructions and thus can have the copyright to the "performance" but not to the instructions.
I'm thinking about music, and "scores" written by composers, but performed by musicians.
An interesting special case is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 .
Do the performers have a copyright to the performance when they are following the instructions/score which says "do nothing". :-)
A computer isn't doing anything creative at all so shouldn't have any performance copyright. Calling a computer's work creative would be like claiming my pants are being creative when I put them on in the morning. It doesn't make much sense to me. The designer of the pants might have copyright, but the pants themselves do not.
No. Nothing was deemed because the photographer didn’t sue Wikimedia for copyright infringement. Had he done so, he very likely would have won, as setting up the conditions to ensure that the monkeys would take selfies with his camera is almost certainly sufficient human involvement.
Are you saying that a photographer doesn't own the copyright on a photo he takes with a delay timer? How about a camera he sets up with a motion sensor?
> Otherwise every photo that used auto settings would be owned by the camera company
No, it's about the camera operator owning the copyright, not the camera company
I'm not clear on what happened, I mentioned it as an anecdote related to a general point about the law.
But we can say for sure if the camera owner had not set up the shot and a monkey just grabbed the camera from him and took a selfie, to the camera owner's surprise, the photo would not be copyrightable "The U.S. Copyright Office, since the dispute began, has specifically listed 'a photograph taken by a monkey' as an example of an item that cannot be copyrighted." (That also extends to artworks by elephants.) "
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823...
While it's impossible to be creative without creating, it's perfectly possible to create without being creative. We call that "copying".
In case of spiders and beavers, they simply have the necessary originals/blueprints "built in".
To further agree with you —
The day the AI files its own legal appeal to its own rejected copyright application — that is when this policy might start to change
AI can produce results 24/7, every day, non-stop, as long as you don't pull the plug. Given the connected nature of the world nowadays, it's also reasonable to assume that all AI will be connected to each other, so we wouldn't even be able to "pull the plug".
So once AI gets copyright, AI will eventually get to patent things. When that happens, AI will rule the world, because there's no end to the things it can come up with.
Imagine the creative genius of a billion Leonardo Da Vinci all being part of a single entity.
No fucking thanks.
So what? Nowhere in the article or my post is there a "sudden new policy has appeared" statement. Why is this comment section filled with weird tangential claims parading as arguments?
A work generated by a human-created algorithm with a human name on the application will still be accepted.
Sure, getting a copyright requires virtually nothing, nothing gets checked, what would they check? It's content you say you created - stamp! Yes, the only way that policy appears is if you say loudly "hey, give me a copyright for my computer generated thing."
However, the main way it would appear in practice would be if someone attempted to assert copyright on a vast store of computer-generated content. And this is the situation where it would matter.
I have registered hundreds of copyrights. That is not at all how it works.
This is exactly how it works:
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap600/ch600-examination-pr...
either that or it says something about what that person's job is, and perhaps something about how many people/computing resources copyright office has at disposal to analyze registrations.
The US copyright office wrote:
"Only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention" and that "Because copyright law is limited to 'original intellectual conceptions of the author,' the [copyright] office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants."
In the future, AI entities will probably be registered as companies themselves (or maybe they will be just company assets), and will be owned by people. Which doesn't bode well for strong AI, but I suspect that even after we reach strong AI people will still grasp at straws for many decades or centuries, denying them personhood because they are just software that run on computers.
I mean... we both know people would if they could, right?
If a tractor approaches me with a QR code to a smart contract that will give me enormous money in exchange for my deed.. I'm going to do it
I mean, people can probably give stuff to an "AI" the same way they leave stuff to their cats, but we are an absurdly long way off from developing an artificial intelligence with real agency. These are questions for science fiction authors, not actual legal scholars.
If somebody else's tractor approached you with a smart contract, the owner of that tractor would have a case that the smart contract was not entered into in good faith, since a tractor cannot enter a contract at all. Maybe you'd even get charged with theft.
this negates the "if we could" part of the hypothetical. I was assuming we live in a world with emancipated tractors capable of making deals (legally speaking), to emphasize that even though it is ridiculous it wouldnt stop people from doing it
Maybe a subtler story, but I wouldn't say no story. It's still worth pondering how it works if a human can creatively develop an AI system that can then output essentially endless unique works. Can the human just submit applications for those works endlessly? Even in purely practical terms, will the copyright at some point just ban the human for excessive submissions?
And what if the AI system is open source or otherwise freely available? Can any human generate a new unique work and submit a copyright application for it? Is the mere curation work that the human applies to the AI system's output sufficient to receive a copyright on the work?
The short answer is that they don't need to submit anything. If they put their name on it, they're the putative copyright holder and it's up to someone else to prove they aren't. Copyright registration isn't required and is mostly related to be able to collect damages from others who violate your copyright.
Maybe a subtler story, but I wouldn't say no story. It's still worth pondering how it works if a human can creatively develop an AI system that can then output essentially endless unique works. Can the human just submit applications for those works endlessly? Even in purely practical terms, will the copyright office at some point just ban the human for excessive submissions?
And what if the AI system is open source or otherwise freely available? Can any human generate a new unique work and submit a copyright application for it? Is the mere curation work that the human applies to the AI system's output sufficient to receive a copyright on the work?
Copyright does not need submissions or applications. Copyright is automatic in most (all?) jurisdictions which respect copyright in the first place.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/whats...
However, it turns out that work generated by AI will be accepted, albeit under a human name.
> [T]he Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.
This is a clash between the marketing BS that is contemporary "AI" and reality. "AI" is either sentient, or it's a human tool. The copyright office is requiring that people cut the BS and concede that just because you have particularly complicated tool, doesn't mean it's not just a tool.
It's like someone attempting to register a book copyright to a typewriter, the Copyright Office rolling their eyes, and responding: "Well, smart ass, if the typewriter wrote it, then it's ineligible."
AI software is just another tool. The human using it is still the creator of the work. Claiming otherwise is hype; we do not assign agency to software.
For example, you can't register a copyright for a naturally weathered rock in nature, and just say that it's a sculpture and I want to assign copyright to someone or some company.
Now, if you put the rock there, to let it be weathered, then you can copyright it. The distinction is that a human was involved in the creation, not that you "picked" a human.
Of course one could ask, if this is allowed, what's to stop humans from claiming authorship for the work of other humans? I'd argue this already exists, in the form of ghostwriting, as just one example. Not saying it's good or bad — it depends not the particulars of each case — just saying, as an elaboration on all this, that the system already allows for it.
A "machine generated work" is not considered copyrightable: "The Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine."
https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/copyright-ownership-content...