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?
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.
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".
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...