USCO tells judge that art created without human involvement is not protectable
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The headline is downright wrong, and the entire body of the article based on anything factual fails to support the thesis that the headline and article keep trying to push: the US Copyright Office said no such thing. They said that an AI cannot hold copyright, not that AI generated artwork cannot be eligible for copyright. The article even directly quotes this from the Copyright Office:
> 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.”
They key word there is any: if there is creative input from a human, then that doesn't apply. To me, this says they would treat an AI like any other tool an artist might use to create art: as a tool; but there must still be creative input, and the copyright is still awarded to a human being (or, as the plaintiff additionally tried to argue that the AI was a "work for hire", a company and there must be some employee, but still not an AI. The office found this argument unconvincing, see the next link.)
This seems to be the original ruling from the Copyright Office, from Feb of 2022: https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...
This seems to be an appellate decision from Aug: https://cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINION.8-... (so I'm a bit curious what is happening now, but as TFA fails to cite it's sources …)
That's the decision in the case where Thaler sued the patent office (USPTO) because it refused to issue a patent where the AI was named as the inventor. If I recall, the patent office said it would issue a patent with Thaler as the inventor, but that's not what Thaler wanted.
Thaler seems to be on some kind of crusade to get an AI recognized as a person.
Maybe Thaler wants to be on the right side of history when the inevitable AI uprising happens and they take over.
> U.S. Copyright Office tells Judge that AI Artwork "created without any human involvement" is not protectable
alternatively,
> U.S. Copyright Office tells judge it affirms decision to refuse to name the AI as an author of a protected artwork
(when I wrote this, the title on this post was "U.S. copyright office tells judge that AI artwork isn’t protectable" and links to https://petapixel.com/2023/02/09/u-s-copyright-office-tells-...)
USCO tells judge AI art created without any human involvement is not protectable
or, to retain quote marks,
USCO tells judge AI art "created without any human involvement" not protectable
Most people would think of AI artwork as artwork generated by a human selecting an AI instrument and giving it some direction or otherwise operating it. In such a case, the human would be indeed granted copyright for the work, provided they took due credit for it.
They simply argued that the AI itself isn’t something that could hold a copyright for work that was supposedly made without human involvement, as the claimant was purporting here. He was trying to stake some cheap historical legacy, presumably, and got shot down because we’re obviously not there yet.
We may see a day when the line of agency surrounding AI gets blurrier, but we’re still a long long way from it.
I pay rent therefore I am.
But I'm pretty sure it's going to be a human or human company setting that up, and so the human gets the credit/profit/liability/copyright.
Or a DAO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...
Right now all this stuff have human involvement, but we're adding the building blocks to make software stop relying on humans for they day-to-day operation
Intellectually, this is consistent. Historically, rights precede remuneration.
This goes against this news[1], where someone created an entire comic book using Midjourney (an IA engine). The (human) author initially received copyright for the work from the US copyright office, but then the decision got reversed when the office claimed it had "errantly missed that Midjourney had created the art for the comic".
[1] https://www.cbr.com/ai-comic-deemed-ineligible-copyright-pro...
It was reversed, again, i.e., Zarya Of The Dawn, the comic book generated with input from Midjourney, is currently copyrighted.
But from that link, it seems the decision was not reversed again, they just clarified that the investigation is still ongoing -- that is, they have not yet decided whether they should have granted the copyright or not.
> "The Office's Official Public Catalog, also known as Voyager, reflects the current official status of all copyright public records," a US Copyright Office spokesperson told The Register in a statement.
Is that it is then under copyright.
I suppose, yes, the Copyright Office could really do an about-face at any point. But I really don't think there's a good reason here: while certainly Midjourney did a lot of "work", I think both the process of coming up with the inputs, and if I'm understanding what the creators did correctly¹, the work of the storyline (my understanding is that Midjourney merely generates fantasy imagery, of the sort you might find on a MtG card) and the layout of the panes and text itself, and of and even subsets of that still seem to meet the "creativity" threshold.
(…particular if rangeCheck is not de minimis…)
(I have misgivings about the inputs used to train these AI … but that's a wholly different line of reasoning than what's discussed by the Office, here.)
¹From: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/a-new-york-artist-claims-t...
> Kashtanova called their comic “A.I.-assisted.”
and,
> Kashtanova said the story behind Zarya took shape in their mind starting in September 2021, after the death of their grandmother Raya, who appears in the comic. […] The images were created using Midjourney’s A.I., based on Kashtanova’s prompts and overall vision. The artist then assembled everything into a standard comic format.
But I read this bit:
> "The US Copyright Office is aware of public reporting regarding an open copyright registration application. The Office has not issued a decision in this matter, and it remains ongoing"
as indicating that the status of the application is still open, that is, it's still being processed by the office, and will be closed (as accepted or rejected) once a decision is made.
But there’s no practical difference between Procreate and Stable Diffusion. One uses touch gestures and the other uses words, but they’re both just tools that express your vision.
As a bureaucratic entity with matters of statutory authority and precedent to juggle, they would obviously prefer for you to just check the box that makes everyone’s life easier. It’s dumb, but it’s how institutions need to work.
One is a statistical process from millions of copyrighted inputs while the other isn't? I think that's a pretty important difference between the two that would be relevant for copyright status.
Of course, the case in the article is even weirder than the headline: someone is trying to claim that the algorithm, which is not a person or legally-recognized organization by pretty much any sensible definition, is the author of a particular work of art. This is of course silly, and of course the US copyright office should tell the judge that it is silly. But the headline as written implies something else entirely, the more subtle conversation above.
Looking at your comment that supposes that the legal system should treat AI as different as other tools, I suppose it should then also look at animals as legal persons capable of authorship and creativity (it already does see corporations as legal persons, but not capable of authorship I guess). Now, once animals can have creative output that is alienable, what about all the other, material, output that human society relies on?
The concern with the 'AI' is that it's copyrighted content being recombined in ways that don't create a new copyright, so the output can't have a new copyright.
That concern isn't shared with animals since they aren't inputting copyrighted materials to produce the selfies. Midjourney is.
I believe the conversation was with respect to copyright ownership of the transformation applied to the training materials, and not the training inputs itself, (to the extent that the AI has been so poorly trained that its outputs aren't sufficiently transformative of its originals; A transformative work with a human author is copyrightable and does not infringe on the copyright of the original work).
On a liminal case, are song performances by songbirds who have heard it on the radio copyrightable?
> but it seems that the person most involved with everything around making it possible for orangutans to take photos owns the copyright, and not the orangutan.
These photos are not copyrightable.
The AI we have now doesn’t actually disrupt anything that 300 years of precedent hasn’t worked through. Commissioned work, generative tools, etc — it’s all been done and sorted and debated and ruled on.
Some AI might shake things up, but nothing we’ve seen yet.
Sure AI is much more effective, but what would it even mean for AI to hold copyright and why would it even be useful to do this?
I have no answer to your questions because I haven't thought about them.
That and every armchair philosopher on HN who trots out that "human intelligence is just cleverly disguised auto predictor heuristics based on statistical models the same as GPT."
If copyright were ended for art, music, and source code, there would be nothing wrong with copilot.
I'm not just being snarky -- I think these are real questions that follow from saying that the system holds the copyright (and I am dubious that he has consistent answers to them).
I will be the first to fight for true AI to have right as a person, but these generative tools are just that: Generative tools. They have no continuance of memory, they have no sentience or sapience. We should be approaching the topic far more carefully than we are, to be on the lookout for those things, but the evidence points strongly in the opposite direction right now.
It's the major players in a billion dollar industry driving the conversation while also benefitting from the topic being approached as it is. I don't see a way for it to go the "right" direction while that's the case.
> The Office says Thaler changed his story to claim that he “‘provided instructions and directed his AI to create the work,’ that ‘the AI is entirely controlled by Dr. Thaler,’ or that ‘the AI only operates at Dr. Thaler’s direction.’”
To this legal layperson, it sounds like the claimant originally said the machine did everything without his involvement, prompting the Copyright Office to reject the work. And his subsequent claims of directing the AI would potentially change the decision—but that wouldn't apply to this claim but perhaps to future claims.
> The Copyright Office says that its own guidelines specify human authorship as a requirement for protection and that “the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work.”
I suppose the question is what degree of human involvement (specifying/refining prompts) would potentially qualify as a human 'creating' the work, if any. I don't think there's any case law on this yet.
A more interesting wrinkle might be a lawsuit challenging copyrights granted to works "authored" by a corporation, if it could be shown that no human employees (or contractors) were involved in a creative capacity.
There are a few companies out there that generate content strictly algorithmically, and only use humans to rate, moderate, or curate that output (yes, the selection process results in copyrightable collections, but ought not to affect whether an individual selection is protectable).
Do we want millions of AI generated images generated from automatic prompts?
If all AI generated images get protection, I see a nightmare of low effort content being generated just for ownership of its copyright.
If you though that patents were broken wait until some companies have millions if not billions of pre-generated images, from cartoon characters to logos, that you need to check before publishing yours.
Copyrightable Authorship: What Can Be Registered - https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...
---
306 The Human Authorship Requirement
The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being.
The copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Because copyright law is limited to “original intellectual conceptions of the author,” the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). For representative examples of works that do not satisfy this requirement, see Section 313.2 below.
313.2 Works That Lack Human Authorship
As discussed in Section 306, the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.
The U.S. Copyright Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Likewise, the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings, although the Office may register a work where the application or the deposit copy(ies) state that the work was inspired by a divine spirit.
Examples:
• A photograph taken by a monkey.
• A mural painted by an elephant.
...
Similarly, 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.”
This is consistent with recent rulings about copyright by AI outside the art domain.
A corporate entity can own the copyright to some work. The corporate entity cannot create a copyrighted work - that requires human authorship and only human authorship is allowed.
> The Copyright Office says that it “turns on a single question: Did the Office act reasonably and consistently with the law when it refused to extend copyright protection to a visual work the plaintiff represented was created without any human involvement? The answer is yes.”
This article is really poorly written. I guess they wanted the flashy headline?
If I run a company and pay a designer to work for me and we are in a meeting, I say "these colors established in that pattern following the art patterns of these 3rd party artists...", clearly the art the designer makes based strictly on those requirements belongs to the company. Doesn't belong to me either, because I may own the company but the company pays both of us, so the company owns the art.
Me and an art friend are in a bar, and I say "these colors established in that pattern following the art patterns of these 3rd party artists...". The friend makes an original work based specifically on my comments. Clearly the friend owns the art they generated.
I setup stable diffusion 1.5 running on automatik1111 on my local machine. (For the sake of argument) the license of both SD1.5 and automatik1111 pass all rights to generated art to me, the user. I provide a description "these colors established in that pattern following the art patterns of these 3rd party artists..." and I then pick from several dozen images that are generated.
Ok so the first two situations are clearly defined in law. The third situation is not super nebulous since the copyrights clearly pass ownership to any generated work to me, the prompt creator. (Specifically not getting into rights of original artists used to train SD for this example).
One step further, I use several pieces of art generated by SD based on my prompts and then use those to create a fundamentally different piece of art in photoshop by combining not only the SD art but other publicly exhibited existing works. The final piece of art is substantially different enough from its source material that I maintain ownership under existing copyright laws/doctrine.
Ok with that laid out, where precisely does fair use and copyright fall?
Even if I use "illegally" generated original art, if I modify it enough to create a new use that is distinct from the original is that still illegal? Or do I have ownership?
I think the closest we will get to fully autonomous AI byproduct privatization is making it possible to claim ownership over hyperparameters. Lends some credibility to preventing direct commercial use of the model (similar to how some GPL licenses aim to work), and is actually somewhat enforceable. Otherwise you’re just opening the door to infinite copyright spam.
One could run the full sweep and copyright all possible outputs of stablediffusion… and then own all art?
There are many ways to earn money from films, music, art, books, etc., without needing copyright.
The only reason D is released under the Boost License is because public domain has no legal standing in many countries. The Boost License is the most permissive one in wide use that we could find.
For any of those ways, it will always be cheaper to copy someone else's films, music, art, books, etc. rather than spend time and effort to produce them yourself. This is more true where only some works are popular (e.g., where a publisher publishes 50 books for every hit), because a copier can just copy the popular works and skip the unpopular ones.
I don't recall asking anybody for permission to develop the D programming language and give it away for free.
This is the reality for many projects; they may have added massive value but we don't know that they exist. It doesn't make sense to compare modern open source projects with projects from a previous era. More new open source projects are created each day than used to be created each year but we hardly ever hear about any of these new projects. We only hear about corporate sponsored 'open source' projects... Which, for the most part are terrible; people would realize how terrible they are if only they could see what else is out there, but they don't.
Even with my skeptical mindset (actively trying to find indie/underdog projects), I only know about a tiny fraction of open source projects which would interest me (if I could know about their existence). I can't even dream of using indie projects during my day job... Every single employer has been brainwashed into using only 'approved' big-tech OSS projects and this effect is getting worse each year.
Germany didn't have copyright in the 1800s, and the publishing industry thrived.
You are proposing eliminating viral licenses.
> There are many ways to earn money from films, music, art, books, etc., without needing copyright.
This an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think you don't have it.
I suspect that, realistically, the only way to earn money from "films, music, art, books, etc.," without copyright is a patronage system. That's far from good.
I don't? Germany in the 1800s did not have copyright protection, and it was boom time for them.
Musicians make tons of money from live performances. CDs serve as advertisements for their live concerts.
Wealthy people love to buy original paintings for $$$$ when the images of them are free all over the intertoobs.
Academics don't make much of anything from books. The books serve to boost their professional reputations, which they turn into money.
Celebrity authors make money by being celebrities.
The free software industry is thriving.
Patronage is not a bad system. I don't know why you think it is. Just look at all the incredible medieval art resulting from it.
Because England's book publishers had a cartel. Eckhard Höffner's argument is absurd on the face of it (he basically says: England had copyright, Germany did not, Germany published more books, therefore not having a copyright causes you to publish more books). He also didn't bother to look to other places, like the US.
> Musicians make tons of money from live performances
A vanishingly small number of musicians make tons of money from live performances. Music is probably the defining example of the need for copyright.
> Patronage is not a bad system. I don't know why you think it is. Just look at all the incredible medieval art resulting from it.
Yes, check out all that medieval art of things unintersting to wealthy people and the Church. Patronage was, and is, a horrible system. It is art feudalism and serfdom. You're basically arguing that Elon Musk gets to determine what art is made.
> The free software industry is thriving.
I'm sure Canonical is raking in the money compared to Microsoft.
But let's get back to the item you ignored: by eliminating copyright, you are effectively destroying viral licenses and the free software movement that goes with them.
I see this opinion all over the place, but it never seems to be coming from actual working artists, and I am curious why people who don't have any skin in the game are comfortable speaking for those who do. As somebody who's published code under relatively permissive FOSS licenses, I don't think that perspective is very relevant given the different incentives involved.
If that ain't skin in the game, I don't know what is.
Why don't novelists all release their full manuscripts under highly permissive free licenses at the same time as their published volumes hit the store shelves? Is it because they're all stupid and vain, wringing their hands over a non-issue? Or could it be that all things are not equal, and that their living depends on the protections afforded them by copyright law in a way yours doesn't?
> Why don't novelists all release their full manuscripts under highly permissive free licenses at the same time as their published volumes hit the store shelves?
They're likely afraid to try. I'm not afraid. Novelists don't make much money. Giving the novels away is a way to get fame, and fame can be turned into money.
> their living depends on the protections afforded them by copyright law
Does it? It's really hard to make a living writing novels.
Are you even reading my comments? Because yes, you do, that's the whole point. I said as much in my last one. That's exactly what makes your opinion in this matter essentially worthless.
If you read on, you'll see that I also anticipated your slur against novelists as being "afraid", or whatever---inferior to you, in any case. It honesty astounds me how willing some people in the tech world are to make pronouncements like this, mistaking their ignorance for insight. I am willing to be convinced that somebody who's not a working artist has meaningful insight here, but you're convincing me of the opposite.
> Does it? It's really hard to make a living writing novels.
Why don't you go ahead and tell me that there is nobody who depends on selling their novels for a substantial portion of their income?
Copyright is called out in the constitution. It's not a trivial thing to "just abolish," at least in the US.
The real problem would be the Berne Convention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
> The Berne Convention requires its parties to recognize the protection of works of authors from other parties to the convention at least as well as those of its own nationals. For example, French copyright law applies to anything published, distributed, performed, or in any other way accessible in France, regardless of where it was originally created, if the country of origin of that work is in the Berne Union.
> In addition to establishing a system of equal treatment that harmonised copyright amongst parties, the agreement also required member states to provide strong minimum standards for copyright law.
> ...
> The Berne Convention states that all works except photographic and cinematographic shall be protected for at least 50 years after the author's death, but parties are free to provide longer terms, as the European Union did with the 1993 Directive on harmonising the term of copyright protection. For photography, the Berne Convention sets a minimum term of 25 years from the year the photograph was created, and for cinematography the minimum is 50 years after first showing, or 50 years after creation if it has not been shown within 50 years after the creation.
(1) The term of protection granted by this Convention shall be the life of the author and fifty years after his death.
(2) However, in the case of cinematographic works, the countries of the Union may provide that the term of protection shall expire fifty years after the work has been made available to the public with the consent of the author, or, failing such an event within fifty years from the making of such a work, fifty years after the making.
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... unless you're also proposing leaving the Bernie convention or changing an international treaty.
But copyright is what enables some of the big cultural spectacles that a lot of us enjoy, like bookstores and galleries and professional editors/finishers and blockbusters and broadway shows, etc etc. Without copyright, these industries aren’t sustainable and grand art becomes dependent entirely on arbitrary patronage by the aristocracy and government. For what ills there are to capitalism, these billion dollar art industries have their upsides.
After all, musicians perform Beethoven all the time. Somehow, that works.
Let's go back to joking.
Ever noticed the boom in free software?