Federal Judge Upholds Finding That AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable | Hacker News Reader

Federal Judge Upholds Finding That AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable

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43 pointsilamont24 comments

Kyle Mitchell is a developer-turned-lawyer who wrote a short blog post on this topic[1] where the second paragraph predicted article headlines like the OP submission:

"I’m sure there will be links like “Court Rules AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted” aplenty. They will be wrong. The court didn’t rule that AI art can’t be copyrighted. It ruled that copyright requires human authorship, surprising approximately zero copyright lawyers…or people who have read the Wikipedia page."

[1] https://writing.kemitchell.com/2023/08/19/Exactly-Wrong-AI-C...

I wonder how much humans will have to “selectively arrange” ai generated code in order to constitute human copyright ownership. Would that mean copy and pasted code from chat gpt invalidates a whole codebase , or would it mean that as long as you don’t use it to generate an entire application it will be human copy writable ?

What’s with the burden of proof? How do you prove that something was AI generated in the first place?

I’m not sure there is a good solution here . Potentially that could undermine the law? What happens in industries where the law is impossible to enforce ?

I am not aware of good solutions, only hilariously bad ones: https://www.firstpost.com/world/professor-fails-entire-class...

I am not a lawyer, but AFAIK anything you did that rises to the required level of minimal creativity is copyrightable. If you take AI code and the do something creative with it, the parts that you did are copyrightable. Someone else can still take the same AI output and do something different with it. There are a few exceptions, such as the merger doctrine, but this is generally how it works if I understood it correctly.

This all is based on the honor system and there is little honor now when millions of dollars are on the line.

At some point AI is going to be some kind of ingredient to most creative endeavors.

It will be interesting to see how courts find ways to divide copyrightable from non-copyrightable works, across the smooth spectrum of no-AI to all-AI works.

Especially given individual art & media works can vary along many other dimensions making catch-all classifications either difficult or arbitrary.

So can you write a bunch of prompts into a book format and copyright the prompts, but not the works generated from those prompts. Ok.

The trouble is that the plaintiff didn't register himself as the author (of the prompts).

He tried to register the AI as the author of the artwork, and that's not copyright works.

Owning the copyright of the prompts is only worth doing if you are going to sell copies of your prompts.

If you are selling the generated book, then you want copyright protection for it to protect your exclusive right to produce copies.

The plaintiff did the right thing based on self-interest, but lost.

> Owning the copyright of the prompts is only worth doing if you are going to sell copies of your prompts.

> If you are selling the generated book, then you want copyright protection for it to protect your exclusive right to produce copies.

> The plaintiff did the right thing based on self-interest, but lost.

This would be the case if they attempted to register the work as the author (which is the only way to register a copyright work! You can't register if you're not the author!)

Since they wanted to push this AI as author nonsense, this reads more like a political or philosophical statement than something with practical benefit

Well yeah, the prompts are written by a human and the output is not deterministic. I don’t understand what your point is.

This is a very interesting development. This would imply that any work product generated by an AI would be public domain, right? If BigTech generate code using AI for their products, can we demand the source code?

No: "Not copyrightable" and "public domain" just means nobody can say " I'm the only one allowed to make copies of that." It doesn't compel you to share information or help people make copies. (Ex: People interested in a family portrait from 1900 hanging in your house, or a Project Gutenberg PDF on your hard drive.)

Perhaps closer to software, recipes are not usually copyrightable either, but that doesn't mean a customer can taste my Secret Tasty Sauce and then force me to show them the recipe card.

I think the real question here is whether un-copyrightable source-code can be used to create copyrightable binaries... And how that might change when software projects contain a blend of source code.

If the source code is public domain, can the binaries produced from it be copyrightable?

I feel like that would be fair, and that the laws should be updated with provisions for this for anything containing api generated content.

My take anything generated by AI is essentially a worthless good. Consider that the amount of energy, material resources, human labor it takes to produce are essentially zero. And the supply is unlimited.

Things usefulness don’t depend on how they were constructed.

AI’s are producing lots of useful things. Classifiers, controllers, etc. as well as art which viewers value.

There is business value and there is utility value. The latter does not require the former.

And even then, not being able to copyright something doesn’t preclude business value. It just changes the landscape for a business using AI generation.

Worthless as in no ones going to pay you anything but a piddling amount of money for it.

I agree on that, for simple sales of simple works.

Everything all of it, the price is going to be nil.

So make an Amazon mechanical turk flip a pixel?

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