The prime example is the movie Metropolis. It became public domain in 1953 but copyright was restored in 1996 only to re-enter the public domain a year ago today.
The United States is decidedly not going to extend copyright terms. The US only very reluctantly pulled works out of the public domain after it joined the Berne Convention in 1989. The reason ''Metropolis'' was in the public domain was because it failed to comply with renewal formalities, which are prohibited by Berne. Essentially, other countries threatened trade deals if the US made terms dependent on formalities for non-US works. So the law was changed and copyrights were restored.
As someone who works in the field (and who isn't a fan of the URAA), I can tell you that isn't going to happen again.
What's your read on what's going to happen with AI?
Will companies be allowed to train on copyrighted works? Seems like we'll fall behind international competition or supercharge monopolies if we don't allow it.
Japan and China permit training on copyrighted works. China goes a step further and allows AI outputs to be copyrighted.
Really interested in what insiders think or know about this.
Companies are allowed to train on copyrighted works - or, to be more precise, there is no prohibition in copyright law on them doing so. On the other hand, there are no particular protections.
The real question is to what extent an AI generator can return its copyrighted training data as a non-de minimis output. In other words, can I get one of the existing copyrighted works by putting in a prompt? This is something that AI developers are trying to avoid, but it's actuallg a pretty tricky problem.
Allowing AI output to be copyrighted is one of the worst ideas in copyright. Thankfully, the US Constitution as interpreted by the courts only allows for copyright to inhere in works of human creativity.
By the way, while I'm very excited about certain "AI" things, I have a very poor opinion of the merit of generative AI — and I mean in theory we well as how it stands today.
What does that mean, in more specific language?
If I create a poster in Photoshop, it is under copyright? What about if I use a smart fill plugin? What about if I use a prompt plugin?
Mine would be different than what we have now, it'd be 20 years or artists lifetime, whichever is shorter - then 10 year long renewals are possible after that, but the cost of the renewal would ratchet up with each renewal.
I've also considered using a percentage of revenue for the work - basically a tax on the revenue from that work, as a condition for the right of monopoly on it - which would also ratchet upwards with each renewal.
I'd also consider a use it or lose it strategy for copyright like trademark, meaning if you are not making the work available for purchase/license within the copyright renewal period, for reasonable terms, you lose the ability to renew it.
Mine is mostly designed to deal with orphaned works, ensuring they enter public domain in a predictable way, I think the biggest issue with our existing copyright system isn't enriching Disney - they're still putting those works out there, making them available - its all the works being lost to the sands of time.
I care much more about all the works that cannot find an audience because of uncertain copyright status, and not enough commercial demand to justify figuring out who 'owns' it.
I would have to actually write something blog-length about this.
Hypothetically if such a system existed where you passed in a copyright image, and then got a prompt to generate it, would that be sufficient to show some kind infringement?
I’m curious what you mean by this. If I’m not allowed under copyright law to make a personal copy of the latest Pixar movie or watch it without permission or payment, even if I’m not sharing it with anyone else, what under the law allows a company to make a copy and train on it? I thought I understood copyright law to not only prohibit redistribution of copyrighted works without permission, but also to prohibit consumption of copyrighted works without permission? Is that accurate? In that sense, I would have thought copyright law does prohibit companies from training on copyrighted works.
I own hundreds of paperback books. Copyright law does not limit what I can learn from them.
It may be that assembling a corpus for training is illegal, but if so, that would be true even if it was never used for training. The act of training an AI is orthogonal to the collection of the corpus.
> It may be that assembling a corpus for training is illegal, but if so, that would be true even if it was never used for training.
Yeah, exactly! You’re right that copyright law doesn’t limit what you can learn at all, and doesn’t copyright ideas. But it does, I think, limit whether you’re allowed to read the copyrighted work in it’s entirety the first place, if you haven’t paid for it or legally borrowed a copy or whatever. Gaining access to the material is covered under the law, right? This does mean, I suspect, that assembling a corpus of copyrighted training material is not allowed under copyright law, unless it was all paid for or licensed with permission.
If the AI companies have paid for all the material they used to train, then my question might be moot, I’m assuming they didn’t pay for it. This is murky when there’s a lot of copyrighted material that’s available online, maybe with the intent that it would be consumed in small parts and not copied wholesale by machines for the sole purpose of making software that can replicate the content and style of what it learned.
You aren't, but in many cases it doesn't matter because, even for USians, you're protected by the fair use exception. And even in some other cases like for educators and archivists where it extends further.
When we get new laws for the training of neural networks, I would expect their spirit to be based on the state of this exception.
So as much as I want there to be a fair use case here, the artists have a real point. If someone can break the memorization without losing significant validation/test set performance, that might go a long way.
But even then, artists don't want their style copied either, and that's problematic to me in that if a human does it, that's OK, but if an AI does it, it's not? Yes I get the ease of asking an AI to do it vs a 10K+ hours artist, but, well, more or less the same to me on a geological time scale.
In the next year, I'm hoping to Patreon/Kickstart project that offers two major funding tiers. Hitting the lowest tier means it will use AI to create assets, and hitting the higher tier will use humans instead. My response to this brouhaha is to throw the controversy right back at the people creating it in the first place and ask if they're willing to walk their fancy talk on this subject with their wallets.
Congress should have grown a spine and called their bluff rather than sell out the American public like that.
Claiming that was due to foreign pressure was just scapegoating / misdirection from its supporters.
The US forced all sorts of copyright extensions on the international community back then (including DMCA-style DRM protections).
The support section of the Wikipedia page lists the main lobbyists for the bill. They are all US based, and Disney started lobbying for it in 1990 (the year after the US was brought into compliance with the Berne convention).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
In the past decade, the USA also has tried to spread the new extended period over the world via trade treaties, of life plus 70 years, going beyond Berne's life plus 50 years.
I have a hard time to find cases when it's true in the context of media content.
Here is them arguing against retroactively applying a 70 year old copyright term in Canada to works published before 1978:
https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/strategic-policy-sector/sit...
> For instance, if an author created a work at 30 -- the average age for a first childbirth in Canada -- and died at the average age of 82, with a copyright term of life of the author plus 50 years, and if the average of 25 years for a generation, we are into the fifth generation after creation of the work. Adding on another 20 years only compounds the capacity of heirs of authors to leverage extended copyright to prevent Canadians from accessing valuable cultural (and by that time historical) works. We have seen numerous examples of distantly removed heirs leveraging old copyright to prevent commentators from quoting extensively from well established works, or preventing historical pictures, news-clipping and other primary sources from being used without payment.
And indeed, it was implemented that way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Canada#Extens...
That being said, copyright is a product of laws and laws can always change. Your comment made me believe that the copyright owner somehow extended their rights; not a literal act of Congress.
What happens is that lobbyists for the same (copyright) interest groups instructs their governments that extended copyright is in their interest, and that whoever have the longest should “win” and become the norm.
WTOs are basically big business “negotiating” with itself through nation states.
This is all about interests: when you are a net importer you want to make it easy and cheap to reproduce and use works. Buy once you start being an exporter you want your works protected, and that's a quid pro quo.
The entry of new works into the commons was shut down for a long time, with Disney keeping Mickey under copyright being viewed as the main driver for the lobbying that's kept it closed. We're coming off of two sequential 20-year extensions, and got our first works entering the public domain in the US in 2019, at which point there was a clear deadline for Disney to either get copyright extended again or cede the point.
So Mickey starting to creep into the public domain means the commons probably won't be closed again, since nobody else has as much interest in pushing that as Disney did.
Borrowing/"stealing"/copying happens with movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HuenDPZw0 (fast forward to 3:12 to see how much star wars borrowed from other pieces)
It happens with music (kirby had to remove this originally because of...copyright) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmjHlkQYoOM