Following lawsuit, rep admits "AI" George Carlin was human-written

> Is that wrong?

Honestly I don't think so. This is one of the things that's always bothered me about copyright, that for the entire history of humanity storytelling has been a place where practitioners build on one another and add their own takes and ideas. Stories are shared and become part of people's cultural and personal identities and I don't think they should be able to be owned to the degree they are today. Copying your Phantom Menace DVD I think is totally fine to be illegal but making your own take on it, making art based on it, or telling other stories the same universe I think should be allowed.

I would require compulsory licensing and percentage fee remittance for "covers" or "remixes" of someone else's work. Like if you remade Phantom Menace, made Muppets Phantom Menace or novelized it. But what's called fanfic today should be able to be published above board.

You're correct in this particular case, but I want to point out that copyright only protects fat-cat artists. OpenAI and StabilityAI thought training on web text and images was OK, but restricted themselves to public domain & licensable audio, because the music industry is perfectly willing to bleed millions keeping you from kidnapping what they've rightfully stolen. Visual artists and writers generally own their own works, unlike musicians, which means they're on the hook for individual enforcement to the tune of 5-6 figures per lawsuit. There's no mechanism that would allow for someone - even the government - to just step in and enforce copyright over the entire training set.

If, say, someone started writing Ruffle PRs with ChatGPT and filing them as made by "AI kmeisthax", that'd probably be a trademark or publicity rights violation. I'd be furious - but I wouldn't be able to stop them. Not without paying a potentially life-ruining amount of money to pursue a marginal claim in court against some anonymous J.Doe.

Likewise, there's shittons of people who steal art and writing, reselling it on T-shirt stores and Kindle without much in the way of legal recourse. Those are often legitimately lost sales[0], too! And yet, despite having some of the strictest copyright laws in history, artists don't really have the means to shut them down beyond "dox yourself with a DMCA notice". They are starving despite copyright.

Private property is a thing that makes it harder to overconsume scarce resources. It doesn't protect against exploitation. What you want is collective bargaining and enforcement - i.e. a law specifically prohibiting misleading use of AI with rights of action for all parties.

[0] As opposed to, say, arguing that a BitTorrent download is a lost sale

Ask permission from whom? George Carlin has been dead for 15 years.

From the copyright inheritors? Personally, not a fan of copyright inheritance, so I'll pass, unless I'm legally obligated. But I think the law says parody is fair use, does it not? I guess we'll find out with this lawsuit.

Is this rhetorical? Authorial essentialism.

This would be the belief that the text/words are imbued with a metaphysical attribute while the text is created that depends on the properties of the author.

This is sort of the same umbrella belief that underpins the "words in the Bible are written by God" conclusion that some people have.

I'm guessing that you and I both aren't authorial essentialists, but as for a way people could believe this, it's not a stretch of the imagination.

The bytecode is not a novel creative work and does not have a separate copyright, this affects, for example, copyright terms (not that they are already relevant for code with the terms being so long) - the effective copyright date is when you wrote the source code, not when it was compiled; and of course the authorship - it does not matter who owns the machine or who initiated the compiling, only the writing of the original source code. But it is protected effectively as a "copy in a different format" of the original work - just as for a book, perhaps the author originally wrote as a manuscript with a quill on parchment or on a computer, and for the physical printed book it matters when and how the book was originally written (first 'fixed on a durable medium'), not what machines or tools were used in typesetting and printing the copy that you have - and the printed copy is still protected as a copy of that original creative work fixed in a manuscript.

In essence, as far as copyright law is concerned, the bytecode isn't generated by a tool, it's transformed by a tool.

Processes that transform creative work do not add creativity, but also do not erase it. So both your Python files and anything in the __pycache__ dir are copyrighted. More specifically, the __pycache__ is the same work in a different form, so it's the same copyright. You couldn't, say, dedicate the source to the public domain and then claim copyright over the binaries.

DMCA anti-circumention has to do with computer programs that enforce copyright. The work being protected has to be under copyright, but not the protection itself.

The only reason why AI art is completely uncopyrightable is because the only human contribution is a text prompt which is too short and functional to be copyrighted. Even if you're getting creative with your prompt writing, none of that creativity translates over into the final art - you're just keyword stuffing a small language model.