What, if any, practical implications does this have? Why would a real person or company want to specify a non real person as an author?
No, its not.
This is not a case of the human trying to claim copyright as the author of a work made using AI tools.
> As the article notes, copyright applications are also being rejected in cases where a human asserts authorship over an AI generated work.
That is true (although at least one has been accepted by the copyright office, IIRC), but it is not an outcome of this case (even in the sense that this ruling might support it) because this case does not concern human claims of authorship at all. It concerns undisputed solely-AI creation.
Seems like a loophole, if I generate synthetic data with a model trained on copyrighted works, the synthetic data is copyright free? So I can later train models on it?
But philosophically, I wonder if it's allright to block that, it techincally follows the definition of copyright. It does not carry the expression, but borrows abstractions and facts. That's exactly what is allowed.
If we move to block synthetic data, then anyone can be accused of infringement when they reuse abstractions learned somewhere else. Creativity would not be possible.
On the other hand models trained on synthetic data will never regurgitate the originals because they never saw them.
If you are a human who creatively uses a tool to generate something, you’d get copyright protection.
Unlicensed AI Code is 0% copyrighted and open source and can't be closed.
Otherwise I would need to check the output of every LLM for copyright infringement
If you can perfectly prove that no copyrighted code was used in training a model and that the model was not algorithmically designed to output that code, based on knowledge of the copyrighted code on the creator's part, but it outputs code identical to a copyrighted program, it could very likely not be infringement... but obviously that's a high bar to clear for a complex program.
If your model always outputs
> #!/bin/bash > echo "hello world"
another programmer will likely not be able to claim copyright infringement on it. If it always outputs Adobe Photoshop, you're gonna need a very good lawyer, and a Truman-show-esque mountain of evidence on your side.
Very little.
> Why would a real person or company want to specify a non real person as an author?
Other than to needlessly complicate the claim that the work is subject to copyright? No reason at all.