Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU
mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Hopefully no judge uses that as precedence.
What if this applied in a photography class? The instructor owns the equipment and helped “set up” the photo. Does the instructor own the copyright?
It's fine, I guess. How does it work in cinema? A director who is the creator of the project must have to get rights from every camera/mic operator.
No, because they're already paid to do that job. And a director is paid too - he doesn't have any copyright for his work. The employer does.
> In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is created by an employee as part of their job duties, the employer is considered the legal author or first owner of copyright.
> It is an exception to the general rule that the person who actually creates a work is the legally-recognized author of that work.
If employment is an exception, I wonder what would happen if an animal that you owned pressed the shutter on a camera.
I'm actually having a bit of trouble thinking of what sufficient societal good there is/would be in granting copyright on raw dashcam or security camera or the like footage? None of those purely mechanical automated systems need a subsidy or encouragement to generate more. Certainly someone can use that sort of thing in the creation of a copyrighted work but what would be the issue with the underlying material in that case being unprotected?
For what it’s worth, dashcam footage can absolutely be copyrightable.
The ruling is more about “only humans can get copyright protection”, not so much anything about whether a button is pressed or not.
Details https://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/gnu/www/philosophy/words-to-avoid.h...
The overwhelming majority of works have an effective commercial life of less than ten years.
Present-value analysis further reduces the individual benefit of long-lived copyright. That is warrented in only a minuscule fraction of all works.
(There are roughly 1 million books published in English annually, of which ... ten make the top-ten best-seller list. The situation gets worse if we consider this a conservative estimate, or include all other copyrighted works created in a year ... every one of the billion or so items posted to social media accounts on a near-daily basis is protected by copyright. Few if any of those have any real commercial value. The fraction of works fostered vs. works encumbered by copyright is parlous small.)
Copyright is a fairly basic protection on Work, and wanting to alter it to be based on percived value is catastrophic- On one end you'll deny copyright to security camera footage- nevermind it's of a meteorite and everybody is clamoring for a copy. Then, on the other hand you'll have micky mouse where it's such a big thing and Walt put so much effort into it that the copyright is perpetual. It'll tie up the courts, and give the Have's the power to remove the copyright or SLAPP the rightsholder into poverty.
We need patent reform far more than any complaint against Copyright that I've seen- and far too many people conflate the two. Lets not even talk about trademarks.
In any case, any country that decides neural network generated media isn't copyrighted then faces a major, and probably impossible, problem of trying to prove it wasn't made by a human.
That doesn't stop people from treating automated recordings as if they were copyrighted, though. Especially for media companies, licensing is standard operating procedure. Even if a media company's lawyers believe something isn't actually copyrightable, if the licensor and licensee believe it is, and especially if distribution outlets (e.g. YouTube) treat it as such, then it all works out.
In some other countries automated footage is copyrightable, AFAIU, but it varies.
> In any case, any country that decides neural network generated media isn't copyrighted then faces a major, and probably impossible, problem of trying to prove it wasn't made by a human.
In the US the initial burden is on the person claiming a copyright violation. In court that is met by simply showing a certificate from the Copyright Office. In fact, it's actually a requirement--you can't sue in court to enforce a copyright claim with a certificate. But in getting the certificate you would be making a declaration that it was made by a human.
Registering a work provides additional benefits.
That’s it.
Same as when hiring a software engineer.
So you're more of trying to create a special rule where if the normal recipient of a copyright would be invalid, then it slides to the 'nearest' most appropriate individual, but that seems extremely fragile and difficult to define.
It's like things that are already in public domain. Even if you make a coloring book out of paintings in public domain, it doesn't necessarily mean others can just print your book as-is.
If companies get slope with creative output to the point that "a few employees" can reproduce it in shadow markets, don't expect to get copyright protection without giving governments revenue and speech-control.
Have you been involved in copyright or patent litigation?
Because it's not that easy.
If you're on the defendant side of a copyright violation case, it's extremely hard to use "well the original author didn't really make it...* as a defense. (Patent cases are often defended with this argument though, as a patent grants far boarder protection than copyright and can be rejected on prior art. But still it's very different from "AI made this actually.")
That's not what we're talking about.
This is a question of copyright eligibility in the first place. An excellent recent(ish) example is Oracle v Google wherein the former claimed copyright over the Java APIs. That particular litigation went on for years and ultimately went to the Supreme Court (though it ultimately ended on a fair use argument and the issue of API copyright eligibility was never settled).
We can probably assume similar high profile cases in the future that turn on quantifying the level of human contribution in code produced through the use of AI.
As for patents, it's literally that easy. Attacking authorship of a patent is an excellent way to invalidate it. It's why any company with a serious patent program requires staff to keep supporting notes for their work and confirm authorship in writing as part of the filing process.
Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?
"spied"?
Whatever it is, slapping "steal" on it because what was done is wrong, and stealing is wrong, is the same sloppy logic that the copyright lobby used in the 80s/90s.
The knowledge wasn't obtained illegally or illicitly, immorally perhaps.
Illegal entry/trespass is a crime regardless of the method used however.
In your analogy copying the code (online content) isn't necessarily illegal, however using that knowledge without compensation, permission or attribution may be a crime (depending on copyright law, judges rulings etc).
What about using torrents to acquire that content?
Seeding is often considered the actual point of infringement, aka sharing copyrighted material without the right licence.
I should note I suppose that I don't agree with companies using artists or developers hard work for their own financial gain without compensation, whatever form that may take.
The problem as usual is the availability of legal loopholes when you have a team of lawyers and near infinite money.
Personal downloading is generally only a civil violation, requiring the rights holder to sue you for reparations.
Take note of the qualifier entirely. If you're working with an agent steering it to produce the results you want, it would be an entirely different story.
> Neither mere prompting nor the selection between several AI suggestions is sufficient as a human creative contribution.
which reads like you actually have to contribute by modifying the output from the system, i.e. prompts/inputs to the system do not count as a human contribution.
same thing applies to sampling in music. if i change enough of a sample as to make it unrecognizable, then i don't need to worry about registering/licensing the sample.
otherwise you can still prompt your agent things, but any output falls under public domain.
since this hype wave started some people have been saying don’t use these tools in an environment where you’re dealing with proprietary IP. did anyone listen? no. because shiny.
> Munich Local Court has held that
Local Court in Germany is the equivalent of the Magistrates Court in the UK or Australia.
Definitely not the arbiter of ultimate truth.
If companies fail to protect their investments in generating IP, they will stop investing in generating it.
And unless IP generation costs (all in, including the humans telling them what to generate) fall close to zero, it will be bad for the world if companies cannot recoup investments in generating new IP.
We would expect this to hit those industries relying on IP protections the most, e.g. pharma.
If that is faithful reading of the law, that makes sense. I know a number of people who use AI, but none of them (that are making anything actually useful) have the output "entirely generated" (aside from some POC tests that never see the light of day).
I have a hard time believing anything of value, anything worth copyrighting, could be entirely generated by AI.
Perhaps you're not stretching your imagination enough. What if an expert novelist used an AI like it were a fancy auto-completing dictation machine to write the next great American novel? AI may have "entirely generated" all the text, but what if they micromanaged the shit out it?
I can imagine the difference between someone who fires off a lazy 5 minute prompt, and someone who labors for months and months to get exactly the results they want.
However, I just saw a product yesterday that was released and being built as you described. Interesting times.
No, just the stuff from people who think whatever they prompted from an AI is a contribution to creative works, science, etc.
However, there's no issue with including non-copyrightable code in otherwise copyrighted projects. There's already plenty of non-copyrightable code like auto-generated boilerplate.
That is not how copyright/trademark/contract laws work, and isomorphic plagiarism is not a long-term business model. People also loved Napster at first too. Good luck =3
So no license is enforceable with code written by AI.
Perhaps we'll have new iterations of FOSS licenses to adjust to legal declarations.
All models know what Disney Mickey Mouse looks like too. =3
Add a subtle bug or odd behavior to your code, see if someone else’s code repros it (presumably via LLM regurgitation), sue.
The issue is most GPL license fall under contract law, and scraped code can't legally have assigned "copy" rights on an "AI" vector search compaction output.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhgYMH6n004
Indeed, these rules obviously don't apply in places like India, Russia, Iran, and China. =3
As the dark specter of Disney Mickey Mouse looms over every LLM model involved in isomorphic and character plagiarism. Yes, even motion capture is considered a performance act in the guilds, so video reskinning an unlicensed performance act people make is also a liability.
It would sure save a lot of money if you don't get caught, so people are gonna try it for sure. =3
The AI system must function merely as a tool or instrument (like a camera or Photoshop) guided by the human, rather than acting as the creator itself. The line may get a bit fuzzy case-by-case, but effectively the human must be the creative one, not the AI.
This is not unprecedented. Machine generated technical data, sensor outputs, automated surveilance photography, monkey selfies, purely algorithmic or generative music and such were already disqualified long before AI came along.
They have a copyright on the original, and if they hire a human, the human would have a copyright on the translation (which would generally be licensed or transferred back to the author in some way).
If they use an AI for the translation, by the logic here, the translation wouldn't have its own independent copyright, but (based on other long established principles of copyright) it would still be a derived work of the original, so even if this decision holds it would not be legal to make unauthorised AI translations, pirate authorised AI translations, make further translations into other languages (or back to English), etc.
Which seems fairly reasonable! But consider:
If you start with, say, a 90,000 word novel, and ask for a translated novel, you (presumably) have sufficient rights to stop someone making unauthorised copies of the AI translated version.
If you start with a 300 word prompt, and ask for a logo, you (apparently) do not have sufficient rights to stop someone from using it without authorisation.
So some combination of the input (0.3k vs 90k) and the output (logo versus novel) crosses an inflection point between these two extremes, and I think it's interesting to wonder what the boundaries are. Like, in theory you could graph input size versus output complexity, and sketch a frontier between "the author's protected expression survives in the output" and "the author's protected expression does not survive in the output". And I don't have the slightest idea what I think a fair frontier would look like.
It has always been like that though. Copyright is just that arbitrary. You really can't tell if Android violates Oracle's copyright over Java by reading law text.
Monkeys and LLMs (so far) either don't understand or don't need such incentives, so they don't get copyright.
The Walt Disney Company insists otherwise.
I've come to understand that rules are not executable, or not executed. As programmers we understand if we write if(X) {Y} and X happens, Y will.
Laws aren't like that. Laws are just powerful people telling us what we want to do and what they want to do to us if we don't. The difference is subtle: the powerful person's power is not limited by the law. He only writes the law because exercising his power is annoying and he'd prefer that we complied in advance so he doesn't have to. The thing that actually executes is the powerful person's desires, not the law.
But what the court did say is that the logo wasn't (sufficiently) derived from the prompt; those 300 words weren't contained or encoded in the logo, so if you copied the logo without permission from the author of the prompt, this was fine, because you weren't in any meaningful sense copying that prompt, or any other protected work of the author. (Which in my view is fair enough, really!)
Another way of thinking about it is to consider:
1) The number of different prompts that would yield a very similar looking logo. In many cases, a one or two word difference would probably yield a very different logo. (Conversely, you could rewrite an entire chapter of the novel, but the other chapters would still be translated more-or-less unchanged. You'd need to rewrite every sentence to end up with an entirely new set of sentences in the output, and since copyright covers the arrangement of text, not the plot or ideas, that matters.)
2) How feasible it'd be to look at the logo and accurately guess the prompt. (Again considering the hypothetical novel, if you translated the novel back into English, entire passages would likely be word-for-word identical with the original.)
But it just begs the actual question of how much human contribution there needs to be:
- I wrote the prompt (not enough)
- I wrote many prompts and iteratively refined them using distinctly human skill (open question, but loosely seems still not enough, potentially in the EU but maybe in the US?)
- I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough)
- I made equal or more contribution to the final result (this better clearly have copyright protection or we are in real trouble)
Artist are human
There is a dramatic difference between learning from or being inspired by an artist and incorporating it wholesale into an LLM
Artists can use human judgement and knowledge of social norms to decide what art is or is not appropriate to utilize. (e.g. a painting in the museum versus someone's tribute to a dead loved one on DeviantArt)
There's a big difference both in the amount of learning and the amount of output between an AI and a human.
There's a big difference between an artist and a megacorporation.
Andy Warhol did in fact compensate the artists whose work he incorporated into his art. So there is definitely precident.
Hmm I don't think that would be enough. I'd expect that would only make the modifications themselves copyrightable, but not the whole modified work including the AI parts.
Compare for example the case where the US copyright office ruled that, when assembling AI-generated images and human-written text into a comic book, only the human-made elements themselves (text, arrangement) get copyright protection, but not the images.
E.g. if you generate an AI photo and color grade it, i expect only the color grading would be protected (if that is even significant enough to be protectable), not the rest. And someone else could re-color-grade the same image without infringing your copyright.
80% of the code should be hand written by you. 20% can be allocated by AI for corrections or suggestions.
AI generated code should never be copyrighted otherwise. It's objectively common sense.
Does it enable decompilation remasters of classic games?
It feels like AI is a cleanroom laundromat
That sounds similar to how LLMs have been trained on GPL code and yet output is not (yet) considered derivative work
Some examples of why I think this is really hard: Say I build a story generation system. I work hard on building an agent swarm of actors, critics, editors, researchers. I craft into the various agents concepts of story arcs, outlining techniques, character development. I build a huge well thought out process for how to agentically write an actually good story, so long as you give it a title. Heck, I even design and train my own custom LLM with original layer ideas and novel training techniques to use on this system. After all that I then take that final step and give it a title. Do I have no claim to that? I probably put more work and creativity into it than an author would have a book. What if I then gave it 500 titles? 5,000? Would my claim degrade the more titles I fed it? Is it a percentage of work question? What is the core concept here that defines 'human-centric'? What is the cut-off here?
Let's go even further. I don't prompt. I live in a world with unlimited context models. I have a conversation about the book I want it to write. During that process I reject some ideas and accept others. I didn't give it a 'system prompt' but essentially all I did was prompt it and select versions I liked. Is that not human centric? How about if I asked it for advice and it did some editing work on my story? Did that make it not human centric even though the starting text was mine? What if that starting text was 99% replaced with a version 10x as verbose. Defining based on how you interacted with the model (prompted and selected) just seems way to weak to be a clear test.
It's an antiquated mechanism and is far more abused than it is actually used at this point.
If we go back 10 years and your friend says “I have an idea for an app, here it is,” and you build it, you own the copyright because you wrote it.
You give an idea to the pile of math calculated of the stolen work of humanity, the math owns it (which it can’t, so no one owns it).
No matter how detailed of a conversation you have with a friend, I don’t think they have justification to claim copyright over code written by you.
Based on your logic that should not qualify, but it currently clearly does: https://quayola.com/selected-unfinished-sculptures/
But if the tool is created from collective human creation, the copyright should belong to all humanity, not the person who triggered the tool.
If you trained an LLM entirely on your own input, I think you should own the output, but that is not the case for any widely-used llm.
Alternatively, they could remove the art from the LLM and divide their past profits among the artists.
Yes, that is vague. I think the examples were like:
If you paint a symbol and use an AI filter over that to stylize it, you own the symbol aspect of the image but not the stylized final result.
You can own a book of AI images as a curated collection. But, not the individual images.
It feels shitty that they have been trained on the life sums of all of our work and online presences with absolutely no credit given... But then again, I'm not sure I'd want to know what parts of the weights were from me and which weren't.
Frankly, I should have been putting something similar attached to any drawings or paintings I make physically. My entire life I’ve been training my brain on countless works of others. And, I’ve never asked one of them for permission or given anyone any credit.
2) If one applies a copyright message to AI generated output, is that fraudulent?
And what about A.I. generated code which has been altered by a human? Is the derived work copyrightable?
Imagine what this would do to a product like Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office!
The set of possible and desirable non-copyrighted text/audio/visual states to render is effectively infinite. Laws don't prevent Scrabble clones; tropes are not protected.
Endless remixes of public domain content are an option as well.
If an iPhone with model weights in chip, a local Mac mini with similar but more powerful model on chip ends up capable of generating endless content copyrights won't provide a moat.
Under most Berne Convention nations, copyright exists in all works "of original authorship" without any further registration requirement. That copyright persists for extraordinarily extended periods of time, generally many decades beyond the death of the author (if known).
Such protections apply to any authorship, including the comments posted here to HN, a jotted grocery list, or an audio recording.
But the protection presumes authorship. Today, increasingly, ubiquitous AI tools take over the role of writing in many contexts: texts, emails, HN comments (somewhat frequently given mod comments: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>), and whole articles and books.
Absent some work-factor suggesting probable original authorship (say, an original, handwritten or typewritten draft), there seems at least a faint possibility that AI might server as an incentive to require some positive act (e.g., registration, with a sworn statement of authorship) for copyright protection to be applied. This might be a positive step back from the copyright absolutism of the past century or so.
Say I would prompt Unix like system in few prompts or started agent chain to make it. That OS wouldn't have a protection.
However! Since AI work is noncopyrightable, the AI’s effort in translation is simply ignored. Claude’s The Odyssey would have zero rightsholders, and remain public domain. ChatGPT’s translation of The Three Body Problem would still be under Liu Cixin’s copyright.
If the AI is treated as an agent during inference, distinct from its user and not merely as a tool, then this should also apply during training too.
Based on this, it seems that AI agents are consuming people's code without permission. The MIT license only gives rights to "any person obtaining a copy of this software".
So the rights are given to a 'person', and the rights pertain specifically to a person who performed the act of 'obtaining a copy of this software'.
MIT license says 'obtaining a copy' and uses the word 'software', not 'code'. 'Software' is to 'code' what 'shop' is to 'building'; if you bought the shop, it doesn't necessarily mean you own the building. These are two different things and require different clauses. MIT explicitly separates the two and emphasizes that the author of the software retains copyrights (presumably over the code as this is the only thing over which they could claim copyright).
The code is different from the software; you can write the exact same software which behaves in the exact same way using completely different code; can be poorly written or well written. The difference is extremely meaningful to the person who invested effort to write the code in a clean way.
If we say that the agent is a separate entity from the person who ran it during inference, surely the same distinction can be made concerning the person who ran the agent during training. So the term 'person' from the MIT clause doesn't seem to apply here since the person running the agent has been factored out (just as they were during inference). Also, the agent is not obtaining a copy of the software; it's obtaining copies of the code which is copyright and independent of the software (as the MIT license clearly asserts).
He became a bit of a pop phenomenon, with stores dedicated to selling high quality prints of his works.
And one of the things, so I'm told, that could happen, was that you could buy one of his prints, but someone at the store, an artist, would dab some paint onto the print. Add some "light" to it.
Obviously this is a commercial endeavor, so I doubt the provenance of the rights holder was in doubt (such as through an employment agreement).
But it's, perhaps, an interesting case study about who owns what in a time of augmented and manipulated media.
entirely is the plank supporting this.
Not to even mention moral rights on how such work can or can not be changed if it would be disparaging for example...
It's reasonable to expect this to hold for all Berne Convention countries.
All licenses are unenforceable if you don't hold the copyright, since you don't have a copyright to license. And attempting to do so would probably be perjury.
But they can still be registered as trademarks.
The creativity requirements may seem arbitrary but there’s a legal distinction between a sculpture and a standard brick.
Or more relevantly, a recipe find on recipe sites (with the author's entire backstory) vs a sequence of instructions. The latter is not copyrightable, even if there was some creativity that went into it (eg. word choice).
In fact, the defense of "I wrote the prompts that led to the code that the LLM wrote" would be a much better defense.
Copyright didn't always exist, nor should it continue to. Hell; it must not.
I think the words (read: hilarious 1.25pp pamphlet) of Aaron Swartz on the topic are just too poignant to ignore, given the paths of Reddit (corrupted yet democratic), IP law (malignant yet showing cracks), and government survellience have taken in the Trump era. Despite the dated context... he really says it best:
https://ia800101.us.archive.org/1/items/GuerillaOpenAccessMa...
AI only = no copyright.
“A Single Piece of American Cheese” got a copyright because it had human involvement in compositing.
Theatre D’Opera did not because it was primarily prompt driven.
Thaler didn’t because he said it was machine derived.
Humans must be involved for a copyright.
I mean the copyright has to belong to somebody right?
Why would it? It’s generated by blending together ~ every bit of content on the internet and in books that they could steal. Why would the operator of the blending machine suddenly get copyright?
Does a gambler own the copyright on the symbols generated by a slot machine?
Imagine a slot machine in a gallery that produces a 4 word sentence. Visitors press the button, and the artist copies the 4 words onto a piece of paper and puts it on the wall.
EDIT: my point being that causing a machine to generate words doesn’t give you copyright over the words but if you then do something with the words they become your work.
What in the world makes you think that?
What is this implication based upon? Where does it say in copyright law that if no copyright arises for your work then it does not infringe the copyright holders' rights? This is completely devoid of logic...
If you record yourself reading a book, you own the audio recording copyright but it would be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without a license for the underlying rights.
In this situation:
If the AI generates the audio recording of a book, no one owns the copyright of the audio recording but it would still be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without the underlying rights.