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Comment by kolme | Hacker News Reader

This is just a neural network fed with some dog pictures, it's not really "thinking", it doesn't "create" anything. In other words, it's not (yet) artificial general intelligence. As I see it, it's just some software which creates an output given an input. In essence, a tool.

So I guess, unless otherwise stated in the license of said software, the ownership lays on the operator.

Maybe, one can argue that the engineers who "fed" the NN do have the rights of the output.

But the software is not clever enough for me to see here a similar case to that of wikipedia, the photographer and the monkey.

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It is affected by that case though because of the policy and guidelines it spawned.

> “Because copyright law is limited to ‘original intellectual conceptions of the author,’ the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work,” said the US Copyright Office in its latest compendium of practices published Tuesday. “The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants.”

and

> In new guidance the USCO has ruled that only works created by a human can be copyrighted under US law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention.

Source [0]

This feels like it falls into the 'by machines without human intervention.' There's no meaningful contributions from a human.

All that said this will eventually be an issue (hopefully) when machine intelligence actually takes off or human uploads become a viable operation. Though maybe by then we'll be less obsessed with every idea having to have an owner, but that's neither here nor there.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/22/monkey-bus...

>There's no meaningful contributions from a human.

Humans provided the training data. Humans wrote the source. Humans compiled and ran the program.

So the copyright belongs to google, even if you run it on your own photographs on your own machine? That doesn't seem right.

Consider if you took two copyrighted pictures and combined them in some way in photoshop. We can lay claim to the combined work, but we may not have consent of the original authors works to distribute thier work.

Now consider if you trained the NNet with the same two images, such that it was highly overtrained and basically produced a combined replica of the inputs. This is essentially the same as doing it manually in photoshop. That a computer done it does not take ownership away from the creators of the two images.

A NNet isn't trained with two images though, but millions. Do we abandon copyright because of scale? Should the NNet operator not be required to keep the entire training set such that copyright can be traced? Do we invent an entire new industry on determining the probability that a particular image was used to train a NNet (and by how much it affected it), such that it's owner can claim royalties on anything the NNet produces?

The question isn't about google versus operator, it's about whether or not we're going to continue investing in the madness of copyright for machines designed to mimic human brains, and if so when will it apply to ourselves - for we can't archive our own training set.

> Do we abandon copyright because of scale?

This is an interesting question. I wonder if, due the number of items in the training set and the minimal impact of each individual creative work, it would be considered fair use.

If your training set significantly consists of images from someone else's training set in the same domain, you might have a conflict. But for arbitrary images, it may be analogous to search engines indexing (and learning from) copyrighted material, which is generally protected.

>The NNet was trained with millions of images not on your machine, whose ownership we cannot trace (unless we store the entire training set).

It doesn't matter whose images they were trained on. As long as you are not reproducing the images exactly it's not violating copyright.

But if it does, then I believe it was Flickr that provided the images.

Humans provided the input photograph

humans caused the photograph to be created...

authority is becoming confused. The notion of Intellectual Property is becoming obviously self-contradictory. Who owns the copyright to your soul? Is it Facebook? Is it Google? Did you accidentally assign all of your Intellectual Property to WR Hambrecht? Can you be required to perform on command like a dancing bear? Are the excrescences of your soul merely the feedstock of an industrial process that requires human fleshbrains for supervised learning processes the output of which will be the property of the state since they are formed without human agency?

Bullshit.

Intellectual Property is Ideal Theft. There are no original ideas. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

There is nothing to be afraid of; resume shopping and avoid panic buying.

Overstuffed wording aside, copyright is just a set of laws that can be interpreted with more or less ambiguity; it's not some sort of ineffable concept. And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory.

Also, "original" in the law doesn't mean the same as in regular conversation; it merely means it's not an outright copy. That's why a work can be deemed to be derived from other(s), yet still have copyright protection for its own contribution.

>And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory.

No, they just become meaningless (and potentially dangerous).

The problem is that people are trying to apply the law to actual mathematical concepts (like bits). Since the law does not model mathematical reality, the law necessarily fails.

Many appear to be stuck in the fallacious belief that the law reflects reality, or at least that reality should reflect laws. Of course, this belief is incorrect, doomed to failure, and we see that failure play out all the time, including in this case.

A bit is no different than a letter/grapheme of a text, which was what copyright originally was designed to protect. They are both digital (discrete) encodings of information - a computer file is just a text in a language that only has two letters. The law doesn't concern itself with the specifics of the components of the work, it concerns itself with higher-level concepts like "copy" and "derivative", which still make perfect sense for information encoded as bits.

As for the failure, I disagree. This case merely represents ambiguity, which is inherent to law (it's why we have courts and judges and juries).

Monetary concerns aside, I like seeing "by spiritplumber" on my work, even when I'm giving it out.

True and I'm a big proponent of attribution. I just think that in a lot of cases the person who's assigned ownership of things like a lyric, melody, etc. is really just the lucky one who got to have their name put on a long string of remixes. This is especially bad in music and specifically hip hop where building on earlier music is one of the core tenants.

It's easier when the thing in question is still whole and unchanged but ownership of bits and pieces of a copyright work is troublesome to me.

To a sufficiently advanced alien species, _we_ are neural networks fed with some pictures (and sounds, smells, touches, and tastes) :)

I agree with you: open source linear regression software trained on open source data creating amusing output when misused doesn't constitute an "individual without rights yet" in my book

> This is just a neural network fed with some dog pictures, it's not really "thinking", it doesn't "create" anything.

That output image, was indeed created by the program.

We tend to think that only we, humans, have the ability to create, but some animals create, like birds do nests for example.

Also, the fact that you can understand how a deterministic program produces a pseudo-random digital work (like an image in this example) does not make the program "dumb" nor intelligent-less --if we could only understand better what means being intelligent, maybe we not be having this conversation :)

You don't have to have general intelligence to be creative. Different networks can create different results with the same inputs. It's not as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32GnAI3nrsQ

derivative works

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

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