You have to be the creator of the work in order to copyright it. He didn't create the work. If the wind organized the leaves into a beautiful pattern, he couldn't copyright the leaves either.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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Weirdly enough the monkey selfie probably establishes some precedence here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
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You could copyright a photograph of that leaf pattern though, couldn’t you?
but its just a photocopy of the leaves, not the actual leaves. And to photograph something, you capture it according to your will. What will be the light situation, from which angle, at what focal length,... so many options.
This is getting weird.
If I would generate an image with an AI and then take a photo of it, I could copyright the photo, even if the underlying art is not copyrightable, just like the leaves?
So, in an hypothetical way, I could hold a copyright on the photo of the image, but not on the image itself.
So if someone would find the model, seed, inference engine and prompt they could theoretically redo the image and use it, but until then they would be unable to use my photo for it?
So I would have a copyright to it through obscurity, trying to make it unfeasible to replicate?
This does sound bananas, which - to be fair - is pretty in line with my general impression of copyright laws.
Copyright covers your creative expression.
For example, you draw a superhero named "LemmyMan" and post it online. All of your creative choices are protected. If someone made another LemmyMan with a different caption, they would be violating your copyright because you created everything about LemmyMan, not just the caption in your drawing.
Now suppose you take a photo of Mount Everest. Mount Everest is not your creation, but the choices of lighting, foreground, and perspective are. Someone could not copy your exact photo, but they could take a different photo of Mount Everest making different creative choices.
The same is true of taking a photo of work in the public domain, like the Mona Lisa. If you make no creative addition to the Mona Lisa in your photo, then you have no copyright at all. If you put some creativity into your photo, like some interesting lighting, then those creative elements are protected. But anyone else could still take a photo of the Mona Lisa with different lighting, the subject itself is not under copyright.
Now suppose you tell an AI, "Draw me a superhero", and it outputs ChatMan. If you make no further creative additions, then you have no copyright at all. But suppose you add a caption to it. Then the caption is your creative expression, so that is protected. But the rest of ChatMan is not, it's in the public domain just like the Mona Lisa. Anyone else can make their own version of ChatMan that's exactly the same minus your caption, because the underlying subject is not protected.
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It's human expression that is protected by copyright. Creative height is the bar.
If you've done nothing but press a button there's often no copyright. Photography involves things like selection of motive, framing, etc. If you just photograph a motive which itself doesn't have copyright, then what you added through your choices is what you may have copyright of. Using another's scan of a public domain book might be considered fair use, for example (not much extra expression added by just scanning)
Independent creation is indeed a thing in copyright law. Multiple people photographing the same sunset won't infringe each other's copyright, at least not if you don't intentionally try to copy another's expression, like actively replicating their framing and edits and more.
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You can copyright a combination of words, though, and it was his unique combination that created the art. The artist doesn't copyright the palette, and the shop that sold the pigments holds no ownership over the painting. If the art is created with paint, pixels, or phrase, the final product belongs to the artist, and so should be protected by law for them.
If I use a combination of words to commission an artist to paint a picture, I don't own the copyright on that picture.
If it's a commission, you might. Depends on the how the contract is worded.
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It has to be fixed in a tangible medium.
In this case they’re not “fixing” their words and the final art is the created expression. Yet in this case their created expression wasn’t created by them but the program.
In this case their combination is the palette and paint but the program “interpreted” and so fixed it.
For example you can’t copyright a simple and common saying. Nor something factual like a phone book. Likewise you can’t copyright recipes. There has to be a “creative” component by a human. And courts have ruled that AI generated content doesn’t meet that threshold.
That’s not to say that creating the right prompt isn’t an “art” (as in skill and technique) and there is a lot of work in getting them to work right. Likewise there’s a lot of work in compiling recipes, organizing them, etc. but even then only the “design” part of the arrangement of the facts, and excluding the factual content, can be copyrighted.
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You can copyright a combination of words, though, and it was his unique combination that created the art
so its literature, then?
The artist doesn’t copyright the palette, and the shop that sold the pigments holds no ownership over the painting.
Sure, the artist doesn't copyright a palette, or the shop does not hold ownership of pigments. But Companies do patent pigments.
If the art is created with paint, pixels, or phrase, the final product belongs to the artist, and so should be protected by law for them.
If you commission an Art piece, with a detailed description of what it should display. The artist comes back to you with a draft, you tell them to adjust here and there, and you finally after several rounds of drafting got the commissioned art piece. Did you draw it?
Thats what LLMs do and nothing else.
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AI Prompt User is complaining people stealing their artwork? Well that's new.
its debatable who the artist is, however, because if you remove the ai from the picture he could never have made this, and if you remove the training data the results would also be different.
Realistically: everyone whose data this was trained on should be included as authors if its not just public domain
There were similar debates about photographs and copyright. It was decided photographs can be copyrighted even though the camera does most of the work.
Even when you have copyright on something you don't have protection from fair use. Creativity and being transformative are the two biggest things that give a work greater copyright protection from fair use. They at are also what can give you the greatest protection when claiming fair use.
See the Obama hope poster vs the photograph it was based on. It's to bad they came to an settlement on that one. I'd have loved to see the courts decision.
As far as training data that is clearly a question of fair use. There are a ton of lawsuits about this right now so we will start to see how the courts decide things in the coming years.
I think what is clear is some amount of training and the resulting models fall under fair use. There is also some level of training that probably exceeds fair use.
To determine fair use 4 things are considered. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/
1 Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
This is going to vary a lot from training model to training model.
Nature of the copyrighted work.
Creative works have more protection. So training on a data set of a broad set of photographs is more likely to be fair use than training on a collection of paintings. Factual information is completly protected.
-> Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
I think ai training is safe here. Once trained the ai data set usually doesn't contain the copyrighted works or reproduce them.
Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Here is where ai training presumably has the weakest fair use argument.
Courts have to look at all 4 factors and decide on the balance between them. It's going to take years for this to be decided.
Even without ai there are still lots of questions about what is and isn't fair use.
Hmmm. This comment made me realize that these ai images have something in common with collages. If I make a collage, do I have to include all the magazine publishers I used as authors?
Not defending the AI art here. Imo, with image generating models the mechanisms of creation are so far removed from the "artist" prompter that I don't see it any differently than somebody paying an actual artist to paint something with a particular description of what to paint. I guess that could still make them something like a director if they're involved enough? Which is still an artist?
I dunno. I have my opinions on this in a "I know it when I see it" kind of way, but it frustrates me that there isn't an airtight definition of art or artist. All of this is really subjective
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Super interesting. The guy claims is wasn't just ai, that he performed alterations as well. If that's true but he still gets shot down it might pave the way for AI being much more shunned in the world out of IP concerns on the output side rather than the training data.
You can't copyright that music, game, book, screenplay or video because AI made some contribution.
Nah, that won't work. As soon as corporations get involved they'll carve out exemptions for themselves.
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That douche punched a sentence into a computer and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become.
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because it was an expression of his creativity.
yeaaaah no chief, that ain't it.
Oh gee so scammers aren’t getting protection for lying? Dang what a cruel world poor him…
/s
boo fucking hoo. If you want to copyright your painting, learn to fucking paint.
It also sucks and is just another shitty AI generated image full of weird nonsense.
Just because he duped a bunch of idiot judges doesn't mean his art or his arguments have any merit.
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Good luck, buddy. AI output has already been ruled not copyrightable. As it should be.
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This is stupid and I hope he gets his butt handed to him, but:
A federal judge agreed with the Office and contrasted AI images to photography, which also uses a processor to capture images, but it is the human that decides on the elements of the picture, unlike AI imagery where the computer decides on the picture elements.
Journey outside the world of API models (like Midjourney) and you can use imagegen tools where " the human that decides on the elements of the picture"
It can be anything from area prompting (kinda drawing bounding boxes where you want things to go) to controlnet/ipadapter models using some other image as reference, to the "creator" making a sketch and the AI "coloring it in" or fleshing it out, to an artist making a worthy standalone painting and letting the AI "touch it up" or change the style (for instance, to turn a digital painting or a pencil sketch to something resembling a physical painting, watercolor, whatever).
The later is already done in photoshop (just not as well) and is generally not placed into the AI bin.
In other words, this argument isn't going to hold up, as the line is very blurry. Legislators and courts are going to have to come up with something more solid.
The rule is already human expression in fixed form, of creative height. So you have to demonstrate that you the human made notable contributions to the final output.
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Womp womp
He did not make it. He essentially commissioned a machine to create an image for him using millions of pieces of art that were stolen from artists. It's no different from commissioning an artist to draw something for you, except the artist turns out to be someone who traces bits of other people's art, or copy and pastes it, and then you attempt to take credit for it instead by claiming that you made it. I predict that this lawsuit is not going anywhere as he does not have a proverbial leg to stand on.
Fun idea: let him copyright his prompt, if he's so particular about his "creativity."
Ah, I remember this image. It received some kind of award or something and created a stir when it was revealed to be AI gen. I can see why that would be incentive to want copyright.
I play with AI image generation all the time. No way do I see that as my work, there’s no skill other than positive and negative prompts, maybe feeding it a a starter image set or something.
Where it might be more concerning is if you use AI gen to create an 2D example of something, then an artist creates a 3D physical representation of the thing. Who owns it? AI famously is not good at creating “whole” things, but one can certainly interpret that image to make a whole of it.
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""my work""
I keep saying dude could have just painted it over by now. Is he just stupid. Just paint the picture you already have it.
The problem is "intellectual property" and capitalism more generally. As technology makes art harder to define and control, the absurdity of violently controlling art will hopefully collapse along with capitalism in general.
Intellectual property as a concept is incompatible with the continued advancement of human knowledge. Before copyright and patenting, we still had trade secrets and sensitive information, and those things cost us insights into metalworking we are still slowly recovering to this day. We still can't figure out how Roman's stumbled upon some of their glass blowing breakthroughs, and we just recently figured out Roman concrete.
Capitalism didn't invent greet, but it's certainly allowed greed to flourish as a core precept of its design.
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