Technology

The ruling says the AI itself can't hold a copyright, but humans using them can still be copyright holders of any qualifying works.

Without human authorship you cannot have a copyright. If something has no copyright protection, it is public domain.

However, the public domain is not viral. A work made with public domain elements can itself be copyrighted. However the copyright will only protect the creative expression added to the public domain work. Everyone else is free to make their own works from the public domain elements.

But...

Holders of public domain works are NOT obligated to publish or make available public domain works in their possession.

So if you use AI generation as part of your process you still have a valid copyright. Unless the audience can extract the unprotectable elements from your final product, you have the same copyright protection as a fully human produced work.

This ruling only applies to fully AI produced works. Using AI to modify a human performance to look or sound like someone else, still copyrightable. Human filming from an AI script, still copyrightable except for the script itself.

If AI makes the final output is where there's trouble. AI's aren't human, their expression isn't copyrightable. The prompt you give the AI is most likely factual rather than creative, which would make that uncopyrightable as well.

Copyright protects humans' creative expression, and nothing else.

I pray it means that Disney is screwed on their plans to make their productions fully autonomous and fire their writers, animators, other artists, line producers, ... I could go on, but you get the idea.

I don't need confirmation that they are working towards that goal, it is the inevitability of their existence and greed. All profit, no overhead.

Good questions. Might be the case. I really appreciate that this decision strengthened the authorship as originally a human authorship. Otherwise many other ownerships might be taken over by computers. With ownership reliability and consequences came hand in hand, but a computer gives a shit about consequences.

That's what we were doing before Ai lol

Nah, fuck that. Writing aides and stuff work wonders to break me out of bad habits and writer's block. I'm 200 pages into a thing because the LLM I use is like a buddy who takes your writing and goes, "yeah, and--!" And keeps you going. It's my content in my style based on my writing, idiosyncrasies, and colloquialisms. It's augmented by an LLM.

That is not even what this case was about - it was about some guy that created an AI that used that AI to generate an image with no real inputs - then claiming that the AI was the author and the copyright should transfer to him as the owner of the AI.

No precedence was set on how much human creative input was needed for an AI created image to be considered copyrightable. Only that you need to be a human to copyright something. Which was already set by previous cases where animals took a picture of things/themselves. No you don't get copyright if you own the camera, just like you don't get copyright for owning the AI.

I am not aware of any cases yet which start to set the bar for what is considered enough human creative work for the content to be considered copyrightable.

Kinda, the thing is they are transferring the standard used for stuff like photography where they require a certain creative height which is required to be supplied by a human to apply copyright.

They used the same example of cameras which I've used myself - it's not the act of pressing the button to produce a picture which gives you copyright over the result, it's instead the act of expression by choosing a motive which gives you copyright.

Similarly with ML tools, if you used a mere list of facts as inputs (lists of facts are not copyright protected, so eg. recipes are therefore not protected) then your output doesn't contain human expressed creative height, you effectively just rolled a dice a few times when running the ML model.

Now if nobody notices then you can probably claim copyright and get away with it, similarly to accidentally taking a great photo when you didn't intend to press the button. But somebody else might try running a few prompts in the same ML model and argue your work looks like it was derived from it with a much too simple prompt to get copyright protection.

If you want copyright protection for your own ML processed works, make sure your prompts are actually creative, similarly to what it takes for a poem to be considered enough for copyright protection.

Any time you make something, you have a copyright on it.

You have a copyright on the comment you just made, for example. And I have a copyright on this reply. It just magically happens once you create the work.

You can give your copyright away (for example, allowing Lemmy to publish your work on other instances or show it to others). You can also sell your copyright; when a publisher buys a book from an author, they actually buy the copyright to the words the author wrote (and thus the author loses their copyright over the work).

This goes beyond just words - pictures and whatnot have the same inherent copyright.

The ai generated portion does not have copy right protection. This also applies within an image. So for instance in an ai generated building image with a human created character in front. People couldn't copy the character but could use the background.

The title is a lie if you actually read the case. AI work can be copyrighted if there is enough human input into the work. This case was just about trying to get the AI to claim copyright (which it cannot do as it is not human) and transferring that right to the owner of the AI.

As for cases where the AI work is not under copyright then I believe it would be consider public domain? And thus we already have rules for how that works can be used as part of a greater works.

Also, is there even any need to tell people that parts aren't copyrighted? That'd be pretty tedious to do ("texture on model pot_interior_clay_2_cracked is not copyrighted"). But if a game has a mix of copyrighted and non copyrighted media, that basically means nobody can use the non copyrighted parts because they simply can't identify which parts those are.

I suspect there's no need to tell people. After all, mixed media is already a thing. I can make a copyrighted video, for example, in which I quote some Shakespeare. The Shakespeare quote isn't copyrighted, but the rest is. I've never seen any kind of copyright notice mention this.

So the net result might not be any different. Just if you steal assets from something, they might have a harder time identifying if they have a case of copyright infringement. Only if something was entirely AI generated would things likely change much. Though there's also some weird edge cases. Like what if a human makes a 3D model but an AI textures it. 3D models are basically never used without their texture. So what's the copyright implications of using videos of this textured model? Perhaps something for a very expensive legal case to figure out?

Technically no. But law is all about interpretation and it can be easy enough to hide depending on what stage of the project it’s used.

TBH, this really only affects people who thought they could gut their entire writing team or artists and release content solely done by AI.

It’s unlikely to affect places that use it for things like mood boarding or other menial tasks.

Copyright protects creative expression. Inventions are covered by patents. The guiding human hand would need to file with the patent office rather than the copyright office to protect their art algorithm.

When the copyright office sees the output of the art algorithm, they see an image that is not copyrightable due to a lack of human expression, a prompt that is uncopyrightable due to it being a factual list of things the image should contain, and an AI that is not even governed by their laws.

The ruling is unsurprising.

I'm pretty sure that he wanted to go this route so he could have automatic copyright ownership of literally anything people using his AI generator prompted from it. There's already ways that artists can take AI output and pretty easily make it something that can get copyright protection. It really seems like he was just angling to own by default anything that is generated using his AI.