I fucked with the title a bit. What i linked to was actually a mastodon post linking to an actual thing. but in my defense, i found it because cory doctorow boosted it, so, in a way, i am providing the original source here.
please argue. please do not remove.
I think we should have a rule that says if a LLM company invokes fair use on the training inputs then the outputs are public domain.
That’s already been ruled on once.
A recent lawsuit challenged the human-authorship requirement in the context of works purportedly “authored” by AI. In June 2022, Stephen Thaler sued the Copyright Office for denying his application to register a visual artwork that he claims was authored “autonomously” by an AI program called the Creativity Machine. Dr. Thaler argued that human authorship is not required by the Copyright Act. On August 18, 2023, a federal district court granted summary judgment in favor of the Copyright Office. The court held that “human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim,” reasoning that only human authors need copyright as an incentive to create works. Dr. Thaler has stated that he plans to appeal the decision.
Why would companies care about copyright of the output? The value is in the tool to create it. The whole issue to me revolves around the AI company profiting on it’s service. A service built on a massive library of copyrighted works. It seems clear to me, a large portion of their revenue should go equally to the owners of the works in their database.
You can still copyright AI works, you just can’t name an AI as the author.
That’s just saying you can claim copyright if you lie about authorship. The problem then is, you may step into the realm of fraud.
