AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US Federal Judge::United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell found that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, putting to rest a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office over its refusal to copyright an AI-generated image.
Autonomously AI generated art cannot be copyrighted.
Just thinking out loud: how would this impact AI-generated videos, or stuff like AI-generated actors and AI-written scripts? Does this suggest that stuff made by AI would, by default, belong to the public domain? If true, that could do quite a bit in forcing the movie studios to get off their asses and bring them back to the negotiating table with the actors and writers.
The ruling says the AI itself can’t hold a copyright, but humans using them can still be copyright holders of any qualifying works.
So we’ll hear this case been wrongly cited forever. AI art is often human guided and sometimes involve editing and adjusting. Rarely ever I get something good the first prompt. But I bet people will say lol no copyright.
Eh I think it would have been worse if this guy won. To my knowledge he was trying to get the AI to be considered the author and then himself to be the owner of the copyright via the “work for hire” clause. As I understand it that would have been catastrophic. It would have likely meant that anything users prompt from these generators would automatically be the copyright of the people running the AI.
The process you describe could likely still be protected under this ruling since there’s human involvement in the selection of output to use and the altering of it afterward to fit whatever creative vision the person had. If this had won a person doing that it seems would at best be making a derivative work and still not be able to protect it.
Please correct me if I am misunderstanding something here, then: Doesn’t the ruling here state that the human using the AI tried to apply for a copyright listing himself as the copyright holder and the AI as the author that worked on a commission for him, which is what was denied? Or are you saying that the reason it was denied is because he listed the AI as the author?
Here’s the relevant part from a different article:
Thaler, who listed himself as the owner of the copyright under the work-for-hire doctrine, sued in a lawsuit contesting the denial and the office’s human authorship requirement. He argued that AI should be acknowledged “as an author where it otherwise meets authorship criteria,” with any ownership vesting in the machine’s owner. His complaint argued that the office’s refusal was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with the law” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which provides for judicial review of agency actions. The question presented in the suit was whether a work generated solely by a computer falls under the protection of copyright law.
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.
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.
I am not convinced by that. I don’t think any lines have been drawn on how much creativity you put into a prompt for the resultant image to be considered copyrightable. This case is about someone trying to get the AI to claim copyright, and have that transferred to him as the owner of the AI. Which is like the cases where someone tried and failed to claim copyright over an image of a monkey that the monkey took because it was taken on his camera. He had no creative input into the shot so the image was not copyrightable.
You could condisider the AI like a camera - you have control over its input, what you point it at, the lighting levels, even creating the scene you point it at. All of which are creative elements. You did not actually create the image - light hitting a film did that. You just set it up to capture the picture you wanted.
So I could see the prompt being similar to setting up a shot for a camera and the AI being like a camera. With enough creative work being put into setting up a good prompt I can see a valid claim for copyright being made - though I am not aware of anyone testing this out i court yet.
Copyright laws have a standards for minimal creativity needed to create a copyrightable work. You don’t have to be very creative to qualify, but you need a minimal amount. There’s no good reason to think the US copyright office will not apply these same standards to AI art prompts.
The US copyright office specifically lists “listings of ingredients or contents” as not sufficiently creative to qualify for copyright protection. This is why there is no legal recourse within copyright to prevent someone from copying the ingredients and quantities of your cooking recipe. If the prompt you give your AI is more than a list, you will not have a copyrightable work. For example, if you open up an AI image generator and type: “paved road on a cliff-face overlooking a pine forest,” the resultant output would likely be ineligible for copyright because the prompt was little more than a list of the image’s contents.
If your use of AI is creative enough to reach the level of “minimally creative” in the eyes of the US copyright office, the work is copyrightable.
When taking a photograph, you chose the settings, you chose the framing, you chose the equipment. That is enough to be eligible for copyright, unless the shot was taken by a macaque or a grizzly bear.
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.
IMO more importantly that copyright of the work does not go to the owner of the AI systems that created it. Which strengthens the copyright claims for anyone that came up with a creative enough prompt that was used to generate the image. And drastically weakens it for those running the servers or training the AI.
My god…is this an island of reasonable thought in a sea of insanity? Good precedent to set, otherwise every moron would copyright every image they made
I hope all AI generated everything can’t be protected.
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.
So, no change then. This is as it has always been. You can take AI elements chop them up, recombine them, and have copyright over the result, but you can’t say “Show me a picture of waffles” in your prompt and expect the resulting waffles to be copyrightable.
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.
