I’ve generally been against giving AI works copyright, but this article presented what I felt were compelling arguments for why I might be wrong. What do you think?
The moment that copyright is granted to AI art is the moment that the war against corporations loses. Getty images is just going to generate endless images, copyright them all, and sue any small artist that starts having an independent thought
All of the discussion over copyright of AI is a complete waste of time. Given only a bit of human editing AI art is indistinguishable from art made in entirety by a person. It will be nothing but a “feel good” law that does nothing to help the artists AI has displaced. We should be focusing directly on helping artists or others maintain their livelihood.
That’s a single line needed that clarifies that derivative works originally created by AI are not copyrightable, to make it explicit and distinct from the ability to claim copyright on non-transformative works made from public domain content. AI created works cannot be copyrighted (and that should include things like software) and derivative works should now be considered non-copyrightable as well. The onus should be shifted to the creator to prove that their work is transformative in order to claim copyright over the work.
That’s not how copyright works. It’s perfectly legal to create exactly the same image that someone else made… as long as you didn’t copy their image.
True, but that assumes that the people filing copyright lawsuits know the law and are acting in good faith. And that the recipient does, too.
If I’m an artist living paycheck-to-paycheck and I get a copyright-related cease-and-desist, I probably won’t have the money or time to fight it even if I know that it’s wrong.
Yeah. In a world where lawyers cost money, corporations can and will squash small artists without hesitation, with cease and desists, DMCA takedowns via youtube and similar platforms, and by threatening lawsuits they won’t even have to persue because most people can’t afford to fight it.
Even companies often can’t afford to fight bigger companies. Like, the makers of Kimba the White Lion had a very clear case that Disney plagiarized them in making The Lion King (if you go on youtube you can find shot-for-shot scene comparisons, it’s bonkers) but couldn’t afford to fight it at all. And that was a company - individual artists have no chance vs disney & etc.
“Intellectual property” is a silly concept that only exists because under capitalism massive powerful corporations benefit if they can leverage the legal system to permeantly keep knowledge, innovation, and art behind a paywall, and people in society are dependent on monetary gain to survive.
We should, to the fullest extent of the law, make it such that proper credit is given to people who make things, but calling something “theft” when the person you’re “stealing” from literally does not lose anything is asinine.
It’s not actually called “theft” or “stealing”, it’s called “infringement” or “violation”. Infringement is to intellectual property as trespassing is to real estate. The owners are still able to use their property, but their rights to it have nevertheless been violated.
Also, corporations cannot create intellectual property. They can only offer to buy it from the natural persons who created it. Without IP protection, creators would lose the only protections they have against corporations and other entrenched interests.
Imagine seeing all your family photos plastered on a McDonald’s billboard, or in political ad for a candidate you despise. Imagine being told, “Sorry, you can’t stop them from using your photos however they want”. That’s a world without IP protection.
right, but how often does that actually work out in people’s favor, and how often does that benefit corporate interests with massive influence? how many musicians don’t have the right to their own work because record companies dominate the music industry? how many artists working for large corporations are denied residuals because a condition of their work is that everything they produce is owned by their employer? writers? animators?
that’s not even considering the ways in which corporations patent technologies that are the result of publicly funded research efforts. a great deal of pharmaceuticals would not be possible without massive public research grants, but the companies privatize the results of that research using the framework of intellectual property.
in theory, you’re right, it does protect you against corporations using your shit without permission, but in practice it just stops you from using your shit without their permission. there are far better ways of ensuring corporations cannot exploit you than to make your creativity and invention a commodity to be bought and sold.
how many musicians don’t have the right to their own work because record companies dominate the music industry?
But not having copyright law doesn’t fix that, it makes it worse. Without copyright law if you make music, a big label can grab your music and sell copies without paying you anything. Sure you can try to sell it yourself and try to educate customers that they should buy it from you. But the big label can easily out-advertise you and get into the top spots on streaming services, online and physical stores etc. and get 99% of the sales.
Same for artists, writers, programmers, photographers, or anyone else whose work is protected by copyright.
I fully agree things are not great right now, but that’s not copyright laws fault. I think you need other laws and regulations to fix things, like small creators should be able to sue large companies with minimal cost if they infringeme on their copyright. And there should be some sort of provisions so companies can’t trap people in horrible contracts. I’d also love to see fair use exceptions broadened in cases where the copyrighted material is just not available anymore, like old games or movies that are not sold anymore. Shorten the length of copyright too. But getting rid of it completely would not work.
If a musician doesn’t have the right to their own work, it’s because someone offered to pay them for the rights and they accepted.
Is that in their favor? I think so, considering the alternative is to not get paid and not have rights to their work.
And not to go too far off topic, but publicly funded research is generally not aimed at drug development, it is aimed at discovering the basic science behind how the body works (human body or otherwise).
If you want a clinical trial that proves a particular drug can actually help patients, you will need to find a company to pay for it. The government almost never pays for clinical trials (I think the COVID vaccine might have been an exception). Clinical trials are far more expensive than basic science, and patents are the carrot to get the private sector to pay for them.
Serious question, when is intellectual property being pirated/stolen (pirating a movie for example), not cause the studio to lose something? You can say that person would’ve not watched it in the first place, but there’s really no evidence suggesting that to be true, and plenty to the contrary. Things that want to be open for knowledge, like open source software or Wikipedia, are consenting to be open, which is in their license. It’s not stealing from them because of their license, so why is it also not stealing when there is a license preventing them from doing so? I’m referring to a digital context btw, where pirating is glorified copy&paste over the internet and nothing is technically physically stolen.
I’m not sure of any evidence suggesting that piracy impacts the bottom line in a meaningful way. The piracy problem is primarily one of competition and innovation–people pay for things they find valuable and convenient, and if the barrier to payment is too high, they won’t pay it.
Highly pirated movies tend to be the most successful, most profitable ones. I don’t know of any high profile, highly regarded pieces of media that didn’t earn their investment back purely because everyone pirated it instead of paying for it.
Some links you might find interesting: https://copia.is/library/the-carrot-or-the-stick/
That last one is an especially interesting case study, albeit a perhaps accidental one.
The key here is that as a business your objective isn’t to capture every last dollar that you potentially could have if every single use of your IP was completely in your control–you want to make enough people want to pay you so that you can be profitable. Pirates are often just providing free marketing to someone that may or may not have ever heard of your product.
I share your sentiment, but I also defend the idea that we shouldn’t let the biggest tech monopolies get away with making bank from other people’s work and creations without their consent first. It’s a bit like licenses in the open source world: it’s not because I put code up there that I mean it to be used for closed source/commercial applications without compensation/consent (GPL), or I mean that, actually (MIT). Similarly, there are CC licenses (and alternatives) to navigate the field of creative works, and we should put Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others back at their place for completely shitting on that. And if the copyright law isn’t the right tool for the job, then let’s find it!
The argument relies a lot on an analogy to photographers, which misunderstands the nature of photography. A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.
A better analogy would be giving your camera to a passerby and asking them to take your photo, with prompts about what you want in the background, lighting, etc. No matter how detailed your instructions, you won’t have a copyright on the photo.
This AI ruling is also actually completely in-line with existing precedent from the photography world.
The US Copyright Office has previously ruled that a photograph taken by a non-human (in this case, a monkey) is not copyrightable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
If he had deliberately caused the monkey to take that photo, he might have owned the copyright.
If you pay a photographer to take photos at your wedding, you own the copyright for those photos - not the photographer.
A better analogy would be giving your camera to a passerby and asking them to take your photo, with prompts about what you want in the background, lighting, etc. No matter how detailed your instructions, you won’t have a copyright on the photo.
I like this analogy a lot.
“Prompts” are actually used a lot in creative circles, whether for art or writing. But no matter how specific you are when you write a prompt for, say, r/WritingPrompts (and some of them are incredibly specific due to posters literally having an idea and hoping someone else will write it for them), the resulting story will never be copyrighted to you.
A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.
I understand what you’re trying to say, but I think this will grow increasingly unclear as machines/software continue to play a larger and larger part of the creative process.
I think you can argue that photographers issue commands to their camera and then evaluate the output. Modern digital cameras have made photography almost a statistical exercise rather than a careful creative process. Photographers take hundreds and hundreds of shots and then evaluate which one was best.
Also, AI isn’t some binary on/off. Most major software will begin incorporating AI assistant tools that will further muddy the waters. Is something AI generated if the artist added an extra inch of canvas to a photograph using photoshops new generative fill function so that the subject was better centered in the frame?
The copyright office has been pretty clear that if an artist is significantly involved in creating an image but then adjusts it with AI, or vice versa, then the work is still eligible for copyright.
In all of the cases where copyright was denied, the artist made no significant changes to AI output and/or provided the AI with nothing more than a prompt.
Photographers give commands to their camera just as a traditional artist gives commands in Photoshop. The results in both cases are completely predictable. This is where they diverge from AI-generated art.
I think the major difference that determines copywrightability is the amount of control the artist has on the outcome. If a photographer doesn’t like the composition of a photo, there’s a variety of things they can do to directly impact the photo (camera positioning/settings, moving the subjects, changing lighting, etc.), before it’s even captured by the camera. If someone is generating a picture with AI and they don’t like the composition of the image, there’s nothing they can do directly impact what the output will be.
If you want a picture of an apple, where the apple is placed precisely at a certain spot in frame, a photographer can easily accomplish this, but someone using AI will have to generate the image over and over, hoping that the algorithm decides to eventually place the apple exactly in the desired spot
This isn’t true with AI generators. You can absolutely draw in a shitty stick figure with the pose you want and it’ll transform that into a proper artwork with the person in that pose. There are tons and tons of ways to manipulate the the output.
And again, we give copyright to artists that incorporate randomness into their art. If I throw darts at paint filled balloons I get to copyright the output. It would be absolutely impossible to replicate that piece and I only have vague control over the results.
No matter how detailed your instructions, you won’t have a copyright on the photo.
If you reach a certain threshold you’d be co-creator. AIs can’t hold copyright, so in the analogous case you’d be sole copyright holder.
Take the movie industry and try to argue, as a camera operator, that the director has no rights at all to the video you shoot. I’m waiting.
In the movie industry, everyone usually signs a work for hire contract that specifies who will have the rights to the completed film.
However, in a recent case the director (Alex Merkin) did not sign a contract and then tried to claim copyright afterwards. The court said that directors have no inherent copyright over film:
We answer that question in the negative on the facts of the present case, finding that the Copyright Actʹs terms, structure, and history support the conclusion that Merkinʹs contributions to the film do not themselves constitute a ʺwork of authorshipʺ amenable to copyright protection. … As a general rule, the author is the party who actually creates the work, that is, the person who translates an idea into a fixed, tangible expression entitled to copyright protection. … But a directorʹs contribution to an integrated ʺwork of authorshipʺ such as a film is not itself a ʺwork of authorshipʺ subject to its own copyright protection.
As a general rule, the author is the party who actually creates the work, that is, the person who translates an idea into a fixed, tangible expression entitled to copyright protection
Yes that’s a thing directors do. They do the translation between script and image, anything cinematography in a movie is due to them.
Taking the judges’ reasoning to an extreme you’d expect them to rule that if I dictate a book to someone who then writes it down I do not own copyright because I did not give the work its tangible expression.
Whose lawyers was he up against? Disney?
There’s gaussian noise involved in many of photoshop’s brushes I’m pretty sure.
Does that make photoshop not a pure function of the user’s input, and hence incapable of producing anything copyrightable?
You need direct control over some elements of a work to claim copyright. Not necessarily all of them.
So even if the microtexture is out of your control, you still have complete control of the framing, color, etc. That’s sufficient to claim copyright.
If you lose control of every element by replacing them all with prompts and/or chance, then you lose the copyright. Which is what happened in the “monkey selfie” photo.
No, the arguments presented in the article are not compelling.
A bit like how Euthanasia is foundationaly fine but it’s allowance under capitalism leads to the poor being pressured to die, while capitalism oppresses us fucking over A.I. art’s ability to be copyrighted is good.
If it were allowed to be copyrit corporations would fuck over creatives more than they currently do and use it to union bust.
Of course in a post-capitalist world copyright won’t matter.
Therefore this shit should never get copyright protection.
There is literally no instance in which expanding the scope of copyright law is a good thing. Never.
