“Human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.”

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.

  • Hildegarde@lemmy.worldEnglish
    171·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • nous@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.