• Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law,
without the need for legislative change.
• The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect
the availability of copyright protection for the output.
• Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author,
even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there
is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute
authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not
alone provide sufficient control.
• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are
perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination,
or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI-
generated content.
I am sure there will be many more legal battles and probably legislation about this to come.
Of course it is vague, these things always are for both good reasons (it avoids objective limits creating silly situations between what is protected and what can be had through an obvious loophole) and bad (written by lawyers to keep lawyers in business interpreting and arguing about it).
It is fairly explicit in saying that what AI makes for your is not copyrightable, the vague comes from how much work you need to do to make it your output and not the AIs. Too many people seem to equate "asking for something to be made" with "I made this!", as difficult as it will be to make a prescriptive rule about that which pleases enough people (you'll never please everyone) it would appear to be necessary unless we just accept the free-for-all "no one owns anything because it can just be copied, and the copies copied too" option.
I’ve encountered (many times) people talking about the copyright office as if they don’t support copyright of things touched by AI and I’m constantly correcting them that their guidance is driven by human expression (and not the tools used). It seems like a lot of people don’t want to accept that a reasonable premise is set because it doesn’t fit their agenda or outrage engagement.
This is why I keep a comprehensive and exhaustive record of infrastructural, architectural, business logic and code-level decisions in the form of tasks/issues for everything I build. It’s literally a real-time record of my personal involvement in the design of the system.
One precedent is that it's not unusual for artists to practice by going to art galleries and sketching or drawing the art on display. It's a standard art student assignment. If that's not a copyright violation, an LLM doing something similar isn't.
"Transformative nature" is just one of several factors that go into deciding if something is fair use. Also, fair use is decided case by case in the courts, so one can't say that "training LLMs on copyrighted materials is fair use".
Model vendors know this isn't fair use, given that they're self-censoring the training and/or generation of copyrighted materials by entities big enough to hurt them. As usual, the rest of us have no recourse other than bend over and take it.
So copyright only applies if there's sufficient human control, and prompts alone do not demonstrate sufficient control. Exactly what counts as "sufficient human control" must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
That means I can't know if my AI generated code can be copyrighted unless someone takes it to court?
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
An excerpt, with emphasis mine:
• Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change.
• The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output.
• Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control.
• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI- generated content.
I am sure there will be many more legal battles and probably legislation about this to come.
Why did Andy Warhol hold the copyright on his painting of a Campbell’s soup can?
Reasonable people have been disagreeing about where human expression begins and ends for centuries.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
It is fairly explicit in saying that what AI makes for your is not copyrightable, the vague comes from how much work you need to do to make it your output and not the AIs. Too many people seem to equate "asking for something to be made" with "I made this!", as difficult as it will be to make a prescriptive rule about that which pleases enough people (you'll never please everyone) it would appear to be necessary unless we just accept the free-for-all "no one owns anything because it can just be copied, and the copies copied too" option.
I’ve encountered (many times) people talking about the copyright office as if they don’t support copyright of things touched by AI and I’m constantly correcting them that their guidance is driven by human expression (and not the tools used). It seems like a lot of people don’t want to accept that a reasonable premise is set because it doesn’t fit their agenda or outrage engagement.
"Translate my very detailed pseudocode into Ruby: <pages of pseudocode>": probably.
"Write me a game about a horse. Don't stop until it's finished. Make no mistakes.": probably not.
And unfortunately for us engineers, there's a very big, fuzzy, not-precisely-definable range in between of "I'll know it when I see it".
OP would much prefer their fantasy of tearing the world down with “one weird trick” that only they were brilliant enough to notice.
So slop doesn’t qualify for copyright. I’m not sure why you didn’t emphasize this one.
Does creatively hitting RETURN count? Asking for a friend.
One precedent is that it's not unusual for artists to practice by going to art galleries and sketching or drawing the art on display. It's a standard art student assignment. If that's not a copyright violation, an LLM doing something similar isn't.
Why? An LLM isn’t a human. Why should the same rules apply to it?
Model vendors know this isn't fair use, given that they're self-censoring the training and/or generation of copyrighted materials by entities big enough to hurt them. As usual, the rest of us have no recourse other than bend over and take it.
That means I can't know if my AI generated code can be copyrighted unless someone takes it to court?