The whole âoeitâ(TM)s super dangerousâ thing served two purposes. First, it hyped the product. It must be earth shattering if itâ(TM)s super dangerous. Second, it was a naked play for government regulation to protect them from competition.
The irony of course is that they played up Skynet, the real societal danger was never going be stopped through regulation. The danger I speak of is that of generated content being taken as truth, whether itâ(TM)s propaganda or just lazy danger like putting glue on pizzas or misidentifying mushrooms.
But of course theyâ(TM)re not concerned with that. That makes money, and anyway, it will get better⦠eventually.
Itâ(TM)s âoequid pro quoâ not âoequid pre quoâ.
If you get the money after the act, then itâ(TM)s not a bribe, but merely a thank you gift!
If Software is subject to the same copyright law, then does this mean that AI-generated software is also not subject to copyright?
Copyright absolutely applies to software, and this ruling doesn’t change that. If a human authors software, it remains protected under existing copyright law (17 U.S.C. 101). The real question is whether AI-generated code qualifies for copyright at all. If a model spits out code entirely on its own, then based on this ruling, it probably wouldn’t be copyrightable. But that’s not how most AI-assisted development works. Tools like GitHub Copilot still rely on human developers to modify, structure, and refine the output. That might be enough for copyright protection to apply—courts just haven’t ruled on it yet.
Yeah, that's the position of the copyright office.:
If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it.[26] For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt[27] from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output... As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.
In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.”[33] Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection.[34] In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself.[35]
The guidance goes on to instruct applicants for copyright registration to "disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and to provide a brief explanation of the human author's contributions to the work" and "AI-generated content that is more than de minimis should be explicitly excluded from the application."
... Dr. Thaler argues that the Copyright Act’s workmade-for-hire provision allows him to be “considered the author” of the work at issue because the Creativity Machine is his employee. Thaler Opening Br. 52-56; 17 U.S.C. 201(b). That argument misunderstands the human authorship requirement. The Copyright Act only protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. 102(a). The authorship requirement applies to all copyrightable work, including work made-for-hire. The word “authorship,” like the word “author,” refers to a human being. As a result, the human-authorship requirement necessitates that all “original works of authorship” be created in the first instance by a human being, including those who make work for hire.
Specifically, the employer (including corporate entity) of a employee who creates a work for hire is the legal owner of the copyright, but they are not the author. The employee is the author, and ownership passes to the employer by law.
So does this mean that pressing play on my keyboard will now launch Spotify instead of Apple Music, or what?
But it's like doing your own appendectomy. Legally, you can do that, too. But it's a terrible idea, and you are likely to make mistakes that are permanent and unfixable.
Fair use is for everyone.
This really isnâ(TM)t that hard. Fair use is not â" nor was it ever intended to be â" a backdoor âoepay what you can affordâ.
Undoubtedly there are many in the antigenai and antioligarch crowd are going to be cheering this ruling, but I canâ(TM)t help but think this is going to absolutely gut fair use and just make rent seeking by megacorps become even more pervasive.
Information wants to be free, and we scraping is not a crime.
I can't wait until someone does a study on how many people die because they got into an accident either because they were distracted by the seat belt chime, or was trying to put the seat belt on while driving to stop the chime.
I'll bet it kills more than 50 people a year.
I'm not sure if you've ever been in a car or not, but the seat belt chimes when you first turn the car on, not randomly while you're driving down the highway.
Years ago, my parents that live in rural Illinois had Verizon landline service. Verizon wanted to get out of the rural landline business and sold it to Frontier. Frontier at the time boasted about their rural service. Now Verizon has bought Frontier.
This doesnâ(TM)t exactly bode well for rural landlines.
I. have a coffee mug with an image in the style of Salvador Dali. The picture is convincing and you have to take a second look to realize it is not one of Dali's works. A person, not AI, made the image. Is this a violation of copyright?
No, because the image wasn't copied, but this isn't about copyright either. This is about trademark rights. If someone sold the mug saying "here's a mug with a picture by Salvador Dali", that would arguably infringe his estate's trademark rights on his name (as well as being fraudulent).
This isn't trademark infringement though, because they're not saying "here's an Ansel Adams picture," but rather "here's an Ansel Adams-style picture". That falls under nominative fair use, and the fact that it was made by AI is no different than if it were made by an art grad school student: people are allowed to duplicate famous artists' styles, as long as they're not trying to pass their version off as being actually made by that person. You can make your own Picasso-style paintings, you just can't sell them as "lost" Picassos.
"Well, it don't make the sun shine, but at least it don't deepen the shit." -- Straiter Empy, in _Riddley_Walker_ by Russell Hoban