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Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain (doctorow.medium.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

139 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The US Copyright Office offers creative workers a powerful labor protective.

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This ruling seems to be really badly misinterpreted. The case wasn't for people using ai tools to create works but from a computer scientist who created a completely autonomous tool and was trying to co-copyright the works with the tool. Copyright needs human involvement, how much human involvement is still not hard law, but if you integrate the output of an AI and integrate it into a larger work that is very much covered.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It took me a couple of clicks to discover that, as I suspected, this article is about the Stephen Thaler case. Thaler was trying to argue that the AI itself should hold the copyright for the images it generates.

This is both a ludicrous argument and irrelevant to the overall issue of whether AI-generated art is copyrightable. AIs are not legal persons, and only legal persons can hold copyright over someting. The result of this lawsuit is straightforward and expected.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Just as corporations weren't legal persons until about 13 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

it's in the name though

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thaler was trying to argue that the AI itself should hold the copyright for the images it generates.

Was he going that far? As far as I understand it, he was trying to claim that the AI was the author of the work and that he should hold the copyright under the work for hire clauses/being the owner of the AI.

Plaintiff Stephen Thaler owns a computer system he calls the “Creativity Machine,” which he claims generated a piece of visual art of its own accord. He sought to register the work for a copyright, listing the computer system as the author and explaining that the copyright should transfer to him as the owner of the machine.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Thaler_v._Perlmutter,_Memorandum_Opinion_(Dkt._24)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Calling the machine the "author" is what I was describing in different words. He's saying "I didn't make this, the machine made this." The court's saying "well, the machine can't hold copyright, so if you're saying you didn't make this then there's no one who holds copyright. With no one holding copyright, that makes it public domain."