As software, creative works, science, etc become more and more contributed via AI does that mean all future works will not be copyrighted or patented? Under our current copyright culture and laws obviously not but that does open the question to how much does a human have to contribute and what evidence is required to show that a human contributed enough so that it can be copyrighted and patented. Some time in the future (may be many years) science may become to complicated for humans to understand fully with AI systems researching themselves. Current patent laws in many places including US says inventions created entirely by artificial intelligence cannot be patented. This future may be coming. What will the new copyright and patent laws look like in the future? Do we need copyrights and patents anymore?
It means as long as you can find a few employees who testify that they made "creative input" during the process and nobody can disprove that, you're fine.
It's like things that are already in public domain. Even if you make a coloring book out of paintings in public domain, it doesn't necessarily mean others can just print your book as-is.
Perhaps but what about individual works done not via a company. Say you are a author and someone falsely detects a AI watermark in your book. Is the testimony you provide enough to override that falsely detected AI watermark? My feeling is that there will be an industry that arises that proves you contributed to the works you want copyrighted.
This is less relevant for logos & creative works, but things that enable companies to do production will go back to being closely guarded and sharded secrets, which is what the patent system was trying to resolve (though we can certainly argue the success of it).
If companies fail to protect their investments in generating IP, they will stop investing in generating it.
And unless IP generation costs (all in, including the humans telling them what to generate) fall close to zero, it will be bad for the world if companies cannot recoup investments in generating new IP.
We would expect this to hit those industries relying on IP protections the most, e.g. pharma.
You wrote your house's security code on a Post-It note. Somebody came in as a houseparty guest and saw the note, and discretely copied it onto their hand to get access to the house during your next vacation.
Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?
Whatever it is, slapping "steal" on it because what was done is wrong, and stealing is wrong, is the same sloppy logic that the copyright lobby used in the 80s/90s.
Take note of the qualifier entirely. If you're working with an agent steering it to produce the results you want, it would be an entirely different story.
Wheres the limit. Would a prompt "Create a system that does x" and no other feedback count? Or do need to do 10 prompts to steer your agent to the results you want. What about just 1 additional prompt. Somewhere there will be a line.
Legal systems are fuzzy. The limit will be what courtrooms decide. There will never be a ">75% of content" law, everything will be left to interpretation, laws are not source code.
If copyright does not protect AI-generated content, then AI should not be restricted from generating content that falls under copyright protection; yet, the reality is otherwise.
That’s not how that would work at all. The copyright of a derivative work has no effect on the existing copyright of an underlying work.
If you record yourself reading a book, you own the audio recording copyright but it would be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without a license for the underlying rights.
In this situation:
If the AI generates the audio recording of a book, no one owns the copyright of the audio recording but it would still be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without the underlying rights.
> If copyright does not protect AI-generated content, then AI should not be restricted from generating content that falls under copyright protection
What in the world makes you think that?
What is this implication based upon? Where does it say in copyright law that if no copyright arises for your work then it does not infringe the copyright holders' rights? This is completely devoid of logic...
If the AI is treated as an agent and not merely as a tool, then this should also apply on the training side.
AI agents are effectively consuming people's output without permission. For code, the MIT license only gives rights to "any person obtaining a copy of this software".
So the rights are given to a 'person', and the rights pertain specifically to a person who performed the act of 'obtaining a copy of this software'. Note it says 'obtaining a copy' and uses the word 'software', not 'code'.
Scraping the code in-situ from millions of repos automatically and systematically, with no intent to use the software, does not involve a 'person obtaining a copy.' The subject at hand is an 'AI agent scraping the code'; that's not the same subject and the MIT license says nothing about this case.
I feel like this question is typed wrong but the same reason someone wants copyright on human work to make money by prevent other people from stealing your work
>The creativity requirements may seem arbitrary but there’s a legal distinction between a sculpture and a standard brick.
Or more relevantly, a recipe find on recipe sites (with the author's entire backstory) vs a sequence of instructions. The latter is not copyrightable, even if there was some creativity that went into it (eg. word choice).
Interesting. In addition to Anthropic's watermark use to prevent model collapse, we can definitively call something copyrighted or not copyrighted. This is a boon to everyone who consumes culture.
That doesn't actually work. Say you took a book and used an AI to translate it into another language. The translation wouldn't have an additional copyright, the way it would if a human had done the work, but the output would still be restricted by the original copyright. So the presence of the watermark does not tell you that the text is public domain.
I thought translations can be copyrighted separately. Their are translators for instance who translate very old texts from other countries/languages and then sell that book/translation using copyright to protect this business models? Not sure but does this mean if you as a human wrote a book in English and then used AI to translate to another language say French then that translated work would not be copyrighted. Not sure how this would work.
Translation, in and of itself, is viewed as a creative work. A translated work has two copyrights: the original, and the translation, with permission needed from all rightsholders to redistribute. A new translation of a public domain work (Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey) has one copyright holder, the translator. An existing work (the English translation of The Three Body Problem) has at least two: the original author and the translator.
However! Since AI work is noncopyrightable, the AI’s effort in translation is simply ignored. Claude’s The Odyssey would have zero rightsholders, and remain public domain. ChatGPT’s translation of The Three Body Problem would still be under Liu Cixin’s copyright.
Lmao. No. Content that is wholesale generated by AI is also not subject to copyright in the US. It relies on the honor system and you can always modify the material juuuust enough that you can claim the copyright. In practical terms, this changes nothing.
Did anyone expect it to go the other way? Europe is more hardcore about copyright than the US, and that's saying something. Germany is practically...well I was going to say they're nazis about it but perhaps that's in poor taste.
It's not surprising, though, since the ECJ held in the Infopaq case that copyright (under the EU Directives) can only exist for something which is the intellectual creation of an author.
Thank god! A victory for everyone who believes in the freedom of information, regardless of what you think about AI.
Copyright didn't always exist, nor should it continue to. Hell; it must not.
I think the words (read: hilarious 1.25pp pamphlet) of Aaron Swartz on the topic are just too poignant to ignore, given the paths of Reddit (corrupted yet democratic), IP law (malignant yet showing cracks), and government survellience have taken in the Trump era. Despite the dated context... he really says it best:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
It's like things that are already in public domain. Even if you make a coloring book out of paintings in public domain, it doesn't necessarily mean others can just print your book as-is.
If companies fail to protect their investments in generating IP, they will stop investing in generating it.
And unless IP generation costs (all in, including the humans telling them what to generate) fall close to zero, it will be bad for the world if companies cannot recoup investments in generating new IP.
We would expect this to hit those industries relying on IP protections the most, e.g. pharma.
Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?
"spied"?
Whatever it is, slapping "steal" on it because what was done is wrong, and stealing is wrong, is the same sloppy logic that the copyright lobby used in the 80s/90s.
Take note of the qualifier entirely. If you're working with an agent steering it to produce the results you want, it would be an entirely different story.
2) If one applies a copyright message to AI generated output, is that fraudulent?
If you record yourself reading a book, you own the audio recording copyright but it would be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without a license for the underlying rights.
In this situation:
If the AI generates the audio recording of a book, no one owns the copyright of the audio recording but it would still be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without the underlying rights.
What in the world makes you think that?
What is this implication based upon? Where does it say in copyright law that if no copyright arises for your work then it does not infringe the copyright holders' rights? This is completely devoid of logic...
AI agents are effectively consuming people's output without permission. For code, the MIT license only gives rights to "any person obtaining a copy of this software".
So the rights are given to a 'person', and the rights pertain specifically to a person who performed the act of 'obtaining a copy of this software'. Note it says 'obtaining a copy' and uses the word 'software', not 'code'.
Scraping the code in-situ from millions of repos automatically and systematically, with no intent to use the software, does not involve a 'person obtaining a copy.' The subject at hand is an 'AI agent scraping the code'; that's not the same subject and the MIT license says nothing about this case.
The creativity requirements may seem arbitrary but there’s a legal distinction between a sculpture and a standard brick.
Or more relevantly, a recipe find on recipe sites (with the author's entire backstory) vs a sequence of instructions. The latter is not copyrightable, even if there was some creativity that went into it (eg. word choice).
However! Since AI work is noncopyrightable, the AI’s effort in translation is simply ignored. Claude’s The Odyssey would have zero rightsholders, and remain public domain. ChatGPT’s translation of The Three Body Problem would still be under Liu Cixin’s copyright.
Copyright didn't always exist, nor should it continue to. Hell; it must not.
I think the words (read: hilarious 1.25pp pamphlet) of Aaron Swartz on the topic are just too poignant to ignore, given the paths of Reddit (corrupted yet democratic), IP law (malignant yet showing cracks), and government survellience have taken in the Trump era. Despite the dated context... he really says it best:
https://ia800101.us.archive.org/1/items/GuerillaOpenAccessMa...