But the pure output of a generative model cannot be copyrighted, regardless of how complex the prompt is (note that the prompt itself could be copyrighted).
What's the threshold? Can the person just slap an LUT on an SDXL image in Photoshop and call it a day?
If that’s how the court interpreted it, then the software industry is hosed, since that’d mean none of the generated code running in production right now is under any sort of copyright or otherwise protection, lol.
If a deterministic machine transformation from a copyrightable prompt results in an uncopyrightable image, what do you think a compiler is doing to source code?
a compiler on the other hand is generally pretty deterministic. The non determinism that we see in output is usually non determinism (such as generated dates) in the code that it consumes.
I'm not saying AI art should or shouldn't be copyrightable. One can argue the inputs into the AI generator are copyrightable, but if the output isn't deterministic translation of the input, its a different argument.
"The courts just take issue with him naming his AI system as the sole author and himself as the copyright owner."
you can't claim a non human as the "author" and claim the material is copyrightable.
the "author" (not the AI) was trying to make a legal point/hack and the courts shot him down.
Review and testing do not confer a copyright the work reviewed or tested
If you have a substantial amount of backend code (as with most SaaS projects) you're never actually distributing the code, and copyright is never at play. Computer generated artifacts are already in this boat and are protected by virtue of being trade secrets not by copyright.
This could maybe be true of shipping javascript to the browser, which presumably is not going to qualify as a trande secret, but I don't think that's where most companies derive value.
Do you mean that a work has to be published prior to registration? What do you mean by "copyright applies to distribution"?
Access to the service is already governed by computer access laws, which don't depend on copyright. And if you never intentionally distributed your code outside of your org, you can call it a trade secret and nobody else has any legitimate right to access it - whether or not it is copyrightable.
There are other things that aren't copyrightable that are trade secrets already. This would be true of any kind of automated data collection for example. You couldn't copyright it but you can call it a trade secret.
And for any of that stuff, if you want to share it and limit distribution, you just have whoever wants access explicitly agree to be bound by contract law.
The point isn't that you have to give it to people, but okay?
>Access to the service is already governed by computer access laws, which don't depend on copyright
Yeah, copyright doesn't control everything, and?
>There are other things that aren't copyrightable that are trade secrets already. This would be true of any kind of automated data collection for example. You couldn't copyright it but you can call it a trade secret.
Okay?
>And for any of that stuff, if you want to share it and limit distribution, you just have whoever wants access explicitly agree to be bound by contract law.
Your point being? You're just rambling assumptions about copyright and other things, which don't even track the actual law.
I'm replying to the post that claimed:
> If that’s how the court interpreted it, then the software industry is hosed, since that’d mean none of the generated code running in production right now is under any sort of copyright or otherwise protection, lol.
There is in fact "otherwise protection" for the software industry by... not distributing the code. They don't need copyright over the generated code if they vibe code a SaaS backend. Whether there's copyright or not is irrelevant for the business model.
>There is in fact "otherwise protection" for the software industry by... not distributing the code.
Copyright protects against reverse engineering in some circumstances, for example.
>Whether there's copyright or not is irrelevant for the business model.
Yeah, I'm going to continue to disagree with you as I'm actually a litigator.
OK, can you explain to me why this is a disaster for a vibe-coded SaaS? Why are computer access and/or contract laws insufficient and why would a vibe-coded backend be a huge risk?
I really don't understand where copyright on the code itself is necessary to protect these business models, and hopefully you can help fill the gaps.
>I really don't understand where copyright on the code itself is necessary to protect these business models, and hopefully you can help fill the gaps.
Well, did you ever try to understand? It's so exhausting coming to these threads when people are just making assumptions about how the law works without any regards to what actually happens, and then suggesting policy changes in response.
Here's a scenario - disgruntled ex-employee leaks the code. Now it's free for anyone to use because there is nothing you can do to stop anyone from using it because you have no rights in the code since the trade secret is broken. You can sue the employee. They are probably judgment proof, wont have a lot of money anyway, and will still not stop a competitor from spinning up the same exact thing.
Trade secret was your suggestion by the way... So do, you actually know how trade secrets work, or you just making things up??
I'm a layman - I read up on the tools that existed and obviously got it wrong, so I really appreciate you filling the gaps.
---
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
---
OTOH, distributing copies created in violation of copyright is a good way to cause legally-cognizable harms to the copyright holder that will increase the potential damage award when you are found liable for copyright infringement, and it also makes it much more likely that someone will notice the infringement in the first place. But its not where the law, on its own terms, begins to apply. Doing any of those without permission (unless it falls into one of the exceptions to copyright protection, like fair use) is a violation of copyright.
Correct, the jurisprudence there hasn't changed.
Let’s say I use an AI prompt to generate an image with 24-bit color, and then I manually change the RGB value of a single pixel from (255,255,255) to (254,255,255).
Does that constitute a modification and would then allow the image to be copyrighted? If not, where is the line?
So the true Renaissance artists are the Medicis and the RC church?
> how much creativity and effort
So art is art prompting, or is it creativity and effort? If some toddler spends two hours on a drawing, it's a masterpiece?
> AI can be used as another kind of brush.
A simile does not a truth make.
Actual creators understand what creativity is and what creation is - not all creation even is creative, as its really more of a process, than it is a singular output, and there are monotonous, time consuming, meticulously frustrating parts of the process of creation.
If you want to limit yourself to creation without the quality of life enhancements, that exist in this time and space - you do you.
Don't proselytize tho - you are not doing what you think you are.
A work doesn't have to be a masterpiece to obtain a copyright so what difference does it make? The point of copyright isn't to subjectively critique art.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
You have an extremely low bar for calling something a masterpiece.
A prompt can be clever, insightful, unique, and even uniquely productive.
But it is nowhere near the level of decades-deep skill and creative inspiration required to create art anything worthy of the label "masterpiece".
>>AI can be used as another kind of brush
Perhaps that is a valid analogy, but we do not give copyrights to brushes, no matter how much cost or effort was required to make the brush. The brush is not the only tool required to make the art. To continue the analogy, the artist must also select and mount the canvas, mix and color each shade of paint, build up the base layers, and on and on and on...
It doesn't matter if your "brush" is a five hundred billion dollar machine and you spend six months whispering to it to find just the right incantation to generate your file of pixels — SCOTUS is right, you have not make art to which you can claim a copyright.
And the starving student artist in their garage mixing their paints and using the dollar-store brush did make art worthy of a copyright claim.
What a joke. No, AI is not a brush, it is a slop machine that spits out derivatives of the actual masters. If you go back and forth with a human artist about a commission where you keep nitpicking and wanting adjustments, does that make you the artist? No, it makes you the “ideas guy”
Meanwhile, random person, gets the exact same AI that you used to create literal DaVinci'esque, visibly masterpiece inspired - maybe not "masterpiece" but "masterpiece adjacent" - thats apparently, its not perfect art, but it could have been created in a workshop...
You can't do that. Rather, you cant nake the AI do that.
What is the difference between you and the random person with artworks in the style of the old masters? What do we call that gap?
Isn't that gap normally stuff like talent, ability, skill, knowledge?
All arguments made in this vein are just people whining about their personal lack of ability, as if its a machines fault.
If you outsource the image creation, then throw it on a t-shirt design, or modify it, or do whatever, you can copyright the modified work that you Han a hand in creating, but you still are not the creator of the original.
From who's perspective? Fundamentally, in one situation a human is creating something and in the other situation, no human creates anything.
You generally cannot copyright derivative works as if they are your own, fyi.
A brief history of art in general.
All the most famous paintings are done like a hundred times - certain scenes were done by ALL Masters, as like a rite of passage or proof of arrival - pretty much the whole time between the OG Masters and modern art.
"Who is your favorite Sebastian?" Is a legit question, for example.
I have an allegiance to humans. I have no allegiance to a computer program. That would be pathetic.
The difference between the "real" video and the "influencer" video is the artistry from the artist(s) involved. (And yes, top influencers often have a person or a team of people involved)
In short, your inability to understand photography doesn't justify the use of AI slop to prompt "give me a grayscale image of a mountain" and assume that it's the same thing as a human being taking an actual photo. They're not even close to the same thing.
They did not write an emotional comment, they were trying to teach you, bc they ascertained that you don't understand art.
They were right.
That is not the prompt I included in my post. The prompt I gave was for taking an the same photo you would be putting into photoshop and using AI to apply grayscale.
Sorry, but... cringe. If we are calling prompts "masterpieces" now - letting alone the image generated by it - maybe we don't deserve art at all.
Absolute nonsense. A work of art is made of semantic stratification, experience, thought process. A prompt lacks all that. AI art can be a tool, but this sentence is a good reminder that on average it’s worth shit all.
LLMs were created in our image. Hallucination, confabulation, sycophancy, psychopathy, learning, reasoning, and blackmail are all behaviours in LLMs that were first found in humans. All these behaviors are present in human writing and imagery captured in a training set. So to me, there's no surprise that LLMs exhibit these behaviors.
Do I think LLMs are sentient or sapient? I'm in the probably not camp. We don't have a good test for either, but they do illustrate the resistance to acknowledging any other being or creation as having the same capabilities as Homo sapiens.
Then copywrite the prompt, that's always been allowed. Should be just as good if that's the true masterpiece.
Or, as I think we all know, it's not. It's merely a commission, the product is the output. Not the prompt.
I think that this means that a single prompt alone does not convey copyright. But if you had spent many hours before the prompt fine tuning the model, or much effort after the prompt shaping the result with further prompts, it could be.
I disagree with this approach because I've seen how much creativity and effort some people can put into slowly evolving a single elaborate prompt. AI can be used as another kind of brush. A prompt can be a masterpiece.