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Comment by thn-gap | Hacker News Reader

Do authors own the copyright of their generated images? I can't see any mention in the FAQ.

I believe the current understanding of GAN copyright is that the "minimum degree of creativity" happens when a human chooses the inputs/outputs and copyright is assigned to the human at that point. Drawing the input image for GauGAN probably suffices.

Fully automated outputs (like pulling an image at random from thispersondoesnotexist.com) would be public domain since non-humans cannot hold copyrights and no creativity was applied.

This is analogous to the "creativity" of a photo being the settings and framing done by the person who set up the shot and is why the famous "monkey selfie" fell under public domain[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

See my comment below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27635481

I think Monkey selfie copyright issue was subtly different.

Related: Do authors of a digital camera own the copyright for their (preprocessed) images?

Why wouldn't they? It's just a tool. When I write something by pen, do I get the copyright or does the company that made the pen? Me, obviously.

But what if the pen draws by itself? You just say "draw a dog", and it does.

I do think you should always be the copyright owner, unless it's clearly stated in their terms that any image created using their tool is owned by nVidia.

But it's still just a tool that functions to your input. An IDE which insert a lot of boilerplate and autocompletions, does it get the copyright to your codebase? Nope.

Interestingly, if I employ an artist to produce a work (e.g. software code), usually the employment contract would say the copyright belongs to me and not that artist.

"Hey pen, sign this contract."...

I'd just like to point out that this line of inquiry is not some unanswered philosophical question. All of capitalism is focused on this question of ownership. Who owns the picture? The answer is always whoever the parties involved agreed would own it. Both options can exist and they'll have different prices.

This same question often comes up with self-driving cars and "fault", and it seems to regress into the same trap. Ownership of _risk_ is one of the primary concerns of capitalism. The question is not, "who should be at fault?", it is instead "what is the cost of this risk?" and then we buy and sell that risk like everything else (which is also how we determine that cost). If the self-driving advocates are right and self-driving is safer, then the risk will likely cost less than your current insurance.

Of course, it's not always clear. If the parties can't agree who owns a thing, they often use some legal mechanism to resolve their dispute.

The real question is "Who is the author?"

Because actually the user isn't. The AI is. AI's don't have a right to copyright. You making a few lines and the AI making the actual image does not make you the creator of the image.

Why not? Can a comparison not be made to writing source code and the output of a compiler?

While the analogy is correct, the binaries generated by compilers does involve integration of creative work beyond that in the code compiled. The binary as such is a 'derivative work' generated from creativity of the authors of the source code, compiler, and standard libraries. What happens is that the copyright licenses coming along with compilers and standard libraries explicitly grant generous permissions to the users of the compilers.

For algorithmic art, likewise the developers of the software typically provide permissive licenses to the users of the software.

AI makes this harder because the works are massively derivative works, which AFAIK, do not have much precedants in law. The question is not easy to answer unless the author (Nvidia in this case) owned copyright over all training data.

The trick.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

AI does both :D

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