Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the finished “work”.
The 8 hours doesn’t matter. By the USCO’s ruling, iterative prompt refinement probably wouldn’t, but that’s not super clear (partially, because the USCO’s description of what the model is doing justifying its determination is a fundamentally strained metaphor, so while its clear how it applies to the exact case it describes, its not clear how it generalizes.)
If you are fine-tuning a model (LORA, Checkpoint, whatever), then your input isn’t just a prompt to the model (once or in an iterative process with review of the output), so, your pretty far outside of where the ruling provides clear guidance.
> and have done a bunch of in painting,
inpainting is probably the thing most (even though it again involves prompting, it involves specific selection of where within the image to apply that based on aesthetic concerns) similar to the traditional creative parts of visual art, and the strongest argument given the shape of the USCO description of its rule.
But, I have a feeling that that a rule that appeals to tradition and vague analogy to lower tech visual techniques probably won’t be anywhere close to the final word on copyrightability in this space.
For example, digitizing famous paintings is labour intensive but not considered copyrihtable.
Rejection by US courts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_State...
Or at least it used to be. Now it's automated.
You might be able to patent it, but that is a different thing.
Copyright applies to the end result. Patents apply to methods and mechanisms.
Indeed in the contents is this:
> While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be protected by copyright, that does not mean that material generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable.