Comment by jclulow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jclulow | Hacker News Reader

> The output of a machine simply does not qualify for copyright protection – it is in the public domain.

The machine, such as it is, is generally not acting on its own. A person operates the machine, and presumably is on the hook for infringement on some level.

Consider: what if one directs the machine to reproduce a specific body of code and it ostensibly does so. Was there copying?

What if I have a person read out that body of code and I type exactly what I hear? I used a machine to produce the resultant text file, but it's pretty clear that copying has occurred then.

FWIW, I'm not a copyright maximalist, but I don't think you can win a conflict by abstaining from playing the game the other team is playing. That is: the companies producing, and drawing incredible and exclusive economic value from, industrial scale plagiarism machinery are hardly going to stop ruthlessly enforcing copyright on their own proprietary software. It would seem best, if it's the goal, to get laws changed in advance of simply declaring, lopsidedly, that this is all fine.

The machine argument also rings hollow to me. This same argument could be made for a scanner + printer that does some transformation - changes colors a bit randomly or something - I'd be having a hard time convincing a court the resulting image is now copyright free.

Obviously LLMs are much more advanced than this, but in the basis it's still a machine that takes its input data and applies specified transformations with randomness.

The machine argument makes sense to me. It shifts the blame from the machine creators to the machine users. A copying machine creator is not responsible for misuse of the machine, nor is it illegal to simply Xerox a copyrighted work. Distributing the copy is where the law comes into play, and it targets the person distributing it, not the machine or the manufacturer.

Obviously, it seems impossible for an LLM user to verify the legality of the output, so it seems like the only conclusion is not to use it, or to only release your works under copyleft.

I guess an alternate interpretation is treating them like gun manufacturers. They aren't the ones pulling the trigger, but one could argue their business and marketing practices are done negligently enough for them to carry a portion of the responsibility. I guess then one must show that the LLM creators are sufficiently negligent in preventing misuse of their product at the same scale.

The difference here is that Xerox isn't trying to handwave away copyright, while OpenAI et al. are explicitly defending the position in court that LLM output doesn't violate copyright, not that the LLM user is responsible for copyright violations. (I'd be hilarious for them to try to take this stance thought)

I.i.r.c. they even "give you a license" to use LLM output, implying that they own the copyright. Too lazy to look this up so I might be wrong there though.

I've coded dozens of procedural asset/"art" generators. It's really surprising to me that, apparently, the output of my creative work (i.e. the novel algorithms) is not protected by copyright.

I've coded a JPEG compressor. It's clear the output of the machine isn't exactly the same of the input, being lossy, so I guess the output is not protected by copyright either.

The input to your JPEG compressor is an image that someone/something created, and the goal of your compressor is to replicate its input as closely as possible. It doesn't create new data, it merely encodes pre-existent data.

The input to my algorithms is a single number, and the goal is to create something new and distinctive that is clearly different from anything that existed before, and that wouldn't exist without the ingenuity of my algorithms.

Really, the "input" to current deep learning algorithms includes all the training data. Which is where the root of the issue is.

There's a reason why compression comparisons tend to include the size of the decompressor in their comparisons - my "magic algorithm can compress wikipedia down to a single bye!" is less impressive with the "decompressor" contains a copy of wikipedia.

We go back several decades, when "computer" meant a person with a pen and paper. The output of those computers could be copyrighted... by the computer, not you.

Your creative work (the novel algorithms) are protected under normal copyright. Depending on where you live, you may even be able to patent those algorithms.

The output of those algorithms isn't a creative work (as you're running a creative work to generate them, not applying any kind of creativity once the program is finished), so it's not protected. Same with generated code.

The lines get a bit blurry when you start applying a creative process onto the generated work. The edits you do on generated images in Photoshop may be considered creative work, as may the edits you do to generated code.

Protections only apply as far as copyright/trademark law can apply. In the case of generative AI and LLMs, it seems that copyright/trademark law doesn't consider the generated output to be a derivate work of the data model, or the model is not a derivative work of the input dataset. As a result, the output of generative AI doesn't seem to be restricted by the license of the training material.

In theory, a sufficiently powerful generative AI may be able to generate entire Disney movies, which would not be considered derivative works under the current laws, as far as I can tell. I'm sure the moment Disney gets threatened, AI copyright law will be updated, though.

I have an unreleased game that contains thousands of procedurally generated 3d models, textures and sounds. I've worked for years on those algorithms; they are my brushes and my paint.

So when (if) I release that game, anyone can just rip the assets, not even apply any transformation, and put them in their own product. I would have to let them do it with no legal recourse. That doesn't seem right.

The reasoning indeed seems a bit simplistic. As if a C file werena creative work but the resulting EXE file would not be.

Rules and algorithms in general (and in the US) are not covered by copyright. The expression of those rules as a creative work is, but the rules themselves are not. To that end, anyone could take your procedures and duplicate the effects of them to release their own game. The combination of those procedures in the specific form of your game is protected, but only to the extent that what is protected isn’t essential to running the procedure. So in its simplest (and most general because law is complex) form, if you release a “game” that uses a deterministic procedure to change individual pixel colors on the screen in response to user input, almost nothing of that is covered under copyright. If your procedure instead places tiles of artwork created by you, those tiles and a game using your procedure to place those tiles in that way is protected, but someone else could replace all your tiles and release their own game with the same procedures.

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