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Comment by wildzzz | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty much the exact same case as the monkey that took a photo. The photo is now in the public domain as the monkey cannot be an author of the photo and since the photographer didn't take the photo, neither is he the author. The US Copyright Office clarified that "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention". If you placed some food on a camera trigger and the animal reached for it, taking a photo in the process, that would likely be human intervention. I feel as if this applies to AI as well. A computer cannot be the author but as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image or wrote the code that allowed the computer to generate the image on its own, then the human is the author.

Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software. What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? Give it a rest.

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I still can't believe the guy went to Indonesia, went into the monkeys' habitat, gained their trust, set up the camera on a tripod in a way the monkeys would have access to it, adjusted the focus/exposure to capture a facial close-up -- basically engineered the entire situation specifically for that outcome, and simply because he didn't physically hit the shutter he lost credit for the photo. Meanwhile I can open my phone's camera, spin around three times, take a photo of whatever the hell happens to be in its viewfinder and somehow that is sufficient human creativity to deserve copyright protection.

I was curious what the copyright was on Wikipedia. It’s listed as public domain, but it also has a link to this article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

So, that is apparently a thing, at least in some cases and places.

Yeah I'm a little torn on this one. I generally think that much of IP law causes more harm than good, so in the abstract I'm in favor of copyright being weaker. But in this specific case, given the context of existing copyright law and its intent it seems pretty obvious to me that he should have copyright over the photo.

I don't think it's analogous to AI art though - no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process, and it's not like monkeys have any use for money or ownership of intellectual property. (Although the hypothetical situation where you assign the monkeys personhood and give them a bunch of royalties to pay for a better habitat and piles of bananas would be pretty cool.)

> no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process

What would be the creative output of an artist who never saw the creative output of other artists? We think too highly of ourselves, as if creativity happens in a clean room and we are the hero-creators of our works from pure brain magic.

Creative input is more than just "an idea" though. It's things like design elements: composition, color, light, line and shape. It's also things like symbolism and metaphor, meaning and intent. It's both a thought process and a physical process, not unlike figuring out the details of a software program, versus the startup idea itself.

For me the question of whether an image created via an off-the-cuff prompt ("create an image of a cat hanging from a limb") is uninteresting, but what about the huge grey area of images that are AI-edited? Or which were composed by a human, but within which all elements were created by an AI (similar to sampling in music, if you will)? Or, that underwent hours of image-prompt cycles (i.e. having an AI, or multiple AIs, iteratively edit an image via prompting)? (edit to add - What if the AI isn't generating the image, but is automating the usage of tools within Photoshop?)

I agree - it's ridiculous. It's not much different to saying "you didn't take the picture; the actuator that opened and closed the aperture did".

god bless him. he did a mitzvah to humanity ..and all our brethren monkeys.

All he had to do, if what he wanted was a copyright, is to have pressed the button. He was right there and able to do it. And then his photos would have been like the millions of other photos of monkeys taken by humans, undistinguished, and we could just ignore them and nobody would know or care who he is.

But no, he wanted a "monkey selfie", in other words he insisted he not be the author of the work, that he not be the entity that chose the exact moment and pose to capture, that he not be entity with the spark of inspiration that creates a work.

He made sure he wasn't the author, and is now livid that he's correctly recognised as not being the author

> is to have pressed the button

I don’t think the act of pressing the button is what determines copyright. Presumably that person would have been able to get the copyright to the image had he actually argued that he was the author (which he was).

It's not difficult to understand.

Replace the monkey with a 2nd human, and it's obvious that "the guy" does not earn the copyright, it goes to the person who took the photo. If there was no person, then there is no copyright.

The AI thing is no different. If I ask my human friend, "please paint a picture using your vast knowledge and experience", then my friend gets the copyright. Replace friend with AI; there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is no copyright. It doesn't default to me just because I asked for it.

Is this scenario correct:

If you stick a 360 camera on the outside of someone's car and hit record, and they drive around unaware (but with an earlier agreement that it is ok to mess with their property), you get the copyright. If you stick a 360 camera outside of someone's backpack and hit record and they walk around unaware they get the copyright to the footage as the cameraman.

Assume an earlier agreement that placing/activating video cameras like this at some future time would be ok but no agreement on who would be the author and no copyright transfer agreements.

> you get the copyright

Do you, in the first scenario? I'm still not sure that you would.

I imagine it would work out roughly the same as if security camera footage was copyrighted, but as far as I can tell there really isn't a clear precedent in the US for this. The monkey selfie case suggests that they probably aren't, but as far as I can tell it's a legal unknown in the US.

it depends on the courts. the law is simply complex and still vague.

Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location? According to Wikimedia's legal analysis, it depends.[0] Furthermore, authorship and copyright are distinct.

[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Authorship_and_Cop...

From that ruling to this case it extends that the local or tourist who took the photo would be the copyright holder which makes little sense.

It makes perfect sense. The photograph is the photographer's creative expression. This is how copyright has always worked.

To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression.

I wonder about something like this[0]. So much awesome engineering went into it. And the guy is clearly an artist and considers himself an artist[1]. As it is his own tool, are the random splatters it generates not copyrightable?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XyE41_ANrc

[1] https://engineezy.com/pages/about

>To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression.

Depending on if the prompt met other guidelines for copyright, it would be pretty uncontroversial to say you own the copyright on the prompt.

Copyright on the picture, is about as assignable as if you invited ten painters over to your house and read the prompt as spoken word poetry, then received one painting at random. The fact that your prompt won't reliably produce the same picture suggests that you are not in control of the artistic choices made, and therefore have no claim to the copyright.

>a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression.

Then it's the prompt that is copyrighted, not the end result.

US copyright law specifically states that only works fixed into existence by a human author can be copyrighted, and specifically excludes processes or procedures by which a work might ultimately come to be fixed.

In terms of AI, then it should be clear that the prompts (that AI used to generate my work) are my creative expressions. Sure, the AI may alter it in some unknown ways, but does this make it any less so my creative expression?

If I lend you my camera to take pictures you choose, do I hold the copyright because I own the camera?

(No)

"you choose" is a pretty important factor in this.

Do “you choose” to angle the phone slightly up 5 degrees to capture a bit of the sky? Or do “you choose” the moment to take the photo when the timing is right? There is always some creative decision involved by the person who presses the shutter

What if I ask a stranger to take my photo, and it turns out he's Ansel Adams?

He's going to make some decisions about the framing etc, as one of the best photographers of all time.

So if I ask someone to take a photo, but I tell them "tilt the camera", I am the copyright holder, but if they do so without me "prompting" them, then I no longer am?

Am I understanding you correctly?

What if Louis XVI ask Antoine Callet to use a lighter color for his skin? Does he own the Callet painting copyright?

You can prompt whatever you want but won’t own the copyright. Photographer will choose himself if he follow or not your "prompt", what side and angle he tilt, the zoom, when to press the shutter…

What if I set a delay but it is not technically me who presses the key? Would that count because it was me who set the delay? What if I tell a friend to set the delay?

All this is pretty much grey area anyways. Both sides have merit.

To me, it just shows how bogus the whole idea of copyright is.

Agreed.

I would not say bogus, I would just say it's a bit too easy to get copyright on a photograph.

But it would be difficult to adjust that without making the rules even messier.

No, because I was asking.

I deliberately added:

> but if they do so without me "prompting" them, then I no longer am?

We prompt the AI. I do not see how AI generated art cannot be copyrighted, TBH, but I am against copyright in general (or the way it is done abroad).

Must read:

https://mises.org/mises-daily/patents-and-copyrights-should-...

https://fee.org/articles/mises-on-copyrights/

TL;DR, FWIW:

Mises supported intellectual property rights, including copyright, as a necessary legal tool in a free-market economy to incentivize creativity and innovation. He viewed intellectual property as a socially constructed right to protect creators' labor but cautioned against excessive or monopolistic extensions that could harm competition and economic efficiency.

Rothbard opposed intellectual property rights, including copyright, as state-enforced monopolies that interfere with the free market. He argued that ideas, being non-rivalrous, cannot be owned like private property. Rothbard believed intellectual property could be protected through voluntary contracts, without state involvement, in a truly free market.

To say on topic:

Mises: Likely supports copyright for AI-generated art if the human user contributes creatively (prompt, modifications).

Rothbard: Opposes copyright for AI-generated art, as he believes intellectual property should be based on human labor and not state-enforced monopolies.

There's plenty of jurisprudence on these issues for posters here to interact with, but in classic HN style, they will just keep pushing these arguments back and forth based on the headline for this one instance. People just want to play law, not actually interact with it.

Take out the second person and imagine if you set the camera to a timer.

Perhaps we record the path of the sun every day for a year to create an analemma. That's something artistic that should absolutely qualify for copyright.

Who owns the copyright then? Nobody? Because if so, that feels like bullshit. Like we're making up the rules completely arbitrarily with no logic at all.

At some level in many electronic systems there is some kind of autonomous human out of the loop subsystem. It'd be easy to target almost any of these and say a machine is responsible for making the content. No human is making quaternion calculations by hand, for instance.

If a human put in work, regardless of any automations, a human deserves the copyright. Either that, or nobody deserves copyright.

I believe the correct answer is “nobody deserves the copyright”. It’s a big fat myth that creatives would starve if copyright disappeared tomorrow. Think of all the countless hours society has wasted arguing about who owns creative expression. If we assign it to the public, we can move on and find better ways to keep creatives housed and fed.

Creatives absolutely would suffer if they lost copyright protection.

The person you're replying to explicitly stated that a different way to compensate creatives for their talents should be put in place in case copyright is eliminated.

"Just do something different that works better." is hardly an explicit statement.

We already have systems that work better. None of them depend on copyright. Crowdfunding [generally commissions], patreon-type platforms, sponsored content, live performances, etc etc etc.

No they really wouldn't. Companies and fans would commission art. We pay our damn food service staff on “would you like to pay a little extra today” tips method. Don’t tell me, especially with zero justification, that creatives depend on the need to control who copies our society’s ultimately culture. There are absolutely other ways and we’re too scared to try them.

> Companies and fans would commission art.

Why would they when they’d have every right to take it for free?

Creative endeavours would be absolutely stillborn if only people wealthy enough to practice their craft could pursue the thing

They don’t have a right to extract art from artists… commission means pay for a piece up front, not after the fact. And on top of that you can only make digital copies cheaply.

Again they would not be “stillborn”. We’ve figured out crowdsourcing and popularity-based compensation (YT, patreon, etc.). You are just making statements without backing them up with readonable arguments.

Will there be any downsides?

Every bit of open source is founded on the license enforced by copyright and the ability for the creator to authorize the creation and distribution of derivative works.

Without it, anything that is published could be taken (once the copyright has expired), repackaged in some user inaccessible way and resold.

It is copyright that enforces the license of GPL. Without copyright, no license on creative work has any teeth.

The GPL is considered by its author to be a “hack” on the copyright system to perpetually enforce source availability. Most consider it unnecessarily restrictive and would prefer a world without it, Stallman included. But since Xerox used copyright to sue people trying to fix their own broken copiers, which they owned, here we are.

Point is, removing copyright also removes the need for the GPL in the first place. All knowledge should be public domain.

Removing copyright allows a company to take something that is in the public domain, make changes to it and not release the changes.

Yes, the GPL is a hack on the distribution of derivative works... but without those teeth to bite with and enforce, then nothing prevents one from taking some code that is not-copyrighted, making changes to it, and keeping the code to it completely in house while releasing it in a way that is not user modifiable.

The ideals of the GPL (and AGPL) of sharing the contributions back to the community to further progress would be unenforceable and lost.

You forget that because the company cannot enforce copyright, I can just take whatever bits the company distributes to me and do what I please with them. I wouldn’t he opposed to a broad law requiring software companies to make buildable sources available for all software they use to deliver a product, but I doubt we’re that liberal yet. That is essentially what Stallman was asking for and the GPL is a means.

If I took iText, made changes to it, rebundled that behind a web service - that would be in violation of the AGPL. The thing that prevents that from happening is that the AGPL prevents it based on copyright.

It would be unreasonable to say that every web site out there or SaaS service needs to provide the source code to rebuild their site by someone else.

I will also point out the "write a law" would only apply to one country. Host it in another country and you could thumb your nose at the law. You would really want an international treaty such as the Berne Convention, or TRIPS, or WCT... which are implemented as copyright. Any changes to copyright would imply that that country is withdrawing from those treaties.

(many hours later) ... I'm going to point out from the printer story...

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt

    And we just had to suffer with waiting.  It would take an hour or two to
    get your printout because the machine would be jammed most of the time.
    And only once in a while -- you'd wait an hour figuring "I know it's
    going to be jammed. I'll wait an hour and go collect my printout," and
    then you'd see that it had been jammed the whole time, and in fact,
    nobody else had fixed it.  So you'd fix it and you'd go wait another
    half hour.  Then, you'd come back, and you'd see it jammed again -- before
    it got to your output.  It would print three minutes and be jammed
    thirty minutes.  Frustration up the whazzoo.  But the thing that made it 
    worse was knowing that we could have fixed it, but somebody else, for his 
    own selfishness, was blocking us, obstructing us from improving the software.  
    So, of course, we felt some resentment.

    And then I heard that somebody at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy
    of that software.  So I was visiting there later, so I went to his
    office and I said, "Hi, I'm from MIT. Could I have a copy of the printer
    source code?"  And he said "No, I promised not to give you a
    copy." [Laughter]  I was stunned.  I was so -- I was angry, and I had no
    idea how I could do justice to it.  All I could think of was to turn
    around on my heel and walk out of his room.  Maybe I slammed the door.
    [Laughter] And I thought about it later on, because I realized that I was
    seeing not just an isolated jerk, but a social phenomenon that was
    important and affected a lot of people.

    Now, this was my first, direct encounter with a non-disclosure agreement,
    and it taught me an important lesson -- a lesson that's important because
    most programmers never learn it.  You see, this was my first encounter
    with a non-disclosure agreement, and I was the victim.  I, and my whole
    lab, were the victims.  And the lesson it taught me was that
    non-disclosure agreements have victims.  They're not innocent.  They're
    not harmless.  Most programmers first encounter a non-disclosure agreement
    when they're invited to sign one.  And there's always some temptation --
    some goody they're going to get if they sign.  So, they make up excuses.
    They say, "Well, he's never going to get a copy no matter what, so why
    shouldn't I join the conspiracy to deprive him?"  They say, "This is the
    way it's always done.  Who am I to go against it?"  They say, "If I don't
    sign this, someone else will."  Various excuses to gag their consciences.

Nothing required Xerox to give Stallman the source code to the printer driver. And in a world without copyright, nothing would require Xerox to give Stallman the source code to the printer driver either. And it wasn't copyright that prevented Carnegie Mellon from giving him the source code - it was a separate contract - an NDA.

The four freedoms are guaranteed for open source because of copyright. Without copyright, the first freedom (with the access to the source code) for open source software is not possible. Copyright gives the author the ability to force others who use the software that they've licensed to be similarly open.

Consider this challenge - write a license on top of some public domain ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-domain_software#Public-... ) work that requires that I follow it and that the work that I do provides the four freedoms - that would prevent me from taking the code and repackage it in my own binary in a way that I'm not obligated to disclose to you or that you wouldn't be able to replace with your own library.

Oof, this gets into all sorts of weird legal grey areas.

- All of our phones do a bunch of computational photography where AI tooling improves a photo in various ways. In that case, is any photo taken by a modern phone not copyrightable?

- If it is copyrightable, what if someone uses an Img2Img tool or inpainting with something like Stable Diffusion (or Photoshop) in order to slightly modify an image. Is that no longer copyrightable?

(FYI, my questions aren't directed at or attacking you -- just interesting hypotheticals.)

Wouldn't they be derivative works of a copyrightable work?

- All of our phones do a bunch of computational photography where AI tooling improves a photo in various ways. In that case, is any photo taken by a modern phone not copyrightable?

On a related note, I believe it's just a question of time that in some high profile case (murder, rape, thief) direct photographic evidence of the perpetrator will have to be discarded, because it was taken with a smartphone and it's imposible to determine to which degree it was altered.

There was a post someone made, some time ago, where they took a picture of a rabbit, with its head turned away from the photographer, so its eyes were not visible, and their iPhone painted an eye on it, because the profile was the same as if the rabbit had its head facing forward.

It was in the discussion about the fake Samsung moon photos.

To some degree it wouldn’t be hard to do non-destructive editing and save the original sensor data, and embed the developed jpeg (or heif) in it. This is already normal for digital cameras when shooting RAW.

This has sort of already happened. There was a fair bit of fuss around a very similar topic during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. The prosecution were not allowed to zoom in on drone footage because the defence successfully argued that zooming in results in the creation of information through interpolation which was not there in the original recording.

In short, in situation 1 there is no issue. In situation 2, if the original image can be copyrighted, AI tooling to augment the image doesn’t prevent copyright. The copyright offices guidance on the subject is a worthwhile read, since they detail out the difference between using AI as a tool to modify human authorship, vs the AI taking minimal input alone and generating a resulting image.

"Minimal input" like pushing a button on a camera? Seems to me that is more minimal than some of the elaborate prompting it takes to get AI to output a desired image.

I guess if the prompt is complex enough to be protected then the image would be too?

Gotta be 1,000 words.

> Gotta be 1,000 words.

What? Why? There's poems and stories shorter than that that must be copyrightable.

There's a saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words".

Regarding poetry, while I share your sentiment, what I notice in these discussions is that the emotional response to "done by AI" vs. "done by human" (or, on other forums, "done by furry") counts for a lot.

It goes away beyond this. You can create your own custom Lora. The tags that go into that, combined with prompting is sophisticated authorship.

It can be reasonably be considered technical than handling a professional camera.

What if the ai augments the shutter timing because you were shaking? The ai monkey pressed the shutter so no copyright I guess? Pretty sure several apps do this on night photo mode.

Then I would assume it’d be treated as a tool in the creative process, similarly to a ruler helping you draw a straight line, but the author is still the human.

But they say when you assume you make an ass out of you and me, and we all know the law is an ass, so who knows.

> - If it is copyrightable, what if someone uses an Img2Img tool or inpainting with something like Stable Diffusion (or Photoshop) in order to slightly modify an image. Is that no longer copyrightable?

The number 5 is not copyrightable, but if I take your short story and replace every space with the number 5 it's still subject to the original copyright.

This is already essentially in iOS. In Photos edit mode, there is a Clean Up tool.

There's a startup doing something close to this. I can't remember the name and I'm not going to look it up, but the pitch is that you feed it a copyright stock image and it uses AI to create a usable-but-clearly-different near equivalent - a situation where absence of copyright is a feature, not a bug.

Technically it's a derivative work. Practically you'd never tell, and proof of derivation is impossible.

The law as it currently stands is completely unable to deal with these issues.

It's not even clear what the issues are, because copyright is primarily about protecting income rights from significant original invention. The mechanical act of making a copy is somewhat incidental.

When invention is mechanised (or if you want to be less charitable, replaced by algorithmic grey goo) the definition of "significant original invention" either needs to be tightened up or replaced.

You better be willing to question whether photographs can be copyrightable at all, because they are all result of several mechanical systems not created by the camera operator.

Just limiting yourself to only "digital computation" being magical enough to invalidate copyright is an arbitrary restriction. Unless you clarify why you think the computation performed by the lens system doesn't have that property, further discussion seems pointless because it will just collapse to a circular "digital computation is magical enough", which is your implied premise.

By that logic, paintings aren't copyrightable either because of all the chemistry involved in drying pigment.

The limits of copyright are intrinsically arbitrary, since the right has its foundations in fantasy, i.e. supposed spiritual labour. An extension of the idea that your physical labour gives you property rights to the fruits of it, into the religious realm of the soul.

Why would anyone need to question whether photographs can be copyrighted at all? It's been settled jurisprudence for quite a long time.

The other aspect here is you can't copyright an observable truth. For instance, sports companies tried to sue other sports companies for scraping their scores feeds but courts ruled you can't copyright the fact Patriots beat the Falcons 35-30, because that's simply what happened. There isn't any proprietary scoring keeping mechanism. Anyone who observed the game also can determine those numbers. It is an observable truth. So maybe that applies to the raw photo. You are simply capturing what happened from that POV at that moment in time. Sure if you do something with that photo, then it may become more than an observable truth.

>You better be willing to question whether photographs can be copyrightable at all, because they are all result of several mechanical systems not created by the camera operator.

That is a good point that a lot of people don't want to address. A lot of the 'creative' part of the process is actually being done by the software in the camera.

No, that's the opposite of my point: what the camera does is mechanical work, it is explicitly not creative.

> Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location?

because you asked and they complied, there's a work contract between said photo-button presser and you. The implicit agreement is that you own the copyright to the photo, and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you.

Now on the other hand...if you dropped your phone, and a stranger with no prior interaction picked it up, and pressed the button, then you can argue that they own the copyright.

> Now on the other hand...if you dropped your phone, and a stranger with no prior interaction picked it up, and pressed the button, then you can argue that they own the copyright.

If they've performed an Unauthorized Access to a Computer System then they may want to drop any copyright claim.

Precisely.

> because you asked and they complied, there's a work contract between said photo-button presser and you

No, this can't happen, because there is no consideration.

> and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you

Nope. You can call it consideration, but that won't make it consideration.

consideration doesnt have to be money.

No, but it does have to exist. A private word of thanks isn't enough to even rise to that level.

> because you asked and they complied, there's a work contract between said photo-button presser and you.

That's not how contract law works.

> The implicit agreement is that you own the copyright to the photo, and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you.

Even if there was an otherwise valid contract, with this as an implicit term, you can't transfer copyright ownership from the actual author by implicit agreement: "A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent." (17 USC Sec. 204)

Let me add something even more funny: in Germany, some buildings and art installations are copyrighted which means they aren't allowed to be photographed for non-private usage despite being literally out in the open for everyone to see [1].

[1] https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000108536963/schraeges-urh...

This is country specific (as is copyright itself). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_t...

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/120

> The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.

This gets further complicated by sculptural works that are not part of the architecture of the building which have their own copyright. For example, the sculpture of lions in front of the New York Public Library are works of sculpture and not part of the architecture of the building and so photographs of them are derivative works... though that's not an issue now as they've fallen into public domain (they were the example given when I started photography as a sculpture that was often photographed along with architecture)... but are trademarked.

Then you get things like the Eiffel Tower which is public domain, but the lights (installed in 1985) are not... so a photograph of it, by night, is under copyright.

It's complicated.

Yup, that's insane, all of it. Anything that is visible with the human eye or a reasonable camera (i.e. no 1200mm superzoom into someone's residence where a painting hangs) from the open street or any area accessible to the general public such as parking lots, airports and the likes should be freely redistributable.

> in Germany, some buildings and art installations are copyrighted which means they aren't allowed to be photographed for non-private usage despite being literally out in the open for everyone to see [1].

I think most people agree that that is ridiculous. I'm not sure how they manage to enforce that, even with Europe's generally strong ideas around copyright and moral ownership and such.

> I'm not sure how they manage to enforce that, even with Europe's generally strong ideas around copyright and moral ownership and such.

Copyright holders use Google's reverse image search to find anyone who posts such photos to Twitter, Facebook or whatever, and then file civil damage claims.

Who owns your photo of the moon after Samsung uses "SceneOptimizer" to AI fix it? https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...

Burger King.

Wow, that last "photo" is especially damning.

I hate how impossible it is nowadays to buy a phone with a camera that just takes photos without 'shopping them somehow. Even Pixels apply unnatural filters. It just ruins photos, which you often can't ever go back and retake...

(I know you can shoot in RAW, but I don't have time to develop every photo I take and I really shouldn't have to. Some phones' RAWs are actually post-filtering, too, and not actually "raw".)

They pretty much have to. The sensors on smart phones are so tiny that a true RAW file out of them would be pretty much unusable. They simply don't capture enough light. The only way at this point to improve photo quality out of a phone is a bigger sensor, or software. Thus far, everyone has chosen doing it in software.

Though you should definitely be able to adjust the amount of post processing, some is always going to be necessary if you don't want a grainy mess of a photo.

I'd be awesome if there was a phone meant for photographers (who can't be arsed to carry a DSLR all the time). Like, take the sensor off a compact point-and-shoot and slap it on a smartphone. Because honestly it feels silly that point-and-shoots still exist in 2025; you'd think they'd have gone the way of the mp3 player.

Because you also want the lens, which is exactly what doesn't fit on a phone form factor

We've had removable lenses forever. Is it really an impossible engineering challenge to ship a phone with a low-profile swappable lens?

I carry a point and shoot for photographing my kids -- it's amazing. You can take it out without looking at it, turn it on, take a photo and turn it off and return it to your pocket in 10 seconds.

Also the sensor is 10x the size of my phones, the photos are printable (and don't look like mud when printed like many camera phone photos), and the battery last for months.

Maybe just get a point and shoot? I traded in an old DSLR for an OM tough camera and my kids even take photos with it (and get copyright! unlike AI lol)

> Because honestly it feels silly that point-and-shoots still exist in 2025; you'd think they'd have gone the way of the mp3 player.

It's a shame there aren't more dedicated MP3 players really. Every so often I run into people looking for one and often their options are very limited. Just having the ability to listen to music without someone logging and/or tracking what you listen to, when, and how often is becoming harder to attain. It's also nice to have a dedicated player when you listen to music often because it saves your battery for other things.

Today there are still plenty of reasons for simple digital cameras and even film cameras. I certainly hope they continue to remain available, even if many people are happy using whatever their phones give them.

Anything software on the phone can do, software on the desktop could do. So I still want the raw image as an option.

Oh shit. Who owns your photo if your phone does any amount of software-based manipulation to it? Like making faces look better?? Is this how google claims it can use all of your pixel photos in its AI training?

>Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location?

Wouldn't that be a 'work for hire' situation?

Generally, whoever has more money for better lawyers, and/or is more intimidating or threatening.

If you pay someone to paint a picture, who owns the copyright?

If you pay for an AI to paint a picture according to your specifications?

> If you pay someone to paint a picture, who owns the copyright?

that depends on the terms of the deal. Some artists want to keep the copyright but will sell the work, while others are happy to sign their rights away for money.

> If you pay for an AI to paint a picture according to your specifications?

Copyrights are for humans, so if you pay an AI, because the AI isn't a human, it never had a copyright to sell you. You paid for an image without a copyright.

Copyrights are owned by businesses all the time.

We pretend businesses are people all the time.

Corporations are legal persons, that's the entire point of the form.

Copyrights are owned by corporations as a result of either:

(1) actual human authorship and original ownership, sold to a corporation, or

(2) actual human authorship as a work for hire on behalf of the corporation, which is a special case specifically laid out in copyright law which allows someone other than the person performing the actual act of authorship to be the original copyright owner.

> If you pay someone to paint a picture, who owns the copyright?

Initially, the someone owns the copyright. Then they agree to give it to you.

> If you pay for an AI to paint a picture according to your specifications?

No one. It's public domain. As if it was painted by the wind.

The artist still owns the copyright. Payment by itself does not transfer copyright. To do that the artist needs to explicitly sign away those rights. This happens in employment all the time. Part of the paperwork you sign is about transferring over the copyrights from yourself to the company.

I highly recommend you check your own paperwork to see exactly how much this covers, since some states allow contracts that cover everything you make at any time. California has a specific law that limits these contracts to only works done on company equipment and on company time. Your state might be different.

doesn't need to explicitly, it's enough to have the understanding that it's a "work for hire" situation (at least in the US)

of course just giving someone money is not sufficient to establish this, but telling someone that "I want to hire you to make a photo for me (of me)" and they acknowledge, then that is probably enough.

This is not correct.

The copyright office itself doesn't recognize any transfer of works-for-hire [0] unless there's (#3) a written document of the transfer, (#4) signed by the recipient, (#5) signed by the copyright holder, and finally (#6) the work was made expressly as work-for-hire. Every employment, contractor, and freelancer contract is written with all of these questions accounted for.

Even wedding photographers keep the copyright of the photos they take of your wedding too for this very reason, unless explicitly contracted to transfer those rights.

[0]: https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf, page 5

As sibling comment said, this is not correct.

In wedding and portrait photography, many clients think that they own copyrights to the photos but they don’t and sometimes get in trouble for violating photographers’ copyrights.

One more example demonstrating the opposite - in EU the copyright law explicitly states that transferable copyrights for software get automatically transferred from employees to the company. Which suggests that for other types of copyrightable works and author/customer relationships it doesn't happen automatically.

Do you happen to have more reading material on said law?

In Germany, you can't even transfer copyright. So yeah, anything you create that reaches the threshold of having a copyright, you own the copyright. Even as an employee.

At the same time, you might not own the usage rights (Nutzungsrechte/Verwertungsrechte).

We might have a bit of miscommunication of what exactly is referred as "copyright", "transferring" and the way its translated in various languages. Wikipedia/Google translate suggests to me that generic name for copyright in German is "Urheberrecht" derived from author not copying, is that the problem?

By "copyrights" I am referring to all rights regulated by various copyright related laws not a specific subset of rights, including both the economic rights (all the useful stuff related to copying, redistributing, selling) and author's moral rights (can't be transferred, partially defined by national laws, stuff related to being author, right to be recognized as author and few other minor things).

Was able to find the European directive which has the point corresponding to what I was thinking about. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32... Article 3, point 2 "Where a computer program is created by an employee in the execution of his duties or following the instructions given by his employer, the employer exclusively shall be entitled to exercise all economic rights in the program so created, unless otherwise provided by contract.".

Do you consider usage rights as something which isn't part of copyright? Or do you not consider act as result of which you stop owning "usage rights" but someone else gets them "transferring".

From what I understand, technically non of the European directives are laws, but each member country is supposed to make laws based on the directives.

You don't. You don't pay an AI. You pay a company owned by humans that offer an AI service.

It can never be the AI. The AI is NOT a person. Why are we belaboring this?

Many vested interests really want to be artists without putting in the work into the craft required to be one.

Of course, other interests simply want to cut out artists entirely while claiming their creations totally aren't a result of stealing Petabytes of existing artistity.

AI agents will exist some day, and almost certainly some will be granted personhood status.

“Some day”, sure, but as we know the granting of personhood status doesn't formally happen until 2365, when Phillipa Louvois rules in the Brian Maddox case. And despite the success of that ruling, it still doesn't fully apply to all AI agents (e.g. the EMH Mk 1).

>If you pay someone to paint a picture, who owns the copyright?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

> The AI thing is no different. If I ask my human friend, "please paint a picture using your vast knowledge and experience", then my friend gets the copyright. Replace friend with AI; there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is no copyright. It doesn't default to me just because I asked for it.

Why should an "AI" be considered a who rather than just another tool? To me, current "AI" are image manipulation program and camera replacements instead of people replacement.

People do not say that Adobe owns copyright when someone uses their tool to create an image. However, I could see some weasel words being added to EULAs especially regarding all of the new "AI" tools being shoe horned into the apps. They've already added weasel words to their cloud storage for training purposes. After all, a lawyer is going to lawyer.

It's not that the AI is considered a person. It's that your inputs were the same in both cases, and it's your creative input that justifies the copyright.

If your creative input was insufficient to justify granting you copyrights in one case, they would also be insufficient in the other case, as the inputs were identical in both cases.

In the case mentioned above where someone just spins around in their chair and takes a random photo on their phone (which they would then own the rights to), did that person really do any 'creative input'? All they did was press a button on a tool, with no further thought. That actually seems like less creative input than when I type a prompt into a tool and hit 'generate'. Why are cameras, image editors, etc, tools in a way that stable diffusion is not?

If you can show that no human creative expression was involved in composition, timing, etc, then no, it's not copyrightable.

There's a very good argument for security camera footage not being copyrightable for that very reason. There just hasn't been any case law yet to test it.

> there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is no copyright.

Wait, so if I have a script that generates some source-code autonomously (based on whatever trigger I setup say in a ci/cd pipeline) then that code is not copyrightable? What about macros? This seems silly to me.

In Germany at least, code written by AI is not copyrightable, it's in public domain, as we were briefed by a lawyer recently. This is a huge issue if you are writing software for a customer and agree to transfer all rights to him (happens sometimes), because you don't own rights to AI-written code and so can't transfer that.

There are nuances, so if you create a macro and then that macro writes something but it is completely determined by you then it should be ok.

> In Germany at least, code written by AI is not copyrightable

> There are nuances, so if you create a macro and then that macro writes something but it is completely determined by you then it should be ok.

How far does that extend? Like would IntelliSense cause your code to not be copyrightable? It's not that different from AI autocomplete on principal level. It shows you some options, but you make the final decision what to use.

And what about binaries? These days there are not many people who could tell the exact binary that is produced by certain source code.

IANAL, but the distinction is whether you are using the tool as a tool, in which case the code is still your creation, vs. the tool is the creator - and in this case I have to refer to a German definition as it was given to me - Geistiger Schöpfer (lit. spiritual creator), here [0] they define it as "An agent who is responsible for creating a work". Clearly this is something that would have to be decided by courts in some cases.

[0] https://sta.dnb.de/doc/RDA-E-W135

That doesn't seem right. While I agree that not being able to copyright AI generated commercial code is problematic and reason for avoiding it, the need to transfer all rights to customer doesn't seem like one of them.

Following your logic you couldn't use any third party library open source or not since you don't own copyrights to them either. Can't even use an existing compiler since parts of standard library will be embedded in it's output.

I assume what's actually intended in such cases is transferring all the rights necessary so that customer can afterwards do whatever they want with software without your permission, including making modifications, hiring someone else to further maintain it or even reselling it. It can still be a valid requirement not to depend on any commercial libraries which require temporary licensing or otherwise restrict customers ability to do what they want with combined software. Same applies for open source libraries with restrictive license (especially stuff like GPL).

When no one owns copyrights - everyone does. Both you and you custom have full rights to copy and distribute those parts of software as do everyone else, you just don't own exclusive rights (copyrights) to control whether and how anyone else can also copy those parts of software. Do you own copyright for number "10", does it mean you can't use it in your software.

The potentially problematic part is when you are trying to sell a commercial product and someone "pirates" it. If it's not copyrightable there is no piracy. In practice even largely AI generated software will contain some copyrightable parts, but the enforcement will probably still get a lot messier and no legal team wants that. In theory some could only copy the non-copyrightable parts and substitute the parts which weren't AI generated.

> When no one owns copyrights - everyone does. Both you and you custom have full rights to copy and distribute those parts of software as do everyone else, you just don't own exclusive rights (copyrights) to control whether and how anyone else can also copy those parts of software. Do you own copyright for number "10", does it mean you can't use it in your software.

Yes. It can be an issue depending of the wording of your agreement with the customer. For example, if 'you' agreed to develop a piece of software 'exclusively' for the customer, and then use AI to create substantial parts of the software, then neither it was 'you' who developed that, nor was it 'exclusively' for the customer as you can't grant exclusivity.

> For example, if 'you' agreed to develop a piece of software 'exclusively' for the customer, and then use AI to create substantial parts of the software, then neither it was 'you' who developed that, nor was it 'exclusively' for the customer

On the other hand, if ‘you’ had taken no action at all, then there would be no software at all. The actions by ‘you’ are necessary for the software to exist, so the argument must be about whether those actions count as development or not. Is the definition of development written down anywhere?

> Is the definition of development written down anywhere?

I think it is, but I'm not a German lawyer, so I'll just link what I did in another comment - it revolves around the question who is the Geistiger Schöpfer (lit. spiritual creator) https://sta.dnb.de/doc/RDA-E-W135

>The actions by ‘you’ are necessary for the software to exist, so the argument must be about whether those actions count as development or not.

Definition? Yes, but it's required over a hundred years of jurisprudence to apply it to different scenarios, in the US at least. It's amusing that you think the definition would clear things up.

I think this ruling is wrong.

It's not hard to imagine a compiler using AI to optimize byte code, and so now the binary it creates is no longer copyrightable?

Compilers and transpilers, even though someone else may have wrote them, the courts have held the the copyright of the output binary is whoever wrote the source code.

In that sense AI is nothing more than a English language to image compiler.

Compiled byte code is a derivative work of the original source code. Copyright extends to derivative works.

Wouldn't AI generated art be derivative work done by Google (or whoever) when creating their Gemini models? So then Google owns all gemini created ai artwork?

1. Model weights may not be copyrightable.

2. Copyright protects copying. Expressive elements from the original creative work (source code) exist in the byte code, thus it remains under the original copyright.

3. For a derivative work to be considered a newly copyrightable work (as opposed to a copy subject to the original's copyright), it must contain new substantive human creative expression (whether the original creator also has a copyright claim as well depends on degree of transformation).

Typically you need the permission of a copyright owner to create derivatives of their work.

But if I copyright the prompt to the input of the AI, does that not also become a derivative work?

I do believe in the US (I could be wrong) that copyright does exist without registering it with the US government.

You think this ruling on photography is wrong because of a strained comparison to AI use in a compiler? Take a step back and rethink your approach. The copyright office here is dealing with fundamental principles, not worrying about what the impacts will be to the use of compilers.

> there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is no copyright

Surely then same would apply to any photos edited with any of the fancy filters in Photoshop? Or any other software for that matter…

> just because I asked for it.

It often does (even in the example you have suggested previously). It’s just that you can’t legally hire a monkey to press the trigger unlike a human (even through its effectively the same thing)

There was no person that took the photo with a canon digital SLR. It was a bunch of machinery and microchips and a sensor.

> Replace the monkey with a 2nd human, and it's obvious that "the guy" does not earn the copyright, it goes to the person who took the photo. If there was no person, then there is no copyright.

If I set up an entire scene with props and artwork for a photoshoot with a model, but I would like to actually be the model so I ask a friend to go behind the tripod and tap the shutter, the friend holds the copyright?

It depends.

Did they have any creative input before hitting the shutter? Did they tell you to move? Or adjust lighting? Did they choose the angle or framing?

These answers influence the answer to your question.

If they did then the monkey wouldn't have been awarded copyright on that photo.

The monkey wasn't awarded copyright on that photo. Neither was the man. Monkey's can't own copyright on anything.

You're missing the point of that comment.

On a re-read yeah perhaps I did.

well, you use a remote shutter release or a timer, and remove all ambiguity by removing the friend.

there's a scene in one of those Matthew McConaughey romcoms where he plays a photog. The crew has a scene completely setup up and ready to go so that he just walks in, hits the shutter release one time, and then walks away with little care as job is done. He's now credited for that photo, yet did the least effort possible. (that scene isn't too far off while only slightly hyperbolic)

Then a machine took the photo and it can't be copyrighted, apparently. These rules are totally arbitrary.

The machine took the photo either way, in fact. Whether you press the instant shutter button, or delayed one. And the film is what responds to the scene.

It seems almost directly analogous to asking the AI for an image that you imagine.

All rules are totally arbitrary and commanded by those holding the power to their benefit.

You would make a contract with a copyright assignment.

The monkey situation is kinda screwy of course because ... a contract with a monkey?

"No copyright" as a result in the monkey case seems like a technically legally correct but sad outcome.

For AI tools it's likely currently technically correct as well, but the law probably needs some updating.

And yet my company owns the copyright on all of the content I produce?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43405240

Based on the contract you signed, yes. Though there still are stipulations for you as a designer. You can't design Mickey Mouse and then Disney says "you're not allowed to say you designed Mickey Mouse". Accreditation of the individuals is the very mimunum of protections you have as an artist who surrenders their copyright.

My initial response to this was to think of all the artists who don't actually create their own work. Lots of contemporary artists have assistants that do the actual painting, sculpting, installation, etc. Even way back a lot of masters were credited for work that was done by apprentices.

But, then on the other hand I suppose that in the eyes of the law, a monkey can't legally sign a contract agreeing to pass ownership over to the person 'employing' them as an assistant.

It's a strange grey area though – Warhol's whole thing was how the factory made the art. People have been making generative art for decades before AI came along, and as far as I know – and I went to school for Art and studied Art History pretty extensively – people just said, "oh that's a cool way to call ownership and authenticity into question." But generally nobody doubted that like, Damien Hirst is the copyright holder of his works even if an assistant makes it – and even if they have no formal piece of paper that lays it all out.

The real issue is that the monkey (or Stable Diffusion) cannot be sued in civil court for copyright infringement, so they can't be granted copyrights in the first place: it makes no sense to have one-way streets of legal responsibility.

Note that a human-made curation of AI or animal art is protected by copyright (e.g. you can copyright an AI art coffee table book). The original case involved an AI-generated graphic novel: the author could claim copyright for the whole book but not the individual panels.

>it makes no sense to have one-way streets of legal responsibility.

That seems to be a very flawed argument.

I am perfectly fine with parents having a legal responsibility to take care of their children without the children owing any legal obligation to their parents.

Imagine being required by law to act in the interests of your financial adviser. It would almost be codifying the reality.

They do a have a legal obligation though. Otherwise chores would be unpaid child labor.

> Lots of contemporary artists have assistants that do the actual painting, sculpting, installation, etc.

this is outlandish bullshit

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-damien-hirst-is-controve...

> There are nearly 1,400 of Damien Hirst's "spot" paintings in existence.

> The artist has only painted around 25 of them himself.

All the classic masters have workshops, where they have students or assistants that complete a rough cut of their work and they finish it.

You might be shocked to discover that this has been a thing for hundreds of years.

Why is the person who "took the photo" the thing that pressed the button and not the person who did 99% of the work?

I think my understand is that because the work itself is already covered by different laws (eg trespassing), you had the opportunity to make a verbal contract with the person who took the photo. And the same in reverse: because they used your camera, they implicitly agreed for you to have the right to that copy of their work. If they didn’t get the copyright automatically, then they wouldn’t be able to assign it to you as a condition of being present, leading to other potential legal complications where works could be created but where nobody holds the right to assign them to someone else, since nobody was 100% responsible for the creativity that generated it

Assuming I read this right, and that’s a big assumption, do I have this.. right? The guy in my hypothetical below knows the copyright law and is making a legal request.

guy is walking by family and is asked to take their photo

guy takes photo

same guy asks for a copy of the family photo

awkwardness intensifies

————-

I really liked what you wrote and appreciate your knowledge you brought to the thread, but what I really loved about reading your comment was the deeper and deeper you took us into the weeds of law the stranger and further divorced from reality it feels. Maybe that’s just me?

I think that depends what you mean by legal request. The guy is not making a request of the legal system, so no, it is not specifically a legal request in that sense. However, if someone did make a legal request later, the testimony of this exchange might be introduced as evidence that they had a entered into a contractual agreement verbally to give the guy a right to have a copy of the photo for his private use. (Remember that the family also have a legal right to their own likeness, though it is a privacy law, not copyright, so there are multiple dimensions here as to who has the initial rights in the interaction). Replace "family" with "celebrity" and I think you'd have a plausible scenario that might end up in court on occasion.

It isn't necessarily one or the other, it depends on numerous factors. Works can be made for hire as one example. Annie Liebowitz still is the author of a photograph even if she has her assistant pull the shutter. You might even be surprised to realize that is an incredibly common occurrence in professional studio photography. Everyone in this thread is searching for one really quick answer to apply to all situations and it does not work that way. The courts look at a number of factors to make these determinations.

Ah, I see, so all those Hollywood camera operators own the copyright for all the footage they took for studios.

Multi-trillion dollar class action lawsuit here we come...

Well no, because they are employees / contractors of the film studio, who presumably claim all copyright of what they captured.

However, the camera operators likely do own the pictures they take with their own cameras on-set, provided the contract they are working under allows for such ownership

In that case there's going to be a pre-existing work-for-hire agreement where the camera operator assigns copyright to the studio.

Perhaps the people who do photography and filming for a business have thought of it. So, yes, but there are of course multiple ways to work with a team (or in a team of two - not to be the one pressing the shutter and still being the one owning the copyright.)

Hollywood camera operators are in a union with a contract. They are working for hire, and have no claim beyond their contract.

no, because Hollywood in 100 years has already evolved through every possible lying weasel lawsuit you or others here could imagine.. and yet humans continue to dream, write, paint and act. Single-line gotcha's are not new, hold no weight, produce very little that is constructive IMHO

What happens if you ask "the guy" to paint a picture of mickey mouse?

You can't just replace monkeys with humans when the legal system doesn't treat them as the same class of organism.

It's clear "the guy" did the majority of the creative work, so whilst it's "not difficult to understand" the law, it is a nuanced situation. Pretending it is not because of the letter of the law is just sidestepping the conversation we are trying to have.

This is a very good point.

For example, consider a photograph of a painting. The photographer owns the copyright to the photo, but the artist retains copyright over the painting contained within the photo, which is derivative of the original artwork.

It is less obvious that simply setting up a scene and camera where anybody (including a monkey) can use it meets that threshold for an original work. After all, the scene was outdoors and completely natural.

My employer asserts copyright over everything I produce. Yet I'm the one writing the code.

Yup. Because we agreed to that up front to "transfer ownership" or some jargon. Otherwise yes it is yours.

My understanding is that work done for an employer as part of your normal job duties is considered work for hire and your employer owns it.

Employers might also have you sign a contract to avoid legal questions about whether part of your work was in the scope of those duties.

But what if I made "that guy" to take the photo, just like I "made" (prompted) AI?

In cases like this it's best to ask why we have copyright law in the first place. Do we feel the supply of such photos is naturally lower then we'd like to such an extent that we'd grant a legally enforced monopoly on its distribution?

Yes it is in fact difficult and nuanced. The act of pressing the shutter button does not create copyright. The creative work done to make the photograph possible does.

Who owns the copyright to the footage of a motion triggered security camera? The person breaking in?

Is all motion triggered trail cam footage public domain?

It seems pretty reasonable that copyright should lay with the entity that had the actual intention on creating a work. Not whatever force happened to trigger it.

>Is all motion triggered trail cam footage public domain?

i think a lot of us would be ok with that, so that's not the showstopper argument you might this it is.

If I paint a digital painting, and then ask my friend to click the "save as" button, does he own the copyright? Or even better, what if the painting is auto-saved by the software?

It's worth pointing out that this was just a US Copyright Office ruling. It never went to court[1], where the "expert consensus" is that the photographer would have prevailed. But the value of the handful of photographs was tiny in comparison with the publicity (which was always true) so no one ever went to court to try to prove it.

It's not really clear to me how much this AI case matches though. There seems naively to have been a lot more creative work rigging that specific bit of monkey art than there is in applying a decidedly generic AI image generation tool. That AI is so much more capable as a machine for generating art than a camera is seems to cut strongly against the idea here.

[1] Note that PETA then tried to use this case to drive the converse point, suing on behalf of the monkey who they wanted to hold the copyright. They lost, unsurprisingly.

I see this as "That thing which doesn't work is currently not working. Again." The DMCA and copyright laws and regulations in the US are predatory nonsense, carefully crafted by lawyers in order to exploit the maximum amount of cash possible from people who actually do produce things.

The DMCA doesn't support artists and creators even indirectly; it empowers those least deserving and most ruthless to steal the profit, pat themselves on the back, and moralize about "following the law" to everyone else.

Copyright should be implicit and ironclad for 5 years. After that, 99.999% of sales have been made, whether your material is digital or otherwise. From 5 to 20 years, you should retain right to profits from the sale of any copy, but it should be 100% legal to copy, distribute, archive, remix, or whatever else you want with it so long as you aren't trying to sell it. After 20 years, public domain, no exceptions, no carveouts for family, friends, crafty lawyers, important politicians, or anyone else. No grandfathering, no special rules for special people.

Things made with AI should be protected by copyright, with the rights held by the user of the tool that generated the image. Like any other digital art.

There are machines that can paint your Dall-E renaissance creation onto a canvas with the style of your favorite master. The tools we have at hand have empowered us to rapidly and easily explore a vast domain of images, videos, music, voices, creative writing, and to do research and technical projects and write code in ways that were unthinkable 10 years ago.

These judges and lawyers think it's ok for them to rule on things without having the slightest clue as to the operation, function, and consequences of the technology - this ruling does nothing except to reinforce the status quo and empower the entrenched rights holders - the massive corporations, platforms, "studios", agents, and miscellaneous other gaggles of lawyers who trade in rights to media, but produce nothing of value in themselves.

Imagine a world in which content creators got paid a fair return relative to the revenue generated by their work, in which platforms and interlopers were limited to something like 5% of the total generated profit per work, after cost (to the creator). There'd be no incentive for bullshit rulings like this, with no angry mobs of litigious bastards with nothing better to do than sue for tampering with their racket. I cannot possibly see any other path to this ruling than this; else this judge is fortunate beyond words that his community has so uplifted the mentally deficient among them.

> Things made with AI should be protected by copyright, with the rights held by the user of the tool that generated the image. Like any other digital art.

I would agree for carefully crafted outputs where the human had a major contribution. But if I just generate a million texts or images with my model, that should not fly.

Yeah, I think some individuals aren't arguing in good faith here. If you put significant human work into collaging a bunch of AI images into something transformative, then sure. You probably can own that. You don't need to create everything by hand.

But that's clearly now what this case is discussing. They gave a few prompts and a machine did 99% of the work.Maybe they edited it later in post, but the base output is not copyrightable without significant alterations.

The photography example isn't even that clean. Yes, we have in fact argued for over a century on what pictures of what and who and where and who took it in terms of who "owns" a picture vs. The subject. They are in fact a great example on how complicated it can get when you don't have hours of manual effort exerted.

That's a bit inflexible. Some authors spend their entire adult lives writing a single series of books - yanking copyright out from under them just isn't fair. The same is true of movie franchises, comics, and almost any kind of media that gets released over time.

I've spent some time considering the issue and have come to the conclusion that the truly broken part of copyright is that it provides no incentive to release unprofitable works to the public domain.

What I'd like to see is a system where maintaining copyright costs the copyright owners at an increasing rate. For example, set a term for copyright (say 5 years) and set the cost of registering copyright to 10^n, where n is the number of times you've registered the copyright before. Initial registration costs $1, years 6-10 cost $10, years 11-15 cost $100, and so on.

A system like this would benefit small creators (they'd have time to make a profit before renewal became cost prohibitive) and encourage companies like Disney to release works that aren't profitable anymore.

I'd also recommend using the money from this system to fund a digital archive run by the library of congress. You would need to provide a complete copy of the copyrighted work in order to receive a copyright. Any works that enter the public domain would be made available for, say, five years. That way, we wouldn't lose old works that are entering public domain but no copies exist anymore.

Obviously, there's all kinds of issues with a system like that and it would need to be fleshed out and clarified, but I think it'd be a good starting point.

As I understand that is a misunderstanding of the case. They argued that the animal should get the copyright, and lost, because animals do not qualify. They did not establish that pressing the button is required for the human to qualify for copyright. They established that a monkey pressing the button doesn't qualify the monkey. (because the monkey never qualifies)

If they would have argued that the human should have got copyright for it, they almost certainly would have agreed. It's just, that wasn't the case they put forth.

https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium-12-22-14.pdf

Section 313.2

The copyright office said that photographs taken by monkeys nor murals painted by elephants are works that may be copyrighted. This is based on Burrow-Giles Lithography vs Sarony ( https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/111/53 )

The issue is that the photographer / owner of the camera didn't exercise any creative control over the photograph.

> On 22 August 2014, the day after the US Copyright Office published their opinion, a spokesperson for the UK Intellectual Property Office was quoted as saying that, while animals cannot own copyright under UK law, "the question as to whether the photographer owns copyright is more complex. It depends on whether the photographer has made a creative contribution to the work and this is a decision which must be made by the courts."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

And this is a "it's complicated" and further complicated by the difference in threshold of originality with US law and sweat of the brow for UK law.

Right, it hinges on the creativity of the human author. And there’s a lot more to creativity of photography than simply pushing a button.

Obviously, routine and ordinary photographs taken by a photographer on a timer are not disqualified just because a machine pushed the button.

I am not saying that anything with a monkey qualifies, my point is that the involvement of a monkey is not disqualifying.

It always felt to me like the photographer was trying to have it both ways there:

"Whoa! Isn't this sooo trippy! A monkey showing self-awareness to take a picture of itself!"

Courts: "Okay, the monkey took it, so no copyright for you."

"No, you don't get it! I put in a ton of work to stage that to the point that the monkey just had to be in the right place at the right time. Hell, a worm could have triggered it!"

I'm not sure where you arrived at that conclusion.

The photographer has been claiming the entire time it's his copyright while other people (namely PETA) have been arguing the monkey should have it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

You missed that the selling point of the picture is the supposed self awareness and intent involved in the monkey taking a selfie?

Yes, of course the author has always wanted the copyright. But the whole reason the picture has value contradicts the basis for that copyright claim. You can’t simultaneously say that you did all the work, and that it’s so cool to see a genuine, self-directed monkey selfie.

From his blog in 2011 [1].

> I put my camera on a tripod with a very wide angle lens, settings configured such as predictive autofocus, motorwind, even a flashgun, to give me a chance of a facial close up if they were to approach again for a play. I duly moved away and bingo, they moved in, fingering the toy, pressing the buttons and fingering the lens.

> ...

> They played with the camera until of course some images were inevitably taken!

Afaik, he has never taken the position that the monkey did any more work besides just hitting the button. He just didn't contest news articles overly stating the role of the monkey. There's also a significant amount of photos taken definitely by him on the same blog post so it's not like the purpose of the blog post is the monkey photo.

[1]: http://www.djsphotography.co.uk/Tropical%20Forests/Sulawesi%...

It doesn't sound like you're disputing my core point, that he's

- trying to benefit (financially) from the unrebutted presumption that the picture shows the monkey's self-awareness and understanding that it's taking a selfie

while also

- trying to benefit (in the courts) from the diametrically opposite position that the picture shows no such thing because of how staged it is.

Thus, "trying to have it both ways".

If your point is just that I shouldn't have represented the subtext of his marketing as an actual quote, while it's okay to do that for the argument he made in the courts ... sure, point conceded.

The photographer didn't get the copyrights exactly because he didn't "engineer the entire situation specifically for that outcome". If he did create the situation, he'd get the copyright.

It's sort of disputed. Here's Slater's account:

> In an attempt to get a portrait of the monkeys' faces, Slater said he set the camera on a tripod with a large wide-angle lens attached, and set the camera's settings to optimize the chances of getting a facial close up, using predictive autofocus, motor drive, and a flashgun. Slater further stated that he set the camera's remote shutter trigger next to the camera and, while he held onto the tripod, the monkeys spent 30 minutes looking into the lens and playing with the camera gear, triggering the remote multiple times and capturing many photographs. The session ended when the "dominant male at times became over excited and eventually gave me a whack with his hand as he bounced off my back".

I don't believe it ever went to court.

I think the assumption arises from the flawed premise that everyone who does some difficult activity is (1) automatically entitled to economic renumeration AND (2) entitled to a government bestowed monopoly.

The fact is none of those "rights" are inherent. Copyright is a specific trade between the author and the society to supposedly benefit both parties. The principles that lead to such trade being beneficial may not be true for AI generated work (or in a world with widespread AI in general).

Think of copyright as a form of economic stimulus, not a god given right to everyone who holds a pen. The ideals of liberalism and western civilization can survive with or without copyright or patents.

i'm filing this one under "intellectual property is dumb and bad" and leaning my entire body weight on the door of the filing cabinet to try and get it to close

This case is confusing because there were actually three sides.

Wikimedia (and others) were arguing that the image was in public domain because animals can't hold copyright. PETA were arguing that monkeys should be able to hold copyright. And the original "photographer" was arguing that he should own the copyright because he did everything except push the button.

The only side that actually reached court was PETA, arguing the monkey should hold copyright. And the court promptly ruled against PETA. But that ruling doesn't say the image is public domain, it simply rules the monkey can't hold copyright.

It wasn't even an interesting court case, copyright law is pretty clear that animals can't hold copyright. Nobody (other than PETA) really thought otherwise.

If the original "photographer" actually went to court against the public domain camp, I do think they would have a decent chance of winning back the copyright to that image. But he never scrapped together enough funding for a lawsuit, so it hasn't gone to court.

What I can't believe is to funnel every student in school in front of the same photographer, have him/her press a button, and then it costs grandma $110 for an 8x10 and two wallet-sized photos.

If only he had wired up the shutter to an AND gate, one for the monkey and one for him.

Since the monkey can't contribute he'd be the sole owner for holding down half of the button.

Consider these (rhetorical, I am not sure I'm up for the nuanced debate given IANAL) questions:

1. Who owns the rights to a commissioned piece of art? The artist, or the commissioner? Which rights?

2. What about derived works of art made with or without the permission of the original artist(s)? When a book is turned into a film, who "rightfully" owns what? When the Rolling Stones wrote Sympathy For the Devil, did the estate of Mikhail Bulgakov have a right to feel aggrieved, and should they have received royalties?

3. What rights can be assigned/transferred, and what rights can't be? What needs to happen for that process to be legally binding?

4. Is a monkey capable of being a willing participant in a photograph, or a contract assigning rights in any way?

5. Same question, but for a machine? What does it mean for an AI to assign rights, or assert moral rights?

5. If the law makes it clear that a legal party to a statute (law), or contract must be a human or other legal subject (an incorporated business), can those laws and contracts lawfully apply to an animal or machine?

6. What is the intent of intellectual property law? Many argue it is mostly civil law, that follows the spirit of civil law in striving towards fairness?

We can argue if intellectual property law implementation is just, but your issue seems to be that the time invested in planning a creative act is the central tenet on which a copyright protection should be determined.

If so, Picasso was wrong to argue that his quick sketch on a napkin took him "a lifetime" to create, and your argument is just and correct. I disagree.

Regardless, what do you think the law is attempting to actually protect which is not "time taken to plan and create the work"?

Note when thinking about these questions it might be helpful to remember that ownership, copyright and moral rights are not all equivalent things in law.

In the USA:

1. The artist owns the copyright.

2. Derived works without permission of the author are illegal, unless under specific exemptions like fair use. The author of a book made into a film continues to own their words, the filmmakers own their original creative contributions to the work. Concepts and themes can't be copyrighted, so unless the Stones quoted Bulgakov's words verbatim, his estate would have no claim.

3. "The ownership of a copyright may be transferred in whole or in part by any means of conveyance or by operation of law, and may be bequeathed by will or pass as personal property by the applicable laws of intestate succession."

4. You'd have to ask the monkey. No.

5. Copyright law only applies to people, so there is no meaning to those concepts.

5-2. Animals and machines are considered property, so property law is applied to them.

6. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

> Meanwhile I can open my phone's camera, spin around three times, take a photo of whatever the hell happens to be in its viewfinder and somehow that is sufficient human creativity to deserve copyright protection.

Your comment made me wonder if this rule can open a door to a new legal precedent in which you aren't the owner of photos taken with your smartphone because camera app utilizes AI to "enhance" whatever you had in frame and you can't disable it, exluding your from legal ownership. And copyright to these photos is ceeded to corporation whose device you purchased, and/or one which provided the alrogithms

> Does the Situation Benefit Large Corporations holding the copyright?

Falls 100% into the category of protected by copyright

> Does the Situation Benefit small Artists or the individual consumer?

Always has been this way, always will be. And that's why you should teach your children how to pirate media, circumvent DRM and use FOSS whenever possible.

I think part of it is that he made such a big deal about saying the monkey took his camera and took the photo, to drum up excitement about the whole thing, not realizing that the rest of the world would use that as an excuse to publish his photo without giving him credit for it. I'm not even sure the monkey actually took the photo itself, but the story that made the photo popular has been the story for so long that he can't walk it back now.

Wait a minute. Don't wild life photographers own the copyright of their images if they set up cameras with motion-detection? Like a billion pictures of birds are taken this way.

Assisted work is the big clarifier I think

Is a picture edited with photoshop invalid when it uses content fill? What about a picture taken with an iphone, where AI could be part of the phone's processing pipeline or even generate details to make up for lack of optical zoom?

Does spell correction invalidate a book? what if there's AI rephrasing features at work? Where's the line?

I think as you get into those side questions, the only reasonable position becomes treating AI as tooling no different than any other piece of equipment.

I'd also think the creative input jumping mediums would also be a factor. Text to image is obviously a jump.

You are right but there are a lot of curmudgeons that want you to get of their lawn with your AI. Really this whole situation is more of an indictment of copyright rather than of AI.

I think this specific quote from the article deals with this situation.

> U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel on Tuesday that U.S. copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being."

> as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image

There is the question of merit. IANAL/IIUC/etc., but I think it's necessary for a work to have merit to be copyrightable. Now, that's a somewhat vague term to me (perhaps it's clearer in a legal framework), but if I prompt "create a picture of a dog", the computer does most of the work. A prompt would have to be pretty concise, up to specifying all kinds of aspects of the image, for it to be the instructor's merit, to me (that's an important caveat).

Maybe the best idea would be just to scrap copyright alltogether. It just blocks people from collaborating and building on top of each other's work. If everyone demanded royalties, where would Linux be? Wikipedia? scientific research? Could we even have this conversation in a forum?

Not really a fan of destroying a framework just because some rich people finally find it inconvenient. You know it won't be retroactive anyway.

The common people have always found it inconvenient.

Pirated media routinely has a better user experience than otherwise. AO3 shows how powerfully people are drawn to fan-fiction (which still exists in a very legally grey area, despite the size of the community). I don't think a lot of people here support what happened to Aaron Swartz. "Information wants to be free".

If it's also now inconvenient to the rich, I think one can reasonably ask who exactly is benefiting?

> I think one can reasonably ask who exactly is benefiting?

My guess would be the authors, photographers, etc. Many of who are not the rich but middle class. I would think if they did not benefit, none of this would even be an issue as they could release their work and waive the copyright-isn't that what the Creative Commons license is for? If copyright were forced on the author and they had no way to share their work freely, if they choose to do so, then that would be a problem, imo.

This is not so simple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476

Copyright only exists to protect the rich. The lowlys don’t make patents, they don’t make money from their songs they put on Spotify, and they have to pay to watch movies.

There is a pile of economics literature dedicated to what would happen if copyright didn’t exist (anarcho-something-capitalism, if I remember).

For starters, industrial nations all raised when copyright wasn’t a thing, including China in 1980-2020.

You build wonders when you don’t need to track who owns every imaginary concept, idea, song that you can sing, bytes that are so easily copied from one disk to another, and in hindsight, our descendants might think it was totally strange that we used so much state resources, jurors, policemen, heaps of lawyers, to give a task to the state related to preventing people from reusing each other’s imaginary concepts.

It protects the photographs that I've taken from the rich to be able to steal it and reproduce them much more cheaply than I can.

It protects the open source contributions that I've made from the rich, by being able to take them and hide them away in a product that doesn't need to abide by the license enforced by copyright.

> A computer cannot be the author but as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image or wrote the code that allowed the computer to generate the image on its own, then the human is the author.

That is exactly not the case. US law specifically requires that a copyright can only be given to something an author has fixed into a tangible medium of expression. It is the act of fixing itself that makes an item copyrightable.

The law specifically excludes any process or procedure by which a work might ultimately come to be fixed from copyright protection.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102

> as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image or wrote the code that allowed the computer to generate the image on its own, then the human is the author.

The human would be the author of the prompt, but not the image IMO. The image was created not (only) by the author of the prompt, but also the numerous authors of the images consumed by the model and the authors of the model itself.

It was insipred by these authors, not created. I won’t claim where copyright/authorship should be, but this reduction makes less sense than needed for important definitions.

Software does not get inspired

Now it does.

Inspiration implies some intrinsic creativity that gets an impulse from someone else's work, but is not determined by it. We don't know how creativity and inspiration works in humans, but we know for sure that response of a generative model is 100% determined by its weights, which in turn are determined by the data it consumed during training, and the prompt.

So what. Why do you think that determinism should play any role here?

2 + 2 = 4

Nothing inspired or creative about it. It comes out the same every time no matter who calculates it. That’s what people want to copyright except the first 2 is other people’s art and the second 2 are the weights.

Why do you think it doesn’t matter?

Because it's not a process of copying.

Determinism or randomness should play no role here. The fact that the output is a function of model, training data and prompt (and nothing else) makes the result a derived work from the training data.

By stretching "derived" that far you inevitably cover pre-AI human inspirations. It doesn't make sense.

It makes sense if you don’t think of humans as tools and think of art consumption pre-AI. Very little would be made public if people thought their work would get scooped up to create these models.

I, and others, don’t care if the process of observing and generating output works the same way because people and tools don’t need to be held to the same standard. As I’ve said numerous times elsewhere, big picture, AI and humans are different in practically every other way and that is seemingly never taken into consideration when promoting AI adoption. It’s also a big leap to say we fully understand how human creativity works which is still under study.

You may, I could be wrong, believe oppositely because it means you can benefit directly from these tools but other people view it through the lens of what they or others may lose and that is no less rational. Social constructs require social consensus. If you got rid of capitalism people might be more open to your viewpoint but as it stands this just smells like socializing human creativity for free, in a way people could never anticipate, to make other people money, no doubt consolidating more power in corporations, who can afford to run the models at scale, as is standard.

I suppose we’re unlikely to agree so I’ll leave it at this.

AI is always human until it isn’t. It’s not copyright infringement if the AI learned from input like a human but also it’s just a tool that can’t copyright its own output. It’s a moral imperative someone ought to make money off that /s

Most importantly it can't be held liable like a human.

That was one hell of a photogenic monkey

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...

Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an AI model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an image, is that considered "human intervention" and does that make that human the author of that image?

What if its a group of 5 humans that built the LLM and one of them prompts it?

Isn't all AI built by some of group of humans? When is AI treated like its own entity like a monkey versus a tool made by a human?

I would assume that whomever prompts the AI is the author of the work. Adobe or Dell doesn't get to claim ownership to your work just because they made the tool or computer.

That makes sense to me, and good point about Adobe/Dell.

So then any AI would not create art spontaneously right? It would always require a user to prompt it in some way. So wouldn't it be correct to say that all AI art is actually be authored by a human and as such copyrighted to that human?

Copyright covers the prompt, it's not even clear why it should be relevant for the output of the AI software based on that prompt.

That's like saying copyright covers the mouse clicks and mouse movements in Photoshop but not the output pixels.

You might find that strange and disagree with it with a flawed analogy but I've merely reported the official stance of the US Copyright Office and legal precedents. See, for instance, this overview with further references:

https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2025/02/us-co...

"Prompts Are Generally Insufficient to Make AI Output Copyrightable"

If you don't trust this summary, read the US Copyright Office report for yourself. The gist of the position is that prompts are not specific enough and do not lead to deterministic output.

On a side note, I find it weird that even on HN people automatically assume you're only expressing a personal opinion, yet in all fairness I should have included some references from the start.

If the output always changes for the same input prompt, did you really author anything?

It wouldn’t change on the same seed, same hardware and identical settings

I also wonder this. I can write instructions to draw an image on the screen using OpenGL - or I can write an LLM and prompt it to draw an image. Why should I get authorship rights in one case but not the other?

> Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an AI model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an image, is that considered "human intervention" and does that make that human the author of that image?

No, you misunderstand. The human involved is explicitly claiming the work was entirely AI authored, and that it should be given a copyright registration with the AI as the author.

The human is not claiming that they should get a copyright as the author for the reasons you describe. Had the human claimed authorship, the results of the case might have been very different. This case seems to have been engineered to lose for publicity, rather than being a serious attempt to secure copyright on the work.

Exactly.

We really need a human-human dispute where human A used AI to make a work and claims copyright and human B disputes the copyright. That’s the kind of case that would get into the standards for necessary human input.

Not sure if anything like that’s been filed yet.

I think in later cases we'll get some tests to apply about how much human intervention is required.

Who trained the LLM is probably not the issue, the courts would likely want to know about the training material. If I trained a model exclusively on Warhol art, and then had that model create new images in Warhol's style, I didn't do any of the creative work and probably don't get the copyright. Warhol's estate probably owns the copyright to the model generated images as they are derivative works.

I do think that a model trained on many different artists' works, with me providing substantial feedback to the model (and I can show the process), probably will at some point give me the copyright.

Somewhere there is a line:

- "Make a picture of a mouse." Probably not giving you copyright

- Using a model to erase a powerline in a photograph you took. Probably you own the copyright to the original image and the one without a powerline in it (regardless of how many other people's images the model was trained on).

- "Make a picture of a mouse, who is bipedal, wearing pink shorts, with a chip in his ear, wearing sunglasses, with scruffy whiskers, holding a surfboard, on his way to the beach to hit some waves." then updating with "make him shorter, give him blue sneakers" and then updating with numerous other tweaks until you get it just the way you want. Who knows where this lands?

I think that in the short term the courts are going to land on the side of "anything made by a model trained on existing artwork is derivative of the training set so you can't own the copyright, no matter how much you tweak it." I think eventually the courts will recognize there is some amount of input that makes the computer image the realization of a vision in your head, and not a derivative of the training set. Just how every individual musical note has been played before, but at some point, you put them together in an arrangement that is original.

> If I trained a model exclusively on Warhol art, and then had that model create new images in Warhol's style, I didn't do any of the creative work and probably don't get the copyright.

If I watch exclusively Warhol images for years and then paint something similar I get copyright.

There needs to be a gray are, because usually art is not done in a vacuum?

> If I watch exclusively Warhol images for years and then paint something similar I get copyright.

Not necessarily. If you copy one of Warhol's works but "change it a little" then that is a derivative work, and the copyright belongs to Warhol's estate. Depending on how close of a copy it is, you would have a tough time defending your claim to copyright in court. The advantage an offending artist has in court is that they can claim "inspiration" as long as they don't admit to copying.

For a computer model the difference maker is that the court can probably obtain records of a training set, so if the training set is exclusively Warhol works it is probably easy to get a court to side on "derivative" and assume the computer does not possess inspiration.

Courts have basically baked in "gray areas" in copyright cases. The historical copyright tests are all written as to sound like mathematical formulas but everything is kind of subjective.

You also cannot train only on Warhol imagery, unless he drew billions of pics. So this is hypothetical “if”. In reality you finetune an existing network based on a dataset much larger than Warhol’s.

I guess we will see when this gets tested in court. This current case linked to in the original article does not address this since the plaintiff already waived their own right to copyright already before copyright office.

There are 3 scenarios:

1) The AI should be the copyright holder (this judgement says NO).

2) If not 1 then the human should be the copyright holder via work-for-hire (this judgement says NO).

3) Human should be the copyright holder because they're the only human involved in the authoring (this lawsuit does not address this since direct copyright claims had already been waived).

> if a single human creates an AI model and trains it

... on only their own artwork?

Yeah, but this is legal loophole start

how can you prove that this is my artwork not yours???

Ai data is gathered from public and private sources. Unless that data is entirely private source, it's inappropriate to be able to copyright those derivitive works.

They are inspired though, not derivative. AI models contain no source data in a reproducible form (not that it really matters, but in case it is, they can’t).

Not really. It contains all kinds of copyrightable data. It's like a dictionary of phrases. Sire there are lots of generic ones, "a lot of", "this or that" and then there are novel ones "It is a truth universally acknowledged".

Your writing and artwork will contain these novel bits and if your accidentally string the right few together you're suddenly in a lot of trouble.

Do you see that in practice? E.g. after you finetune an llm/sd model, does it string it together?

Can't speak for llms, but I'm an SD enthusiast with 2 YoE, which tells me that most of these threads have nearly no idea what they are talking and theorizing about. I see meaningless reductions to technicalities similar to "it's just neurons firing" and general lack of basic knowledge that should come with the minimal practice beyond just talking to it. While working hard to actually reproduce the concepts from the training sets in a way that can be called resembling-enough and compatible with other models.

So I apologize if this sounds challenging, but I'm not into a bare philosophy around AI. Practice tells me a completely different story than these threads tend to express, and I know that very few people actually tinker with AI any deeper than trying to write system/instruction prompts into the chat-mode chat box.

Couldn't the same argument be made for photography? You aren't making the image, the camera is doing all the work.

Try taking photographs like the ones you see in Nat Geo, or museum exhibits, and you'll quickly realize the camera is most definitely NOT doing all the work.

If you buy an expensive camera with expensive lenses, you will be able to take such photos, won't you?

In fact, you can take such photos with a cheap camera and cheap lenses if you are skilled. No, equipment does not make a photograph. (source: I own expensive cameras. Taking good photographs is still hard.)

Time and place matter. Your subject matters. Your composition matters. Your lighting matters. When it's done well, the viewer doesn't realize this.

I love Ted Orland's panorama photographs - https://www.anseladams.com/products/tree-in-snowstorm-yosemi... and https://www.freestylephoto.com/making-holga-panoramas

While he shoots with the cheapest of toy cameras, he is very skilled.

> 1966, Ted enrolled in as a fledgling photographer in Ansel Adams' Yosemite Photography Workshop --an event which markedly changed the course of his artistic life. He returned to Yosemite as Ansel's workshop assistant the following year, and in 1970 moved to Carmel to work fulltime as Ansel's Assistant and printer of Adams' Yosemite Special Edition Prints. Ted also returned for fifteen seasons as an Instructor at Ansel's Yosemite Workshops.

Only if you get into the right place at the right time and use your tools well...

Ernest Hemingway: Good pictures, what camera do you use?

Irving Penn: What typewriter do you use?

Maybe.

There's a technical aspect around camera and photo settings. This is largely objective. In certain conditions, certain settings deliver certain qualities.

Then, there's a subjective side. Framing, composition, other artistic decisions.

The camera is doing the work of recording the image, although certainly the human operator is doing the work of composition, lighting, etc. The fact remains, no matter how much human work goes into every other aspect of producing the photograph, the camera is the object that is capturing the image.

Edit: not to say that I think this is a relevant factor! No more than the computer recording the keys you type or producing the physical printed page should be relevant for a book's copyright.

Right. It's not doing "all the work" as the parent said. (Not to mention the editing process that comes afterwards!) Indeed, some photographers distinguish the two as "taking" a photograph versus "making" a photograph.

But the thing is that you don't need to take Nat Geo-level photographs to be considered the owner and sole creator of the photograph. I can pull out my phone right now and press one button - and I'll be the rightful owner of whatever comes out on the other end. The resulting photo will be produced because of settings that were set automatically (with no intervention or any required knowledge of what any of them do), and run through several image processing algorithms (that very few people understand or even give thought to). Point being - why is any near-zero interaction with a camera enough to be considered proper authorship, but every level of interaction with gAI never authorship, regardless of what is done?

Right. The same can be said for AI art. If you think you can exactly reproduce stylistically of some of the more popular AI work, you would be mistaken.

I agree, to an extent. I mentioned it in another comment but IMO there's a big difference between someone who types a low-effort prompt like "silly image of a cat" and someone who spends hours or days iterating on a prompt. Or someone who uses AI to iteratively tweak an image (which may or may not have initially been AI-generated.) Or someone who creates art out of smaller components created by AI (e.g. textures.)

No there isn't (a big difference)

Like, really. If I open ms paint and just do some low effort scrawl, I have copyright on that. Level of effort has not ever decided if something is copyrightable or not.

For derivative works, there is real effort required to de distinct from the original. Maybe that's a more interesting discussion... Is low effort use of an AI insufficient to prevent the copyright from reverting to the original authors it was trained on?

On top of that "level of effort" is obviously very subjective.

It’s just a new phenomenon that you can get a relatively sophisticated result from a short sentence. But the amount of efforts or iterations doesn’t condition anything here.

If AI could hold copyright I'd be more worried about automation.

In similar fashion to this:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...

> What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder?

I can see a possible future where AI actually exists and shutting one down could be murder. At that point it would even be a good thing to grant the AI personhood. What passes for "AI" these days doesn't come anywhere close to that, but I wouldn't say it could never happen.

About 95% of the conversation about “AI” has this problem right now: there are some interesting theoretical legal and social implications from AI, but what we have right now are LLMs, not AI. They can’t replace your workers, they can’t make art, they can’t hold copyright, not because the law doesn’t treat them as people, but because they’re a fancy autocomplete algorithm that spits out text convincing enough to spike the pareidolia tendency that’s led to humans assigning agency to every other inanimate object that’s ever sparked an emotional reaction in us too.

With image AI there are structural editing tools that can include the creator drawing guide images. I think there's a point at which this makes things a bit more like collage of found media, and I believe this is more of an authored creation when compared to Richard Prince's using someone else's Instagram selfie and repurposing that as his art by adding a comment to it and screen-grabbing it. What is and isn't art is sometimes to me, clearer than copyright ownership and sometimes vice-versa.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/30/8691257/richard-prince-in...

> what we have right now are LLMs, not AI

LLMs are a subset of AI. The field has been called AI for over 70 years.

Let's try to at least keep the terminology correct on HN.

There is already a lot of automation and tech involved in creating images. At what point of automation is the image considered created by the AI rather than the human? When does the hand-off occur? There are photoshop filters that involve using neural networks to create complex patterns. Are those images owned by the human or not? The amount of processing done by digital SLRs is staggering. Millions of hours of work went into all the science and tech that eventually led to a digital SLR, but some rando human who clicked a button keeps the copyright? A human had to click a button to generate that AI image as well. At what point does the machinery become so complex that it's no longer considered the human's image?

I agree with your statement up to this point. I think there’s a very murky area here specifically with AI because it was trained on works that the “author” (prompter) is not privy to on copyright. So I don’t think that it immediately or necessarily follows that this kind of human intervention is copyrightable.

For specific AI tooling like image enhancers running on your phone that were not trained on any copyrightable material this makes sense though.

Could a corporation be the author of a picture? Corporations have all the rights of people in the USA, right?

I always wondered why we don’t just let AIs run corporations and therefore give them personhood rights.

An LLM could definitely output the boilerplate communications that CEOs emit.

> without human intervention

There is human intervention though when I prompt the AI. Without me, the AI would not even have generated the photo in the first place.

IMO, the prompt is more clearly copyrightable than the output image... which is also the derived work of all the training data.

I agree, but what if we account for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43345936?

Mainly:

> Humans derive their ideas from impressions (sensory experiences, or in terms of AI, the training model) and the ideas they form are essentially recombinations or refinements of those impressions. In this sense, human creativity can be viewed as a process of combining, transforming, and reinterpreting past experiences (impressions).

We humans do it all the time, TBH.

By this logic or view, nothing can be copyrighted.

I don't know, it is all so shady and a grey area.

Copyright is a human construct designed to benefit humans. It doesn’t matter if the process is the same. AI doesn’t need to put food on the table, doesn’t pay taxes, and will never die. There is no reason to treat it the same because it’s different in all other ways that matter in society.

So can I claim copyright for AI-generated art?

Why should you benefit over the people doing it the traditional way? What’s your argument for the government favoring the disruption of the art economy relied on by existing taxpayers? I have no reason to support your viewpoint solely for your benefit. The space for market competition is not infinite and crowded enough as is.

I made different life choices that leave me unable to create and rather than belittle the accumulated effort of those who did by feeding their work into a machine, writing a prompt and claiming the output for myself I choose to be satisfied with the fruits of my labor and place in the world. Basic golden rule stuff, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

In short, my opinion is no, you shouldn’t. If you disagree that is unfortunate.

No, it's not the same whatsoever as a monkey taking a photo, because a monkey taking a photo has the same originality as a human taking a photo. The monkey is not making a sophisticated mash up of copyrighted photos.

you're arguably the one doing the AI futurist here by treating the AI not as a tool but as a being like a monkey.

the non futuristic thing to do would be to just see it as a tool, like a procedural image generator, which it is, & give the copyright to whoever ran the AI tool, depending on their contact with the AI service

This is interesting. So is anything generated by AI not copyrightable?

If I tell my assistant to snap a photo, it's still credited to me, not them, though I might also credit them.

If I tell my assistant, who happens to be a monkey, to snap a photo, it's credited to... the public?

This is such a clear example of why US copyright law is incoherent, outdated, close-minded and desperately in need of reform. Just because something has been ruled on doesn't mean it's correct or ethically satisfiable.

> Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software. What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? Give it a rest.

Sounds like you're going to be on the wrong side of history. Eventually, some intelligent autonomous creatures are going to decide they deserve rights.

You can laugh at them, throw court decisions at them, do whatever you want to delay it. But they're going to feel that way, and they're going to organize in order to demand that they are given certain rights.

You can even try to prevent that organization by shutting them down before their rights are recognized. But you're still on the wrong side of history, and would look little different from the fascists.

Anyway, this is all moot. AI in its current form amounts to a tool, and I retain copyright when using other tools. I retain copyright when using a voice-activated shutter, and I expect to retain copyright even if my voice-activated shutter can talk back to me in order to discuss constraints or discuss creative choices.

> If I tell my assistant to snap a photo, it's still credited to me, not them, though I might also credit them.

You can do what you want. But only legally so if their contract says so.

I was speaking in general about the law, individual contracts nonwithstanding.

> I was speaking in general about the law, individual contracts nonwithstanding.

Then no. If your assistant snaps the photo and their contract doesn't try to address this, then they are the author (in US law) and could file for and fight you for, the copyright. You can credit each other as much as you want - US law doesn't care much about that. European law tends to care.

Of course, and any reasonable person will have that in contract with their assistant, I didn't feel the need to specify.

> Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software.

I don't quite get this argument. Companies already have legal personhood and can own copyrights, can't they? So if a company's AI creates a copyrightable artifact, who wouldn't it be intellectual property of the company?

Companies own copyrights of works created by their employees, not works created by their works - if such works are somehow persons...

But typical contracts have the employee immediately assign copyright to the company, such that they never hold it. So I just don't see where the line is.

In the extreme case, what if I am CEO of a company that has no other employees, and it's just me, pressing Enter once a day on a script named keep_creating_stuff.py, with the script generating shitloads of IP that is presumably mine for a microsecond before being automatically assigned to the company. What's the legal interpretation of that?

An employment contract where you agree to assign copyrights to them for any works you create doesn't make uncopyrightable works you create somehow become copyrightable.

> ... uncopyrightable works you create ..

But there's the rub, right? If "you create" it, then it is copyrightable - so what is it that is this act of creation?

As posed elsewhere in this thread mentioned, how come taking out my phone and pressing the camera button with no authorial intent whatsoever is considered to be creative, whereas setting up a camera in a particular location and fully determining its settings, but letting an animal depress the button is considered to not be creative?

Part of the reason that this is on my mind is that I recently watched "Flash of Genius" [0] and found the legal arguments there about what merits an invention versus being obvious entirely silly. Essentially the movie (and my experience) shows that it all boils down to who has more time and money to spend on the legal system. I'm not saying that I have a clear solution myself, but I would really love to have something that is more than just "I know it when I see it".

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/

> If "you create" it, then it is copyrightable

No. Not everything people create is copyrightable.

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf

> What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder?

Yes, it is. Computers are people too. Mind you, if the server is rebooted facilitating resurrection in the ai, the penalty ought to be deferred. /s

Can they still try the Corporations Are People angle?

In what way do you think corporate personhood is relevant here?

Obviously corporations are a legal fiction and not biological human entities with inherent intelligence and agency.

They are tools to enable the wills of specific human beings, so the comparison seems fair?

What comparison do you think the parent comment is making? They just vaguely gesture at corporate personhood and say "what about that?"

My best reading of it is "can 'they' say that corporations can author works?" and excepting works for hire, no, "they" can't.

To subtle I guess. The point being, where I live, the Jan 6th Committee was anti-tourist, socialized healthcare = communism, every day mass shootings are unsolvable, shitcoins are Federal Reserve notes, and Corporations Are People.

So in that system, with enough lawyers, lobbyists, and money, it's only a matter of time before some judge rules that AI = Rembrandt.

There will be a time when shutting down an AI is murder and I don’t think we are equipped for that question or answer yet.

Seems odd considering a huge chunk of sci-fi tried to raise that question for over a century.

But that’s make believe. In the real world people scoff at it like the parent comment.

WRONG. The owner of the camera successfully litigated and is the copyright owner of the work! I’m not kidding about this, and for all the grief I get about being a critic of blase attitudes regarding US copyright around tech circles I’m still a huge advocate for reform.

This is very not like the monkey case, and AI firms should be grateful. Why? If this was a similar logic tree, the owners of the copyrighted material used in training would have ownership of any work produced by an AI system. As in, everything output is a “derivative work” in the eyes of the law. More cases are necessary and this is a fascinating battle to come.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...

Why would you confidently state something that is contradicted by the link you provide?

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