alt Hacker NewsCopyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU
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As software, creative works, science, etc become more and more contributed via AI does that mean all future works will not be copyrighted or patented? Under our current copyright culture and laws obviously not but that does open the question to how much does a human have to contribute and what evidence is required to show that a human contributed enough so that it can be copyrighted and patented. Some time in the future (may be many years) science may become to complicated for humans to understand fully with AI systems researching themselves. Current patent laws in many places including US says inventions created entirely by artificial intelligence cannot be patented. This future may be coming. What will the new copyright and patent laws look like in the future? Do we need copyrights and patents anymore?
So this means you can not use AI for the majority of open source projects since GPL, MIT, BSD, etc are all copyright declarations and they'd be being made for code which you can not copyright.
There was some related discussions of US law recently[0].
This post is glossing over most of the nuance in EU law.
The AI system must function merely as a tool or instrument (like a camera or Photoshop) guided by the human, rather than acting as the creator itself. The line may get a bit fuzzy case-by-case, but effectively the human must be the creative one, not the AI.
This is not unprecedented. Machine generated technical data, sensor outputs, automated surveilance photography, monkey selfies, purely algorithmic or generative music and such were already disqualified long before AI came along.
Does this also extend to generated source code? I mean, this upend the business models of many A.I. companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. In addition, many ISVs would probably stop using A.I. if their products could lose their copyright.
And what about A.I. generated code which has been altered by a human? Is the derived work copyrightable?
Interesting thought experiment is to consider an author who writes a novel in English, but wants to translate it into German.
They have a copyright on the original, and if they hire a human, the human would have a copyright on the translation (which would generally be licensed or transferred back to the author in some way).
If they use an AI for the translation, by the logic here, the translation wouldn't have its own independent copyright, but (based on other long established principles of copyright) it would still be a derived work of the original, so even if this decision holds it would not be legal to make unauthorised AI translations, pirate authorised AI translations, make further translations into other languages (or back to English), etc.
Which seems fairly reasonable! But consider:
If you start with, say, a 90,000 word novel, and ask for a translated novel, you (presumably) have sufficient rights to stop someone making unauthorised copies of the AI translated version.
If you start with a 300 word prompt, and ask for a logo, you (apparently) do not have sufficient rights to stop someone from using it without authorisation.
So some combination of the input (0.3k vs 90k) and the output (logo versus novel) crosses an inflection point between these two extremes, and I think it's interesting to wonder what the boundaries are. Like, in theory you could graph input size versus output complexity, and sketch a frontier between "the author's protected expression survives in the output" and "the author's protected expression does not survive in the output". And I don't have the slightest idea what I think a fair frontier would look like.
it's sort of non-controversial at the extreme end I think - where there is no human contribution, why should there be protection?
But it just begs the actual question of how much human contribution there needs to be:
- I wrote the prompt (not enough)
- I wrote many prompts and iteratively refined them using distinctly human skill (open question, but loosely seems still not enough, potentially in the EU but maybe in the US?)
- I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough)
- I made equal or more contribution to the final result (this better clearly have copyright protection or we are in real trouble)
You can copyright the instructions file, as long as you wrote it.
Lots of wild guesses about mixed human-AI copyright in here. Last time I read the copyright office’s statements in this, their stance was basically: The human owns exactly what they contribute. The rest is public domain.
Yes, that is vague. I think the examples were like:
If you paint a symbol and use an AI filter over that to stylize it, you own the symbol aspect of the image but not the stylized final result.
You can own a book of AI images as a curated collection. But, not the individual images.
Does this mean someone could develop a switch emulator using an AI and Nintendo couldn't win a lawsuit against them?
Does it enable decompilation remasters of classic games?
It feels like AI is a cleanroom laundromat
I don't see an easy test here. Worse, I see the beginnings of a test that is technical and very likely to not match the future of how we will interact with these things. We have to start somewhere but I'm not sure 'Neither mere prompting nor the selection between several AI suggestions is sufficient as a human creative contribution.' is the right place to start. I think we need more examples of what does constitute 'human-centric' and work from there. I also don't think that any system that says 'you didn't do enough work so it isn't human-centric' works. Any system like that will require a reexamining of copyright in general. There is a lot of low work copyrighted material out there. Just because 'AI' didn't build it doesn't mean the same tests shouldn't apply.
Some examples of why I think this is really hard: Say I build a story generation system. I work hard on building an agent swarm of actors, critics, editors, researchers. I craft into the various agents concepts of story arcs, outlining techniques, character development. I build a huge well thought out process for how to agentically write an actually good story, so long as you give it a title. Heck, I even design and train my own custom LLM with original layer ideas and novel training techniques to use on this system. After all that I then take that final step and give it a title. Do I have no claim to that? I probably put more work and creativity into it than an author would have a book. What if I then gave it 500 titles? 5,000? Would my claim degrade the more titles I fed it? Is it a percentage of work question? What is the core concept here that defines 'human-centric'? What is the cut-off here?
Let's go even further. I don't prompt. I live in a world with unlimited context models. I have a conversation about the book I want it to write. During that process I reject some ideas and accept others. I didn't give it a 'system prompt' but essentially all I did was prompt it and select versions I liked. Is that not human centric? How about if I asked it for advice and it did some editing work on my story? Did that make it not human centric even though the starting text was mine? What if that starting text was 99% replaced with a version 10x as verbose. Defining based on how you interacted with the model (prompted and selected) just seems way to weak to be a clear test.
1) Does applying a copyright message warrant that the content has not been generated by an AI?
2) If one applies a copyright message to AI generated output, is that fraudulent?
Suppose that an artist trains an AI model purely on their own works, and then the AI generates something similar to that artist's work. I would say that the artist must be allowed to assert copyright over that. The artist has copyright over all the training data, and the output of the AI is a derived work of that.
We've reached the stage where copyright has become impossible. Let's just accept it and move on.
Microsoft is using AI generated code in their OS, so does that mean they lose copyright protection in Europe?
Does it matter?
The set of possible and desirable non-copyrighted text/audio/visual states to render is effectively infinite. Laws don't prevent Scrabble clones; tropes are not protected.
Endless remixes of public domain content are an option as well.
If an iPhone with model weights in chip, a local Mac mini with similar but more powerful model on chip ends up capable of generating endless content copyrights won't provide a moat.
Does a photo/image that generated/modified by a human-being using photoshop got protected by copyright? I think previously someone does this...
Why should anyone want to have copyright on AI-generated content?
Under this interpretation models themselves do not have copyright protection either
This then implies that in the EU, AI-generated content cannot have a license applied? MIT, GPL, CC, etc?
Does this apply to software?
>Content that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence is not protected by copyright.
entirely is the plank supporting this.
Good luck proving the origin of these created works
Interesting. In addition to Anthropic's watermark use to prevent model collapse, we can definitively call something copyrighted or not copyrighted. This is a boon to everyone who consumes culture.
The same is true in the US. This is a nothing burger.
> When you put your name on an article that's written by ChatGPT or Claude, you're basically putting a provenance mark on it saying: I take responsibility for this. I haven't written it, but I'm putting my name on it. That doesn't give you copyright, but it does give you liability for the content
If the AI is treated as an agent during inference, distinct from its user and not merely as a tool, then this should also apply during training too.
Based on this, it seems that AI agents are consuming people's code without permission. The MIT license only gives rights to "any person obtaining a copy of this software".
So the rights are given to a 'person', and the rights pertain specifically to a person who performed the act of 'obtaining a copy of this software'.
MIT license says 'obtaining a copy' and uses the word 'software', not 'code'. 'Software' is to 'code' what 'shop' is to 'building'; if you bought the shop, it doesn't necessarily mean you own the building. These are two different things and require different clauses. MIT explicitly separates the two and emphasizes that the author of the software retains copyrights (presumably over the code as this is the only thing over which they could claim copyright).
The code is different from the software; you can write the exact same software which behaves in the exact same way using completely different code; can be poorly written or well written. The difference is extremely meaningful to the person who invested effort to write the code in a clean way.
If we say that the agent is a separate entity from the person who ran it during inference, surely the same distinction can be made concerning the person who ran the agent during training. So the term 'person' from the MIT clause doesn't seem to apply here since the person running the agent has been factored out (just as they were during inference). Also, the agent is not obtaining a copy of the software; it's obtaining copies of the code which is copyright and independent of the software (as the MIT license clearly asserts).
Thank god! A victory for everyone who believes in the freedom of information, regardless of what you think about AI.
Copyright didn't always exist, nor should it continue to. Hell; it must not.
I think the words (read: hilarious 1.25pp pamphlet) of Aaron Swartz on the topic are just too poignant to ignore, given the paths of Reddit (corrupted yet democratic), IP law (malignant yet showing cracks), and government survellience have taken in the Trump era. Despite the dated context... he really says it best:
https://ia800101.us.archive.org/1/items/GuerillaOpenAccessMa...
Create an “assign copyright” skill?
I mean the copyright has to belong to somebody right?
If copyright does not protect AI-generated content, then AI should not be restricted from generating content that falls under copyright protection; yet, the reality is otherwise.
This matches historical precedent in other nations where copyright was not extended to a photographer when a primate took a photo of themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...