Copyright Office is restoring copyright to something you have to work to get

The article is just restating US copyright law for people who don't know it. The title indicates a recent change in policy, and there hasn't been one.

Now, this is US law. Much of the world does have "sweat of the brow" copyright. But the US does not. See "Feist vs. Rural Telephone". There must be human creativity because the US constitution reads "(Congress shall have the power) 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." That limits the power of Congress to change this.

So a lot of things are uncopyrightable in the US. Feist is the big case, and it was about telephone directories. No copyright. Useful objects are not copyrightable, which is why there are third party auto parts. Facts are not copyrightable, nor are databases of facts. Nor are pictures of public domain art. Nor is automotive sheet metal, despite lobbying by automakers.

That's what leads to AI-generated content not being copyrightable. Model weights don't seem to be copyrightable either.

> The CO has taken the (entirely correct) position that copyright law exists to incentivize human acts of creative expression.

The US Constitution grants Congress the power to grant copyrights "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts." Creative expression that is not useful therefore is not constitutionally copyrightable.

But that aside, I agree with the author that the Copyright Office refusing to further expand the already vastly over-expanded scope of copyrights is a rare positive ruling.

I don't quite get it. Can Pixar copyright its GPU-rendered films or can it only copyright the human-created models?

How will the USPTO draw a legal distinction between AI-generated and GPU-generated?

> Basically, we're about to recreate formalities, but managed by the private sector. To the extent that companies use AI in their work, they are going to have to track every pixel and every word and every note that is output by an AI system, and which parts were added or edited by humans after creation.

> That means that companies that want to protect their commercial interests aren't just going to get more protection based on how much work they get humans to do; they're also going to have to treat copyright's government-enforceable monopoly over expressive speech with the gravitas it deserves: not something you get automatically, but something you have to do real administrative work for.

Assuming this happens, wouldn't this mean that copyright becomes significantly less useful for people who aren't corporations and don't have the legal, financial, and administrative resources to produce this kind of bookkeeping?

I’m surprised that Doctorow has such a poor understanding of US copyright law. “Sweat of the brow” does not exist here. It is not “fundamental to a correct legal understanding of copyright.” You can argue it should be, but it isn’t. All that matters is human authorship, and LLMs aren’t humans.

I'm confused by the framing that copyright protecting creative expression and not hard work is something that would come as a shock to media bosses. If you're in the business of buying up creative stories and paying for the hard work necessary to sell them to a large audience, then being able to automate the expensive part is good news. Imagine film credits listing just the director, screen writer and some assistants, with everyone whose job was never primarily about making creative decisions being eliminated.

It’s not clear to me where the line is drawn.

A digital camera creates the photo, the photographer just presses a button. Obviously they have creative control over framing, lighting, subject, etc. But so does a prompter with their prompt.

As AI gets embedded in more and more creative tools (photoshop, cameras, etc), it seems like this could get murky.

> The simplest, most reliable way to ensure the works you invest in are fully and entirely eligible for copyright is to just use humans for the whole project. Declare a "no-AI policy," and hire human artists to produce the works you hope to sell. Monitor their activity to ensure they're not using AI. Keep good records.

That seems true.

But also: generate all you like and then have humans edit, and keep a record of it, seems plausibly defensible too.

The current state of a lot of AI generated content material, not all / not necessarily program code, seems to really benefit from human editing.

Thinking of all the media execs, crying, because their plans to fire all their creatives, and replace them with slophaus tech, are rendered null and void, from this.

I'm having a real hard time, feeling sorry for them.

  For media bosses, copyright is a pseudo-property† right

Regardless, 'I agree with these people I always disagree with are somehow right this time despite acting like they always do' should be a sign that some reflection is needed!

  > AI slop isn't copyrightable, but there can be copyrightable elements in an AI-generated image. The most obvious element is the prompt. So long as your prompt contains some quantum of creativity (e.g. "Make me a beautiful flower whose loveliness is reminiscent of a newborn baby", but not "make me a beautiful flower"), that prompt is copyrightable. That means you can use copyright to challenge others' rights to present the same prompt to a chatbot. But while the prompt can be copyrighted, the image it gives rise to isn't. So you can spend a month iteratively refining your prompt, consuming all your town's water along with 200,000 gallons of diesel and that prompt will be yours for your life plus 70 years, but the image it generates is in the public domain, and anyone can copy it, sell it or give it away

There should be a difference between asking AI to "draw a funny picture of a donkey", and spending a month iteratively refining your prompt.

How does this mesh with this, where the court decided to declare AIs as authors and originators of copyright, just to make sure billionaire companies like Microsoft avoid liability to programmers they copied from?

https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig...

Obviously courts will cheat, or should I say "keep cheating", until the output of AI models is covered by copyright while the input is not, because if AI output isn't covered, then most tech companies have nothing of value in their entire AI investment. Anything to cheat individuals out of their rights into the deep pockets of billionaire companies.