The US Copyright Office has received applications in recent years to register a wide variety of arguably creative objects for copyright protection. This includes driftwood shaped and smoothed by the sea, photographs taken by monkeys, and murals painted by elephants. Natural stone appearance for cut marks, imperfections, and other qualities. In each case the response was the same: no. The Copyright Office Compendium, a guide to policies and procedures, explicitly states that works created by nature, animals, or plants cannot be registered. It also includes “works created by machines or mere mechanical processes acting randomly or automatically, without the creative input or intervention of a human author.”
New guidelines issued by the Copyright Office and recent decisions regarding comic book copyright registration may add some wiggle room in this area. Dawn of Zaryawas created by New York-based artist and artificial intelligence (AI) consultant Kris Kashtanova, using imagery generated through the AI platform Midjourney. The Copyright Office granted copyright to the book as a whole, but not to individual images within the book. They argued that these images were poorly created by the artist.
Recognizing the growing number of images, perhaps created by humans and modified by AI, or generated by AI and modified by human activity, Zaria In March, the Copyright Office provided additional clarification on the “human authorship requirement.” Part of it explains the path forward for artists in this new realm. In this new clarification, the Copyright Office states, “If the traditional authorship element of a work is machine-generated, the work has no human authorship and the Copyright Office will not register it.” I claimed. However, “a work containing AI-generated material may also have sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, humans have created sufficient AI-generated material may be selected or arranged in such a way that “the entire resulting work constitutes the author’s original work.” ”
The Copyright Office has likened some uses of artificial intelligence to more traditional mechanical tools, such as visual artists using Photoshop and musicians using guitar pedals to create different sounds. I was.[W]What matters is the degree to which humans creatively control the expression of the work and “actually shaped” the author’s traditional elements. ”
i’m glad [Copyright] Office Willingly Appreciates AI-Assisted Works
Van Lindbergh, Copyright Attorney
Partial and Temporary Solution
Applications for registration must specify only human writers or artists, and for artificial intelligence technology, make a “general statement that the work contains material generated by AI.” The Office will contact applicants when their claims have been reviewed to determine how to proceed. ” In other words, decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.
To some extent, the process of publishing policies on the use of AI in art is a work in progress, and the Copyright Office has plans. To learn more about technology and its impact, we will be hosting “Public Listening Sessions” throughout 2023.
“There are thousands of AI-assisted works being generated every day,” said Van Lindbergh, a San Antonio, Texas-based intellectual property attorney who represented Kashtanova at the Copyright Office. It sets out new guidelines for how to treat works of art. Promulgated by the Secretariat, “It is a step towards accepting it. We are pleased that the Secretariat has indicated that he is willing to evaluate AI-assisted works for registration.”
While the expanded guidelines aren’t quite what Kashtanova would have liked, “I agree with this guidance in many ways,” says Van Lindbergh. “The Copyright Office is right that copyright requires a human creator, and that human-provided creative elements lead to protectability.” He said, “Non-human authors remain a barrier. Yes, and will continue until changed by the Supreme Court or Congress.”
It’s hard to draw the line where humans end and machine learning begins. Scott Hervey, an intellectual property attorney and partner at his California-based Weintraub Law Group, said: Alternatively, Artist may modify material generated by AI technology to the extent that modifications meet copyright protection standards. In such cases, copyright only protects the human-generated aspects of the work and is irrelevant to and does not affect the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself. ”
These scenarios acknowledge that AI is the tool to be used, but are also intended to produce results that are independent of humans. “If humans can control the final product, is it really AI?”
Another complicated copyright issue concerns AI platforms fed with existing copyrighted images. Users of this technology may create derivative images that may be modified by users of this technology and offered for sale. Getty Images and a number of artists are suing some of these platforms (Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Deviant Art) for copyright infringement. These cases have not yet been heard in court. James Lorin Silverberg, an intellectual property attorney in Washington, D.C., said the Copyright Office is amending federal copyright law regarding the relationship between original copyrighted material and AI-generated images based on it. It said it was investigating whether there was a need to do so. “AI works may not present any of the copyrighted content of the underlying work, but simply learn from it,” he says.
