Copyright Office suggests AI copyright debate was settled in 1965
25 comments
·January 31, 2025lolinder
Salgat
The human input makes sense, otherwise, couldn't you bruteforce generate billions of low resolution images that cover a vast range of situations and then use that to attack anything similar enough to fit the substantial similarity condition? You could even plug a news feed into the generator.
cxr
There's not really much of a debate, just a bunch of clamoring and wishful thinking by rightsholders who don't understand copyright law insisting that precedent should be subordinate to mimetic outrage over LLMs.
throwaway17_17
In what way are ‘rightsholders’ expressing wishful thinking? I assume you are saying that there is no violation of those rights controlling various properties that have been used to train ‘AI’. You then mention precedent in a way that implies there are legal decisions that make it clear ‘AI’ training using copyrighted material does not violate the rights of those who own that material. Could you list or link to such a precedent?
To the best of my knowledge, there is no direct precedent from any federal circuit addressing this issue and certainly no USSC opinions dealing with the issue. Additionally, any analogies drawn from precedent focused on other areas of intellectual property law is easily distinguishable. This is truly fresh legal ground and the next 10 years of jurisprudence will go a long way towards building the precedent that your comment would imply to already exist.
Just to be explicit, the above, while a legal opinion, IS NOT legal advice.
cxr
No amount of solidarity from support groups comprising clusters of likeminded folks on internet message boards who're opposed to settled law is a substitute for an act of Congress, which is what it will take to give the position of folks opposed to contemporary GenAI any legs.
Neither your comments to HN nor anyone else's strenuous assertions that there's anything to debate are going to change anything.
If you want to treat LLMs as a special case—which is what you want, since there is an entire history of jurisprudence that you have to contend with here—then you need to get Congress to write legislation that says so.
jpalawaga
Copyright law stipulates the conditions in which content can be reproduced, not conditions in which it can be consumed.
Arguably the material has been learned and not copied. Maybe in some cases learned with an uncanny ability or photographic memory, but learned. (People with photographic memories also cannot reproduce content in an unlimited fashion).
Aloisius
> "Where a human inputs their own copyrightable work and that work is perceptible in the output, they will be the author of at least that portion of the output," the guidelines said.
This policy is sensible. Most AI generated works should be uncopyrightable, except where a substantial human contribution is in the output.
Simply describing a picture and letting AI generate it shouldn't be enough for the same reason that dictating what you want to a painter isn't enough to earn you copyright over the resulting painting.
I would be wary about integrating too much AI output into works one wants to enforce copyright over without some level of documentation. The nightmare scenario is having your copyright stripped away because of evidence one used AI extensively.
BeefySwain
Why is a binary (compiled machine code) protected by copyright, but the raw output of an AI model is not?
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ilaksh
It says they were not able to reproduce an image with the same prompt. So they just didn't know about seeds?
jarsin
When uploading books to kindle direct publishing you have to state that you own the copyright and publishing right.
So any book or story on Amazon that was generated substantially via prompting should now have to be removed based on this guidance from the copyright office.
furyofantares
You can publish public domain content on kindle.
Aloisius
Yeah, though Amazon could just make their own copy available without compensating the uploader.
cyberax
That's incorrect. Purely factual books (like phone dictionaries or map atlases) are perfectly fine for publishing.
feoren
Purely factual books are copyrightable. It is the collection and curation of those facts that is protected. You cannot just copy someone else's 100 Amazing Facts about The Rainforest verbatim; if you publish 100 Cool Truths about The Jungle and it has those same 100 facts, you'll get sued and they'll easily win.
jcranmer
The EU and the UK generally has something akin to "sweat of the brow", where collections of facts that took time to collate are copyrightable.
But in the US, Feist v Rural explicitly disavowed the sweat of the brow doctrine, and said that facts have no copyright value--a work requires a quantum of original creative spark to be copyrightable (it was discussed in the context of phone books--a phone book does still have some residual "thin copyright", but the listing of phone numbers is not copyrightable, and it is actually difficult to infringe on the thin copyright of a phone book). In the US, your example would easily be found to be not infringing, if the only similarity were reproducing the same 100 facts.
The headline is either sloppy or intentionally misleading: the Copyright Office is saying that the law surrounding whether AI generated works can be copyrighted was settled in 1965 (the answer being "yes if AI assisted a human creative process, no if not, and we have to decide on a case by case basis if there was enough human input to qualify"). This has been their stance all along, but now they've provided a bit more guidance on what counts as human input, which is helpful.
What this article doesn't talk about at all is the far more controversial AI copyright debate, the one most people will think of given the headline: whether training a model is fair use. That's the one everyone is actually concerned about, and they're definitely not claiming it was settled already.