Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

&gt; If a work&#x27;s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it.<p>&gt; For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office&#x27;s understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output.<p>&gt; For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare&#x27;s style.<p>&gt; But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text.<p>&gt; When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship.<p>&gt; As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.<p>This is the crux of the argument for me.

Many commenters seem to be under the impression that &quot;because I made something, it is copyrightable&quot;. That&#x27;s not how it works. What is protected under copyright is determined by long processes of lobbying, legislation, lawsuits, and court cases. For example: a melody is copyrightable, a chord progression is not, even when the chord progression is so unique as to be the primary intellectual asset of a piece. (Look up contrafacts from the bebop era!) Another example, the rules around the copyright of a sound recording are very different from those of the intellectual property of a song.<p>Only specific things are copyrightable. There is nothing unusual (from a legal sense) in the government and others taking a stance on which things those should be and under what circumstances. You have no a priori right to copyright something because you fucked around with a prompt for a long time.<p>I don&#x27;t see how they could go with a different stance given that all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it and declare it copyright (IFF it <i>is</i> copyrightable, that is). This will fall apart it if it&#x27;s possible for a company to have AI spew out eleventy-billion variation of training input and declare them all copyright.<p>Don&#x27;t forget that in the early 90&#x27;s we went through an era of records being yanked off the shelf at great cost to labels when the sampling laws finally settled. (Anyone else remember the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of Us3&#x27;s &quot;Hand on the Torch&quot;? fond memories!)

Yay, the software development industry is saved! (only partly &#x2F;s)<p>Not that I thought AI would be writing decent code for a while yet, but the fact that AI-generated code can&#x27;t be copyrighted (and therefore licensed[0]) is going to create problems.<p>It&#x27;ll be interesting where they draw the line with this, though:<p>If the AI generates all the code, but then a human debugs it and alters it, is that copyright that can be owned? Does the entire code base then become copyrightable?<p>If a human reverse-engineers uncoyrightable AI code, does that reverse-engineered code become copyrightable?<p>If a human downloads someone else&#x27;s uncopyrightable AI-generated code, and makes some changes to it, can they then claim copyright on that code?<p>[0] Since the whole of software licensing rests on copyright, this is going to get tricky for licenses. How do we determine if a restrictive license has been added to uncopyrightable (and therefore unlicensable) code?

This is all very sane and consistent with previous opinions on the matter.<p>But it doesn’t answer any tough questions either, like: if an AI model outputs something very close to a training input, does the result infringe on the copyrights of the input work?

I’m curious. If I’ve spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work?<p>Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the finished “work”.

The big clue here, is that if we allow generated content to be copyrighted, then some asshat company will just generate All The Things (within, say, a given space) and copyright them (likewise for trademarks and patents, which could be much easier to exhaust within defined spaces). Combined with the lifetime of companies and the preposterous copyright extensions granted to them, swaths of human-generated work could be excluded from copyright, blocked by some hidden trove of copyrighted machine output. Especially bad if someone manages to copyright everything that <i>could</i> be generated by some AI.

Unpopular opinion : the government shouldn’t protect your art from getting used as training data. The government shouldn’t protect your generated art from being copied. Intellectual property is not real property. Nothing is being taken from you. Force is only justified in response to force, and you don’t get the right to throw someone in jail for “stealing” something you still have.

How does this affect programming? Does this mean if a program was built using GitHub Copilot, that in order to have copyright on software, you have to explain that to the copyright office?

The human authorship requirement still stands:<p>&gt; If a work&#x27;s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. [0]<p>Even with that, applicants now must disclose the inclusion of AI generated content and highlight which parts are human authored vs AI generated:<p>&gt; Consistent with the Office&#x27;s policies described above, applicants have a duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and to provide a brief explanation of the human author&#x27;s contributions to the work. [1]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.federalregister.gov&#x2F;d&#x2F;2023-05321&#x2F;p-44" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.federalregister.gov&#x2F;d&#x2F;2023-05321&#x2F;p-44</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.federalregister.gov&#x2F;d&#x2F;2023-05321&#x2F;p-59" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.federalregister.gov&#x2F;d&#x2F;2023-05321&#x2F;p-59</a>

I would like the Copyright Office to delineate just how much effort is necessary for a work to possess “the traditional elements of authorship.” I type in MIDI instructions and play back a tune, but if I type in sentences it doesn’t count?<p>Maybe they can measure entropy. Did you emit a sufficient amount of data to make the Music Box work, given the Copyright Office defined ratio?<p>For every unit of data in your song, you must have emitted no less than 1&#x2F;2 of a unit, which was specifically intended to manipulate the Music Box in order to shape outputs. Any less and the creation isn’t yours.<p>What do you mean I can’t copyright this song? My air drumming against the cassette player introduced very significant data, which adjusted the playback. Just a very slight legato. It’s too similar? I assure you it is not. Convert the two to Universal Data Format and check the Hamming distance. Incredibly different pieces of data, believe you, me.<p>This is basically the origin story for how the US Copyright Office became the galaxy’s Entropy Police. “Back in 2023 someone tried to copyright a photo of an “ottercat” surfing a DeLorean on the moon and now we’re in charge of how organized is too organized.”

Would this not apply to tons of procedural generation tech as well (used in plenty of games and tons of movies)? We give it a bunch of elements and write algorithms to do the generation... but we are ultimately not the ones putting pen to paper so to speak.<p>I think this is the 100% the right call, some small level of human effort should be required otherwise what is to stop a few individuals from mass copywriting 10 million images and suing everyone that produces something substantially similar.<p>Having said that, there may be odd knock on effects at play here.

Not possible to reliably tell apart. The Image generation scene is one thing. For a lot of output, there are still some tells. Text generation though...well good luck ever finding that out.

It’s going to be insanely hard to copyright anything produced by AI. Especially now that generative models are widely available&#x2F;in use. The possibility of multiple instances of the same output being produced (as a whole, or in parts) is high.<p>All you have to do is set the temperature low and the generative models will start producing repeatable results.<p>All of a sudden, copyrighting GitHub Copilot supported source code is not so straightforward anymore. How does one distinguish the human authorship in a function from that generated by AI?<p>Interesting times we live in. In a way, this may lead to less regulation&#x2F;more openness. Equal opportunity for all. At least one can hope.

It&#x27;s all well and good that the copyright office deems that protection only applies to the parts of the work where a human was in control of the traditional elements of authorship, and that there is a duty to disclose the use of generative technologies ... but now one can plausibly assert that they are the sole author of a work which was produced by one of these models, and be 100% confident that no one can dispute that.

This announcement has immediate, significant practical impact for creatives.<p>The most important document a creative had, up until today, was their portfolio -- typically, a look-book of finished pieces.<p>Now, that portfolio needs to include, for every piece, proof-of-work -- snapshots of the whatever-it-is in various states along the road to completion, in sufficient quantity to dissuade any legal claim that the work was AI-produced.<p>At the limit, those aim to sell organic-certified free range content will want to surveil themselves during the entire creative process, and associate that recording indelibly with the created work.<p>That&#x27;s a whole lot of extra work and a whole lot of extra privacy violation, but the alternative will be to devalue one&#x27;s own work: for to the extent to which it may have been produced by AI, it will be a liability to downstream consumers.<p>For example, a film director might commission a score from a composer, but unless that score comes with timestamped, SHAsummed video of <i>enough of the composition process to preclude invalidating the broader claim to a copyright</i> (and thus salable work), that composition becomes a financial risk for the director.<p>The consequences of <i>not</i> doing so are severe: At minimum, if the score cannot be copyrighted, then it can be borrowed, free-of-charge, by another film director, and at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film (IANAL; am I getting this right?)<p>&quot;Creative&quot; just became the most surveilled job on the planet.<p>We also may have just found the first agreeable use for blockchain -- an indelible public record of organic artistic creation, bearing SHAsums associated recorded twitch and youtube streams (along with logs of workstation network traffic) permanently with the finished work.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be hilarious if AI copyright law saved crypto?

So if movies use AI to help create characters they won&#x27;t be able to claim copyright? I expect Hollywood studios will have something to say about this. With AI already being deeply integrated into DCC tools this stance isn&#x27;t going to last long. And how will it be enforced if the artists don&#x27;t show how they made the art?

It&#x27;s great that USCO is ending speculation with an official stance. Their rationale seems perfectly reasonable, and in step with the court rulings that they cited.

That&#x27;s not going to be practical. How do you distinguish if something was created by mere computation, or by AI? Oops, AI is just mere computation. So if you forbid mere computation, I cannot use fancy numerical algorithms in shading my 3D art? Ain&#x27;t gonna fly.

One part I found particularly interesting about this is footnote 27:<p>&gt; While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be protected by copyright, that does not mean that material generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable.<p>I wonder if this is meant to imply that no possible prompt can produce copyrightable output. What if the prompt already contains expressive elements that the model faithfully reproduces in its output? (For instance, in the limiting case, &quot;Exactly repeat this poem that I wrote: ...&quot;) Or perhaps this is meant only in the strict sense, that a creative prompt does not <i>necessarily</i> produce copyrightable output, if the expressive elements in the output originate from the model instead of the prompt.

So this effectively destroys any concept of AI digital art for sale. If there’s no way to protect it then there’s really nothing to own. It would be like trying to sell someone public domain content.

On a practical level, in order to protect authors and inventors (i.e. give them a reason to keep doing their work), this makes it even more vital to closely lock down AI interactions and preferably bring models offline in the sense of running locally on hardware without network component and where the bits are not sent anywhere except to the user. That way the output of the interaction can still be covered by trade secrecy if not published, since it will not be covered by copyright law if published or leaked by employees at the hosting company who have access to the output of the interaction.<p>To give a specific example, if as a paying user you craft a prompt to give you a competitive advantage, it will not be protected by copyright if leaked.<p>You can still run the code on your own server and others can still try to guess how you did it, but they should not have access to the interaction unless you explicitly publish it.<p>This will continue to encourage innovation. It is not necessarily the best trade-off but it is understandable.

Just curious... with such a decision in place, wouldn&#x27;t more artists be inclined to make their use of generative AI less transparent? In other words, what would prevent them from ceasing to disclose that their work includes elements generated using generative AI?<p>This could indeed increase skepticism, particularly when it comes to img2img and, if not as much, txt2img usage.

Hmm. I am not so sure about this. What about the fact that to produce a image I like with dalle our similar I need to often run many many different descriptions to get what I want and some times use the edit feature. If a generate an image and use the built in photoshop like erase feature and regerate something else to fill the space is it copywriteable. What about if photoshop has or implements (probably already exits) auto insertion of images and people. Say you just paste something onto your image and photoshop runs ai algorithm that helps blen it in. What about traditional painters that relay on randomness in thier work? Like guys who just spin a canvas get blindfold and just throw paint around?

I would speculate there will be no works containing no material generated by artificial intelligence soon. At least it will become a common practice to use a GPT to improve your language, possibly also assist the creative proccess by supplying facts and suggesting creative ideas. Everybody uses spell checkers and thesauri already (some also use grammar checkers like Grammarly), also google things up - this will be increasingly extended&#x2F;replaced with advanced AIs usage. It is generally considered correct for a writer to hire assisnatnst who would proofread their writings before publishing them or even assist their thought through conversation so I can see no big deal in an AI doing the same job.

What the government needs to do is to say that all AI-generated content is CC-SA 4.0 or GFDL and all the code is AGPL &lt;latest version&gt;. That oughta do it.<p>(edit: I put &quot;CC-BY-SA&quot; and then I remembered there&#x27;s no need to give credit to a hunk of sand and electrons!)

Reading this, it’s clear a tool like InvokeAI (built on Stable Diffusion but with potentially a lot of human input in a mouse-driven GUI) could certainly qualify for human authorship under their principles.

In the studio, the photographer directs the lighting, the model, tweaks the shot, issues commands to modify the scene, presses a button, checks the outputs, iterates, chooses the best shot.<p>In a virtual conversation, the promptographer directs the computer to set the tone, chooses their model, tweaks the inputs, issues commands to change the virtual parameters, presses a few buttons, checks the outputs, iterates, and takes the best output.<p>One of these is a creative work guided by a tool and one is a act that shows no human creative authorship at all.

Good. Works containing any material should not be copyrightable.

&gt;For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare&#x27;s style. [...] But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text.<p>Neat example and convincing reasoning.

If this is the logic, then corporations should lose personhood because they can&#x27;t have it both ways.<p>I don&#x27;t see the rationale because ultimately there are owners of copyright, whereas the creation process should be immaterial to protection whether it was paint thrown against a wall, AI generation, or some poor human painting with hummingbird eyelashes.

This works for now. However, I can imagine a spectrum of input parameter specificity that could eventually blur the line this draws and undermine this strategy.<p>On one side you have these general prompts.<p>On the other side you have, say, autotune, where the final output is still created by a machine but the human&#x27;s input (voice in this case) greatly constrains the output.

Pointless screaming at the tide hoping it won’t come in.<p>In 3 years there won’t be a major digital tool that isn’t pipelining through ai especially in CG and music, in 10 years the pre-AI versions of those tools won’t run on a modern computer.<p>Unless you’re ready to say “anything made with Adobe CC can’t be copyrighted “ then this is pointless to debate.

Seems like a win for artists who oppose generative AI. Now those who use AI to claim a copyright are &quot;put on notice&quot; to clearly disclaim the AI generated portions of their content.<p>It will be interesting to see if Prompts themselves could be copyrighted, since presumably humans came up with the prompts.

If a TV show generates a script using AI in which animated characters read using AI voices... would I be allowed to then distribute&#x2F;remix the portion of that episode? What does the distinction requirement actually do besides serve as a notice, is there some kind of diminished rights?

How come work “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine” cannot be copyrighted &lt;&lt;it was made “without any creative contribution from a human actor”&gt;&gt; but machine code as generated by a compiler can?

In addition to the new registration guidelines, the USCO announced a new AI initiative and series of public hearings<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;copyright.gov&#x2F;ai&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;copyright.gov&#x2F;ai&#x2F;</a>

Art is in the eye of the beholder.<p>We&#x27;re going to be awash in so much AI generated content that the act of lifting something truly marvelous out of that background will be a creative action worthy of protection.

What I’m curious about is how much Neuralink will it take to make a person legally less-than-human in this context. If I’m hooked up to the Metabrain am I still entitled to ownership of my works?

But if you asked it to generate a story in the style of Stephen King, whose works are still copyrighted, then does King have a copyright claim even though he didn&#x27;t operate the AI?

Now the big question is how do we make “ai” companies pay for the data they use to generate their content. Stealing ip by scraping content and then reselling it is not fair use.

Ok, so I won&#x27;t tell anyone what tools I used to make my art. Not a big deal.

<i>ChatGPT sues US Government</i><p><i>Anti AI discrimination NGOs call for public protests.</i>

Autotuning of voices uses AI- Songs using autotune are partially AI generated.

chatgpt4 summarized:<p>This is a statement of policy by the U.S. Copyright Office to explain how it examines and registers works that contain material generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The statement is effective from March 16, 2023. The Office has experience and expertise in distinguishing between copyrightable and noncopyrightable works. The Office may require additional information from applicants who use AI to create or use copyrighted works.

Wasn’t there a voyager episode about this?

Please let chatgpt4 summarize this

non ai content will be drowned out by the massive wave of generated content.

And how will they know?

The document is too long let me summarise it with ai

&gt; For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare&#x27;s style.<p>&gt; But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text.<p>But I can certainly specify those things in the prompt. In fact I can write some of the poem and have it riff on the rest for me. And anyway how would you know whether or not and how much I was assisted by the AI. Strawberry Fields forever.<p>-- Written by llama 13b, edited by a human(?)<p><pre><code> -- Written by a human, edited by llama 13b(?) -- Written by llama 13b, edited by a human(?)</code></pre>

I&#x27;m sure there will be a number of ramifications but one I know of is for those who sell specific captures of guitar amps that were created through machine learning just lost their copyright on that product. Those works could not have existed without the AI that was used to create them.

The U.S. Copyright Office seems to be living under a rock and completely unaware of how much creative work goes into prompt engineering, as well as selecting the subsequent image and applying variations to it until it meets the human&#x27;s creative desires.

This is already a hot legal mess.<p>The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) should come up with Berne convention 3.0 that provides:<p>- increased protection for human authorship<p>- longer copyright terms for hoomans<p>- shorter copyright terms for bots (5 years)<p>- moral rights preventing &#x27;globbing&#x27; by generative AIs<p>- royalty system for original authors<p>- derived computer-generated works pay<p>I&#x27;d like to see a blockchain ledger-esque system where human authors can claim authorship and they receive nano-royalties every time works are derived from it. The generative AI&#x27;s can &#x27;glob&#x27; it but they will need to pay their dues.<p>Importantly GAI&#x27;s can&#x27;t register their stuff in the hooman copyright chain.

<i>&quot;Based on the Office&#x27;s understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material.&quot;</i><p>As an artist and a musician I use various degrees of randomness in my work - from feedback and &quot;noise&quot; in a composition to abstract splatters in my paintings.<p>Plenty of art, writing, and music is the result of partially or completely random techniques, over which the artist has little to no control, and AI generated works are just another tool in the hands of a creator.<p>The copyright office understands neither art nor creativity.