Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jhanschoo 1228 days ago
The difference is that if you ask an artist to take a cute selfie, and you ask an orangutan to take a cute selfie, the artist owns the copyright in the former and the orangutan owns the copyright in the latter. Presumably we can train orangutans to take good photos, but it seems that the person most involved with everything around making it possible for orangutans to take photos owns the copyright, and not the orangutan. See (not orangutan but macaque) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Looking at your comment that supposes that the legal system should treat AI as different as other tools, I suppose it should then also look at animals as legal persons capable of authorship and creativity (it already does see corporations as legal persons, but not capable of authorship I guess). Now, once animals can have creative output that is alienable, what about all the other, material, output that human society relies on?
2 comments
Xelynega 1227 days ago
Why does a legal system have to "treat AI as different than other tools" also have to "look at animals as legal persons" to be consistent?

The concern with the 'AI' is that it's copyrighted content being recombined in ways that don't create a new copyright, so the output can't have a new copyright.

That concern isn't shared with animals since they aren't inputting copyrighted materials to produce the selfies. Midjourney is.

link
jhanschoo 1227 days ago
> The concern with the 'AI' is that it's copyrighted content being recombined in ways that don't create a new copyright, so the output can't have a new copyright.

I believe the conversation was with respect to copyright ownership of the transformation applied to the training materials, and not the training inputs itself, (to the extent that the AI has been so poorly trained that its outputs aren't sufficiently transformative of its originals; A transformative work with a human author is copyrightable and does not infringe on the copyright of the original work).

On a liminal case, are song performances by songbirds who have heard it on the radio copyrightable?

link
jhanschoo 1227 days ago
Edit:

> but it seems that the person most involved with everything around making it possible for orangutans to take photos owns the copyright, and not the orangutan.

These photos are not copyrightable.

link