| > I always assumed that Midjourney, the company running the application, owns the copyright In a way that's even worse; building a tool that someone else uses to produce a creative work shouldn't grant the original builder copyright over the user's output. That would also have a ton of implications beyond AI. It's bad enough that many software tools come with license agreements around their usage that reassigns copyright and restricts output, but at least in those cases the agreement rests on a license that the user is signing to get access to the tool. But we wouldn't claim that the person who's made an artist's paints owns the painting made with them. > The website is fairly circumspect around the whole issue as you can imagine. I remember it making the news when one of the companies in the imagegen space (I don't think it was Midjourney, but it might have been) said that users would keep copyright on images they made, and I remember similarly thinking at the time, "well, that's very nice of you but I'm pretty sure that's not your decision to make." But agreed, I think that the company is probably not going to go out of their way to really clarify how much IP control they think they have over what other people do with their tool. ---- There's implications beyond AI to saying that AI images are copyrightable, but I think they're small potatoes compared to the implications of saying that inventions confer copyright of artwork made with inventions back to the inventor, even if someone else was using the invention to create the artwork. When studios pay artists, they don't get copyright, the artist does. The studio gets copyright if they think ahead and make the artist sign a contract to assign their copyright over. And negotiation over assigning copyright is part of the payment process and contract process, the studio doesn't get that for free. |