[Luker88]

I see a big one missing:

* fully-generated content is public domain and copyright can not be applied to it.

Make sure any AI content gets substantially changed by humans, so that the result can be copyrighted.

More importantly: don't brag and shut up about which parts are fully AI generated.

Otherwise: public domain.

[Wowfunhappy]

> fully-generated content is public domain and copyright can not be applied to it.

Some people keep saying this but it seems obviously wrong to me.

At least in the United States, “sweat of the brow” has zero bearing on whether a work is subject to copyright[1]. You can spend years carefully compiling an accurate collection of addresses phone numbers, but anyone else can republish that information, because facts are not a creative work.

But the output of an AI system is clearly not factual! By extension, it doesn’t matter how little work you put in—if the work is creative in nature, it is still subject to copyright.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_State...

(IANAL, yadda yadda.)

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Sweat of the Brow is irrelevant. Only humans (or collections of humans) can create a work that gets covered by copyright. Non-human animals cannot create copyrighted works, even intelligent ones. Humans can apply sufficient creative transformations to non-copyrighted works to create copyrighted works.

[Wowfunhappy]

A human did create the work. A human turned on the computer and pressed the button.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

A human needs to have significant creative choices involved in the creation for a work to be copyrightable. Naruto v. Slater litigated this, where a "selfie" taken by a macaque was ruled to not be eligible for copyright.

U.S. Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices § 306 (3d ed. 2021)¹ is quite explicit:

> The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being.

> The copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Because copyright law is limited to “original intellectual conceptions of the author,” the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). For representative examples of works that do not satisfy this requirement, see Section 313.2 below.

This has not yet been litigated to conclusion, but it seems likely to me that LLM-generated outputs are not subject to copyright.

¹https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...

[Wowfunhappy]

> A human needs to have significant creative choices involved in the creation for a work to be copyrightable.

How does this square with encryption keys being copyrightable?

[SAI_Peregrinus]

They aren't. DMCA anti-circumvention provisions are a different area of law.

[jMyles]

> * fully-generated content is public domain and copyright can not be applied to it.

Simpler yet - and inevitable, on sufficiently long time scales - is to dispense entirely with the notion of intellectual property and treat _all_ content this way.

[port11]

This would remove the incentive to generate content, no? Copyright duration could be much shorter, but I think artists, writers, etc. would prefer the continuing protection of their work. (And I'm pro-copyright reform.)

[jMyles]

I'm a full-time professional musician, and I don't know anybody (at least in bluegrass) who thinks that the system of IP is designed to protect us, or is in fact serving us in economic terms. It seems much more geared to protect spotify and apple than it does the musicians.

Last year, I cut Drowsy Maggie with David Grier (something about which I boast every chance I get :-) ), and part of our journey was listening to aging, nearly-forgotten versions to find melodic and harmonic ideas to harvest and revive. For this, we of course made heavy use of archive.org's Great 78 project - and at the very same time, the RIAA (who is supposed to represent us?!) was waging aggressive lawfare against the Great 78 project, to try to take it down.

It was just the height of absurdity.

Consider that since at least 2020, every grammy winner in both the bluegrass and americana categories (and almost no nominee) has been released DRM-free. And that many of the up-and-coming bluegrass and jam bands are now releasing all of their shows, directly off the board, licensed with creative commons-compatible licenses.

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free

[AlienRobot]

I don't understand this opinion.

The only leverage you have to stop Spotify from taking your music and publishing it without your permission is your copyright of the music.

In fact, every time I see a complaint about copyright it's always "we tried to do something at small scale for some noble purpose and couldn't because of pesky copyright laws," and it completely ignores the massive scale of abuse for profit purpose that would occur if copyright didn't exist.

Think of how AI scraped everyone's books without permission using the flimsy excuse that it's transformative work, except they wouldn't even need that excuse or the transformation. Amazon could just take everyone's books and sell it on Kindle, then kick out all authors because they only need to buy 1 book to resell it as if they were the owner of the book.

[jMyles]

> The only leverage you have to stop Spotify from taking your music and publishing it without your permission is your copyright of the music.

There are a lot of challenges facing a band, including the frustrations of CDBaby and Distrokid. If you told me my music would just magically appear on Spotify without my having to lift a finger (and without having to implicitly endorse them by putting it there), that'd be a huge relief.

> it completely ignores the massive scale of abuse for profit purpose that would occur if copyright didn't exist.

"abuse"? If you can somehow make money by playing music that I've made, nothing will make me prouder. And whatever you're doing that's generating that profit, it will almost certainly increase the likelihood that I can plan a series of shows around it, which will in turn generate income for me. Who exactly is losing here? Where is the "abuse"?

> Think of how AI scraped everyone's books without permission using the flimsy excuse that it's transformative work, except they wouldn't even need that excuse or the transformation.

I'm already sold, you don't have to keep making it sound sweeter and sweeter.

[port11]

I find your arguments hard to relate to, given that I buy CDs/on Bandcamp because I want to pay musicians. I usually can't afford concerts, so I won't be there as a channel for merch. If you release all your work under permissive licenses, how do you expect to be supported?

[AlienRobot]

I assume that this means you simply make all your work public domain, as you don't believe in copyright?

I don't believe that most creators would willingly let go of their right as you would.

[atrus]

It's true, before copyright existed, no one made any art at all, and they certainly weren't paid for it. Thanks to copyright, the large majority of artists have been well and fairly compensated for their work.

[port11]

Okay, you're right. I mean, there was patronage for a long time, and then a good era of proper copyright protections. The modern system really does need a reform, I agree. But I don't think we should wholesale put everything in the public domain. I mean, AI scrapers already think that's the case, but…

[jMyles]

It's not just AI scrapers, it's the entire concept of the internet.

The internet _wants_ to copy bytes. That's what it does. Right now you're reading this because bytes were copied from my local machine to the HN server, and then to a cache, and then to your machine.

Copying bytes is, in some low-level sense, the entire function of interconnection in the human species.

The idea of trying to bolt-on little machines to restrict the flow of bytes at every vector of network connectivity, just to satisfy some abstract claim of "property" - it's completely nuts. It's never going to work. Tomorrow it will work worse than it does today, and every day going forward until states realize that the laws they want to enforce around this concept are simply not possible on the internet.

And you know who will celebrate that? Musicians like me. Nobody will be happier to see a lubricated copying machine become the human identity more than people who are trying to get their music out there, and trying to be inspired by the music of others.

[AlienRobot]

What prevents me from stealing your work and selling it? Including the source code you wrote?

[jMyles]

Well, what prevents you from doing that right now? The threat that I'll call the cops on you? Is that really how we want the internet to work? It's sure as hell not how I want my music to be perceived - I can't fathom wanting the state to intervene because some kid listened to something I made without permission.

You are welcome to "steal" anything I've ever made if it pleases you. And encourage your friends to steal it from you. If this process keeps repeating, look me up and let's book a show in your area, and we'll play our music _and_ demo our source code _and_ get you all dancin' and trippin' and having a merry old time.