> In 2021, the Canadian agency ISED (Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada) recommended three approaches to the question:
> 1. Ownership belongs to the person who arranged for the work to be created.
> 2. Ownership and copyright are only applicable to works produced by humans, and thus, the resultant code would not be eligible for copyright protection.
> 3. A new "authorless" set of rights should be created for AI-generated works.
It seems obvious to me that the answer should be #1. An artist who creates works out of random paint splatters (modern art!) didn't purposefully choose the locations of their paint marks. However, they still own the copyright because they arranged for the creation of the work. You would never argue that a piece like this is uncopyrightable.
Using that analogy, you are stochastically sampling from other people's splat mark art, and guiding it towards something that resembles the prior work.
I'd like to take a moment to emphasize that whether something is copyrightable and whether it is infringing are actually separate considerations. Both are social constructs the same as which side of the road one drives on, and it makes sense for us to define them in some way that is "fair", whatever that means.
Copyright implies creativity. The creator owns the copyright, expect for in works for hire. But the thing has to be created. An ai doesn't have creativity so it can't own a copyright. You could argue that the person who created the prompt owns the copyright. And you may have a valid point based on how much creativity is required.
TBH i do not see "prompts" to be copyrightable. For one, they're incredibly short (e.g. most image generators will output something for "a green field" - who owns that prompt?). For another, they're incredibly reliant on pretty much everything else around the system: the same prompt can produce wildly different results based on different algorithms, models, weights, etc. And let's not forget that not everything uses a "prompt".
Prompts are really just a UI (with a bad UX IMO, it just happens to be impressive at a first glance to "talk with the computer"), trying to copyright a prompt is akin to trying to copyright a series of clicks and keypresses in an image editor to produce some effect (and just like a "prompt", you'd easily get different results depending on where you apply that effect, what program/version you are using, etc).
I already explained why it is different in my original post: the prompts are UI (and IMO a bad one at that). UI interactions are not copyrightable - you could copyright some sort of program/script akin to automation, but what would be copyrightable is the program/script itself, not the actions it takes.
You doing "something" doesn't mean that "something" is copyrightable - or that it should be (if anything, less things should be).
> The creator owns the copyright, expect for in works for hire.
The exception is actually more narrow than it sounds too. Work for hire requires that the work be made as part of employment or that the work was both commissioned for a handful of carveouts and there was a contract in place agreeing that it is considered a work for hire.
So if you commission a piece of art for yourself, the owner of the copyright is the artist. Also my understanding is that while the artist can transfer copyright, they can at any point take it back from you.
1) is an utter minefield, though. If you create an artwork using Adobe Photoshop, you have the copyright. If you use Minecraft, apparently Microsoft own it. So where does the prompt engineer lie? No-one knows.
They completely forgot a 4th option: it belongs to the people who have copyright on the training data.
If I take someone's book, painstakingly replace all words with their synonyms and publish it as mine, I am getting sued. Same if I do some other mechanical transformation meant to obscure the true original work.
There's no AI, there's just statistical models of existing work.
If you take a bunch of books. Read then. Then write your own story with hints from each of the books, then who owns the copyright? Yes if you take a single work and replace every word with a synonym, that works be infringement. But that isn't what an ai does
Let me reiterate, there is no AI, there are only statistical models. It doesn't matter if you make the math too complex for a human to make sense of or not, it's just a remix of existing copyrighted material.
Your argument forgets why copyright even exists, it's some a law of nature, it's a rule created to protect people who invest time and effort into creating. AI even if it existed would not be a person, it would be code created by a person (or more likely a corporation) to serve its goals.
That’s only meaningful if it’s legally established that the ownership of the output was theirs to grant in the first place. There’s no law directly on point and precious few legal decisions in this area, so it’s still very much an open question.
This varies widely by country. The US does not have "database copyright" or "sweat of the brow" copyright. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone, which was about telephone directories. This restriction comes directly from the U.S. Constitution and would require a constitutional amendment to change.[1]
The UK and EU are different. The EU allows copyrights on databases.
On one hand I agree with you, if I can build the same software you can, I should be able to sell it all the same. On the other, if there's no copyright or similar, what stops theft of source code and an identical program with fresh branding?
No, selling a search engine never made any sense to begin with. Services should be publicly funded and freely accessible. As a bonus we wouldn't have to put up with spam on every site on the internet.
Kagi sells a search engine and it's hugely popular. They're supported by the people who buy the software, not by ads. Not selling the software is exactly what leads to the spam you hate. In similar vein, would you say all software should be given away freely?
I assume op means you should be compensated through a method other than pretending software is scarce and trying to assign value to it through a system that relies on equivocating scarcity with value.
Does ownership of books make sense? What is the difference between code and books? Code is translated to machine code, just like books can be translated to other languages.
You own the medium the content is contained in (for books, the paper). Not the content itself. You do not get to copy the books content and place it in another container and sell the new container as though the content within it was yours to distribute in the first place.
That doesn't mean you own any software or ebooks obtained by ill-gotten means. Nor does it mean you can replicate and sell an application, as though it was your own, that you paid a licenses or rental fee for. But you still own your hard-drive and are free to erase it and sell it.
I fully agree. Limiting the amount of copies of software to sell them like a finite good has so many downsides:
1. There may be people who cannot use/afford some software, although there is technically an infinite supply.
2. Collaboration becomes awkward. Either all contributors give up their rights (Open Source), or one contributor holds all the rights and the rest is being treated unfairly. The latter decreases the incentives to make software modular and reusable.
3. The resulting software typically gets worse due to some copyright enforcement mechanisms. For example, no closed source software will ever have a good debugger, because that would allow viewing and changing the source code.
4. It creates a power imbalance between software owners and software users. Nearly all software has to be adapted over time, but the software owner has a monopoly on performing such adaptations. The result is enshittification, surveillance, and basically a return to feudalism where daily life is governed by a small number of overlords.
5. It is not clear how to price software fairly, and there is also little incentive to do so.
6. My impression is that high-quality software converges to formal proof, which is AFAIK not copyrightable.
For all these reasons, I think it is time to consider a world without copyright on software.
To those that worry about salaries in such a world: Negotiate payment in advance (contracts, crowdfunding, bounties, ...), or get a job where software is created as a byproduct (consultant, researcher, tester, ...).
As far as I know, the code I write for my employer it's his- it would be really funny if ChatGPT had more rights than me to ownership of the product of its work. This is, I believe, a generally accepted principle (even extending beyond what I code during working hours as long as it's connected with the main purpose of my job).
Nothing particularly new, since none of the cases around this have concluded.
If I were to guess, I'd say the output of an LLM isn't copyrightable (it's not the creation of a human), unless it's a verbatim copy of some copyrighted training data in which case it belongs to the authors of the work(s) used in training. This creates the most annoying combination of legal problems around using it, so by Murphy's Law it must be correct!
Do that at $BigCorp and Legal will eat you alive, if not fired.
Long ago I went through the company-approved process to link to SQLite and they had such a long list of caveats and concerns that we just gave up. It gave me a new understanding of how much legal risk a company takes when they use a third-party library, even if it's popular and the license is not copyleft.
Unless you are now involved in a lawsuit that asks for a hypothetical 50% of your income for using a tech very similar to their and they speculate its been stolen and not permitted by their license and even if you know you are going to win/or that it doesn't affect you still have to spend money on the lawyers fighting it.
This felt like a way bigger topic (LLM copyright in general) when ChatGPT first dropped and now no one cares it seems. Are there ongoing cases for this or did something get settled that set a copyright-free precedent that I missed?
There are a bunch of ongoing cases and the US copyright office has made their position clear. We're waiting for American courts and for and European anything to say something
I already mentioned in another thread (which didn't get much discussion), but the recent EU AI Act takes into account the source material for training by essentially saying that you can train on copyrighted data unless the author opts out. The text from the AI Act is:
> General-purpose AI models, in particular large generative AI models, capable of generating text, images, and other content, present unique innovation opportunities but also challenges to artists, authors, and other creators and the way their creative content is created, distributed, used and consumed. The development and training of such models require access to vast amounts of text, images, videos, and other data. Text and data mining techniques may be used extensively in this context for the retrieval and analysis of such content, which may be protected by copyright and related rights.
> Any use of copyright protected content requires the authorisation of the rightsholder concerned unless relevant copyright exceptions and limitations apply.
> Directive (EU) 2019/790 introduced exceptions and limitations allowing reproductions and extractions of works or other subject matter, for the purpose of text and data mining, under certain conditions. Under these rules, rightsholders may choose to reserve their rights over their works or other subject matter to prevent text and data mining, unless this is done for the purposes of scientific research. Where the rights to opt out has been expressly reserved in an appropriate manner, providers of general-purpose AI models need to obtain an authorisation from rightsholders if they want to carry out text and data mining over such works.
(note that the "appropriate manner" is meant to be some machine readable way, AFAIK the way this will happen is still in works - the Act wont become law until 2026 anyway)
Under EU copyright law the machine generated output (like code, etc) cannot be copyrighted. Essentially this means that:
1. ChatGPT et al. can can train on copyrighted code, text, etc unless the authors opt out via some (machine readable) way.
2. ChatGPT et al. can then reproduce a bunch of code from whatever it was trained on, that code by itself is not copyrightable (but it can be modified and become part of a copyrighted work - think of it as combining public domain code with some other project).
AFAIK the only muddy aspect is what happens when ChatGPT (or really any AI generative algorithm) reproduces already copyrighted works without the knowledge of the user. Again AFAIK this is something that is currently being worked on.
There was an AMA on Reddit recently[0] by someone who worked on the act and answered a bunch of questions. IMO it is a great AMA on the topic (at least if you ignore the trolls that ask "why do you want to destroy EU", etc).
Also (unrelated to the above AMA) i think both UK and US are likely going towards a similar direction.
If i pay a consultant to write code out generally belongs to me. Why would a tool like an llm be any different if you are a paying customer. If you are on the free model shrug….
Incorrect, it clearly belongs to you if there is an agreement with the transfer of such rights otherwise you are in murky waters.
LLMs are not individuals automatically covered by copyright laws, as they are simply tools based off other (often) copyrighted work. This means that the initial copyright infringement is still a valid concern, hence these discussions.
If it was a easy and clear cut as just shrugging, the conversation wouldn't be so prevalent.
> 1. Ownership belongs to the person who arranged for the work to be created.
> 2. Ownership and copyright are only applicable to works produced by humans, and thus, the resultant code would not be eligible for copyright protection.
> 3. A new "authorless" set of rights should be created for AI-generated works.
It seems obvious to me that the answer should be #1. An artist who creates works out of random paint splatters (modern art!) didn't purposefully choose the locations of their paint marks. However, they still own the copyright because they arranged for the creation of the work. You would never argue that a piece like this is uncopyrightable.
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