Technology

That is a different conversation. If we assume a legally trained AI strictly on data it was allowed to train on, they are saying the AI cannot hold copyright.

I also don't see a loophole here, since it was denied anyway.

I shouldn't be able to create derivative media and have it be legal and public domain.

Well, there's the rub - proving that AI-generated works are "derivative works" (in the legal sense).

This court case had nothing to do with that. I'm aware of a few cases that have established the opposite, that AI models and their products are not derivative works. Do you know of any that have established that they are?

The unlicensed training itself is a rights violation,

There are cases where it's been ruled fair use.

Copyright is an intellectual property right, firmly grounded in property law doctrine–you are probably thinking of trademark, which is rooted in consumer protection law, or likeness rights which have their roots in privacy law.

First of all, "Intellectual property[sic]" is a not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, but they are all significantly different from each other. Trying to lump them together under a single term is disingenuous at best, and using the word "property" in that term is biased loaded language.

Second, copyright cannot be a property right because ideas cannot be property. In fact, ideas are essentially the opposite of property, as Thomas Jefferson once pointed out:

it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me.

What copyright actually is, is a temporary monopoly granted at the whim of Congress. It's a license, not a right.

• A property right is a thing the owner is entitled to, and a natural right. In contrast, a copyright is an artificial construct invented as a power of Congress, and granted with the express purpose "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts," not because the creator of the work somehow deserved it.
• Ownership of a piece of property exists in perpetuity until it is sold and cannot be taken from the owner without "just compensation." In contrast, copyright exists explicitly "for limited times" and then it expires and the work reverts to the Public Domain.

He can copyright his software then? That's like saying that if I create a computer game where the computer also plays, I own the copyright to every single game played by the computer. It's just dumb. They stole the artwork that it was trained on, so move along thief.

In other words, it's not that he as the human operating the "AI" is trying to claim copyright in his own name, it's that he's trying to set a precedent where the "AI" can hold copyright in its own name.

He's trying to pretend that his glorified pile of statistics is sentient, and get it legally recognized as such. 🤡

Is there any literature that actually says DABUS exists? Everything I see online is talking about the spectacle of Stephen Thaler claiming it made something - and trying to patent it in several different countries across multiple continents - not how (or if) DABUS exists or functions.

DABUS stands for "Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience," which sounds... suspicious.

It sounds like he has way too much money and time on his hands.

AI is legally the same as a printing press. It's not the guy that designs and runs the press that owns what comes out of it. And what goes into the AI is large volumes of other people's work, turned into confetti and glued together into something not quite new.

The fuck you talking about? You can't copyright the output of an AI.

Seems impossible to me but I'm not an artist - I write code as a hobby and see no way to definitively prove I wrote any code that an AI could also produce. Is there any aspect of art creation that an AI cannot replicate?

If the final product isnt the raw output from my understanding. The current laws are there mostly to stop the whole thing from turning into copyright mills.

Instead of considering if the whole work is now copyrightable, consider parts of the work made by generative AI are not and the human parts are (if they reach the minimum line of creativity). Sure there's other helpful tools that do some of the work but unless they're substituting the creativity then they need not apply.

It goes both ways. If the artist has to do 30% of the work, what about collages? Do we have to count the square millimeters of each cut and paste item to ensure they are above the threshold?

Easiest should be all digital art is not copyrightable as it was created with software that did most of the work and the "artist" could not have produced it without that software. But that would invalidate almost all Hollywood movies from the last 30 years lol.