<story><title>AI-generated art lacks copyright protection, D.C. court says</title><url>https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/ai-generated-art-lacks-copyright-protection-d-c-court-rules</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thrill</author><text>Previous rulings had found that when code itself was copyrighted due to being a work of art (of human labor), the output of that code was indeed copyrightable if the program did the majority of the work in producing that output.  This ruling seems at odds with that previous interpretation.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mwhlawgroup.com&amp;#x2F;can-copyright-in-software-extend-to-its-output&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mwhlawgroup.com&amp;#x2F;can-copyright-in-software-extend-to-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nerdponx</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a fascinating ruling.&lt;p&gt;Forget AI for a minute. Let&amp;#x27;s say I write a program to generate cool images using Penrose tiles or space filling curves or some other algorithmic process, maybe deterministic, maybe (pseudo-)random. Under that ruling, it sounds like all of the outputs of my program would also fall under the copyright of the original program, unless the creator could prove that they did substantial work in addition to what the program did.&lt;p&gt;Which then leads to the next question of: what is the &amp;quot;lion&amp;#x27;s share&amp;quot;? Does it matter if I randomly punch in some parameters and get a nice result on the first try, or if I spend hours trying different parameter combinations to find some thing that looks the way I want it to? Even if the outcome is still  considered owned by the software author, is my particular parameter choice copyrightable by me, being my own creative output?&lt;p&gt;If you think about it, the modern generative &amp;quot;AI&amp;quot; systems are more or less the same thing, but where the input parameter space is something like the entire space of written language, rather than a couple drop-down menus with algorithm settings and a seed for a PRNG. Does it matter if I slap in a simple prompt and get a nice result, or if I spent hours engineering a perfect prompt?&lt;p&gt;If anything, it should be unambiguous that the prompts are copyrightable just like any other written work, being actual free-form human-readable text. So at least AI artists have that going for them.&lt;p&gt;It will be really interesting to see what happens as more court rulings unfold.</text></comment>
<story><title>AI-generated art lacks copyright protection, D.C. court says</title><url>https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/ai-generated-art-lacks-copyright-protection-d-c-court-rules</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thrill</author><text>Previous rulings had found that when code itself was copyrighted due to being a work of art (of human labor), the output of that code was indeed copyrightable if the program did the majority of the work in producing that output.  This ruling seems at odds with that previous interpretation.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mwhlawgroup.com&amp;#x2F;can-copyright-in-software-extend-to-its-output&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mwhlawgroup.com&amp;#x2F;can-copyright-in-software-extend-to-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragonwriter</author><text>It is not, the filer here claimed no role in the creation except as the employer of the AI in a work for hire, and was attempting to overturn the Registrar of Copyrights determination that AI could not be an author and that a registration listing the AI as the author was facially invalid.&lt;p&gt;This case is fundamentally &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; about whether art in which AI is used as a tool by a human (even if the human role is entirely in programming the AI) is copyrightable as a work of the human, it is solely about whether a piece of software can be an author under copyright law, a &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; different question.</text></comment>