Last updated on July 1st, 2023 at 12:34 pm
In recent years, the US Copyright Office has received requests to register a wide range of seemingly creative objects, such as driftwood smoothed and shaped by the ocean, a monkey’s photograph, an elephant’s mural, and the appearance of natural stone with its cut marks, defects, and other qualities. The Copyright Office Compendium’s policy and process manual states that animal or plant-made works cannot be registered. Additionally, “Works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author” are also excluded from registration for copyright.
New Copyright Office guidelines and a recent decision regarding the copyright registration of a comic book, Zarya of the Dawn, written by New York-based artist and AI consultant Kris Kashtanova and illustrated with Midjourney images, may give some leeway in this area. Despite the book’s copyright, the Copyright Office denied rights to the images since the artist did not appropriately generate them.
In March, the Copyright Office clarified its “human authorship requirement”. It provided a path forward for artists in this new realm, perhaps recognising that Zarya will not be the last image created by humans, modified by AI, or generated by AI and modified by humans. The Copyright Office said it would not register a work if “the traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine.” The statement also added that “a work containing AI-generated material must also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim,” but not always. If a person creatively picks or arranges AI-generated content, ‘the finished work as a whole comprises an original work of authorship’.
The Copyright Office compared AI programmes to typical mechanical instruments like Photoshop and guitar pedals used by visual artists and musicians, respectively, to determine copyright registration. It, however, depends on the level of a human’s creative control and the human’s original contribution to the creation of the artwork.
The Copyright Office has scheduled “public listening sessions” until 2023 to gather data on the effects of various technologies and publicise AI rules in the arts.
Another copyright concern arises when AI platforms modify copyrighted photos to create derivative images that can be sold. Getty Images and other artists have sued Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Deviant Art for copyright infringement. No judge has heard such cases. The Copyright Office is studying the relationship between copyrighted material and AI-generated visuals, according to Washington, DC, intellectual property attorney James Lorin Silverberg. “It is possible that an AI work does not present the copyrightable content of the underlying work at all,” he says.
Leave a Reply