Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual ⁠art ‌was ineligible for copyright.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday ⁠to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence can be copyrighted under U.S. law, turning away ​a case involving a computer ​scientist from Missouri who was ​denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by his AI system.

Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual ⁠art ‌at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection ⁠because it did not have a human creator.

Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering ‌a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and purple plant imagery.

The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors ​to be eligible to receive a copyright. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had urged the Supreme Court not to hear Thaler’s appeal.

  • FatCrab@slrpnk.netEnglish
    21·
    2 hours ago

    This is wildly wrong in so many ways.

    1. 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.

    2. The copyrightability of AI generated content gets to where the nexus of creativity happens. Effectively, image generators (modern ones–i actually don’t think DABUS is a diffusion model) are operated like a commissioned work. The user gives detailed instruction on par with what you might see in a commissioned work, and the creative event occurs when the “contractor” interprets that into the work. The copyright may be assigned or it may be licensed, in any case, the initial copyright holder is the contractor–or in our case, the model. Now, it is well established that only humans can have sua sponte property rights, including intellectual property right. Those can be assigned, licensed, etc., but they must first inher to a human and so an AI system literally has no copyright to assign, were it even able to engage in a contractual agreement to transfer said rights. As a result, no, there is no copyright in AI generated content and without a significant change in law there is unlikely to ever be any.

    3. If he had sought to register the copyright under purely his own name, he would have been committing a fraud on the copyright office. This wasn’t explicitly established at the time of his suit, but it has been very explicitly the case now for over a year. When registering copyright you must declare any AI-generated components. Failure, or refusal, to do so constitutes a fraud on the office and such fraud is sanctionable up to revoking the copyright in the work in its entirety, even if the AI-gen component was only partial. This is really important to note with software copyright and the kind of litigation we’re likely to see wrt piracy in the future (i.e., defendant claims plaintiffs did not declare vibe coded components and thus committed a fraud on the office and should be sanctioned with full revocation of the right as a signal to other would-be claimants).

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 hour ago

      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.