The Copyright Office Is Bringing Back Copyright Formalities for AI
Copyright Office is restoring copyright to something you have to work to get
The US Copyright Office has taken the legally uncontroversial but industry-shocking position that copyright protects human creativity, not hard work—so AI-generated works aren't copyrightable. That means proving which parts of a work are human-made now requires the kind of paperwork, registration, and record-keeping that copyright law abandoned decades ago. Cory Doctorow argues this is good for artists and free expression, even if it's a nightmare for media bosses.
Copyright rewards and protects creativity but it does not protect hard work.
- Animats
The article is just restating US copyright law for people who don't know it.
The title indicates a recent change in policy, and there hasn't been one.
Now, this is US law. Much of the world does have "sweat of the brow" copyright.
But the US does not. See "Feist vs. Rural Telephone". There must be human creativity because the US constitution reads "(Congress shall have the power) To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." That limits the power of Congress to change this.
So a lot of things are uncopyrightable in the US. Feist is the big case, and it was about telephone directories. No copyright.
Useful objects are not copyrightable, which is why there are third party auto parts.
Facts are not copyrightable, nor are databases of facts. Nor are pictures of public domain art.
Nor is automotive sheet metal, despite lobbying by automakers.
That's what leads to AI-generated content not being copyrightable. Model weights don't seem to be copyrightable either.
- zugi
> The CO has taken the (entirely correct) position that copyright law exists to incentivize human acts of creative expression.
The US Constitution grants Congress the power to grant copyrights "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts." Creative expression that is not useful therefore is not constitutionally copyrightable.
But that aside, I agree with the author that the Copyright Office refusing to further expand the already vastly over-expanded scope of copyrights is a rare positive ruling.
- EGreg
Wait, but what if you worked hard for 10 months iterating with a chatbot, which used an LLM to write the code behind the scenes?
You didn't write the actual code by hand, but you did iterate a lot and fix a lot of bugs, etc.
- GMoromisato
I don't quite get it. Can Pixar copyright its GPU-rendered films or can it only copyright the human-created models?
How will the USPTO draw a legal distinction between AI-generated and GPU-generated?
- spijdar
> Basically, we're about to recreate formalities, but managed by the private sector. To the extent that companies use AI in their work, they are going to have to track every pixel and every word and every note that is output by an AI system, and which parts were added or edited by humans after creation.
> That means that companies that want to protect their commercial interests aren't just going to get more protection based on how much work they get humans to do; they're also going to have to treat copyright's government-enforceable monopoly over expressive speech with the gravitas it deserves: not something you get automatically, but something you have to do real administrative work for.
Assuming this happens, wouldn't this mean that copyright becomes significantly less useful for people who aren't corporations and don't have the legal, financial, and administrative resources to produce this kind of bookkeeping?