A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a piece of art created by AI is not open to protection.
“In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.”
Thaler was appealing this, and his appeal was denied.
It’s nice to see this starting to get tested in court.
I doubt this will really upset “Hollywood Studios” too much, though. They are unlikely to be creating entire productions using ML techniques, and instead using it for smaller parts of an overall production. It seems like e.g. generating a voice or image for one part of a film would not invalidate copyright on other parts of the work or of the overall work taken together.
Film studios also rely on other non-copyright protections such as trademarks to dissuade derivative works.
I think the bigger test will be: is it copyright infringement to use a work as part of a training set for a model? It’s all very well saying that the output is not copyrightable, but there’s still a big question about the input.