An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
If anyone deserves copyright over a photo, it’s the people that had their work photographed without permission. Then, the most deserving of the copyright are the camera and film manufacturers that made photography possible.
I think this is an angle that isn’t pften taken. The advent of photography was a very similar situation to the current advent of AI.
However, there are some crucial differences. For example, a photo can realistically be taken for personal use, which is either protected by law, or at least tolerated. AI, on the other hand, doesn’t have this going for it (you wouldn’t really go to the trouble of training an AI model for personal use). Even if the model and everything else is fully transparent and open source, it’s still gobbling up copyrighted data for commercial purposes - the model’s authors or the users’. Luckily, there is no AI fair use carveout (and I hope there won’t ever be one).
Another thing I’d like to point out: in the vast majority of european legal systems copyright isn’t called “Copyright”, but “Authors’ rights”, i.e. its primary purpose isn’t to restrict copying as much as it’s protect the interests of the author (not publisher/corporation, although this unfortunately got bastardised a while ago).
I can only hope the EU takes a reasonable approach to AI (that is, ban it from gobbling copyrighted work, require current “tainted” models be purged along with corporations paying reparations to the authors, as well as banning EULA clauses along the lines of “by signing up we get to feed all your information into the AI”).
By my first comment I was trying to point out the fact that the “time invested” argument isn’t that strong. That doesn’t mean there aren’t better arguments or that I don’t agree with the general idea, just that we need better arguments if we want to win this fight.