AI's Artistic Freedoms: Legal Limbo in Copyright Law

0:00The first thing to know here, I think, is kind of the implications that this has with the current writer's strike that's happening. I think that the writer's strike that's been going on for a while now, it's now past the 100 day mark. And there's definitely a lot of apprehensions regarding studios potentially leveraging generative AI to script content. And a lot of writers and people are complaining about that. It's kind of interesting. um I I think I saw a tweet somewhere that someone was saying like has anyone noticed that Jimmy Fallon and every other late night uh talk show host is uh canceled essentially from this writer strike and then they're like neither have I anyways so I kind of relate to that I'm not a huge fan of Jimmy Fallon um I'm sure some people will take issue with that so if that makes you upset sorry he kind of reminds me of um from the hunger games the uh the guy that like interviews all of the people before they go on with like blue hair and he's like super cool and whatever but it's like he's interviewing these people about to do some atrocious thing i don't know why he gives me joey fallon gives me those kind of vibes but in any case um i'm sure he's a great guy maybe i don't know anyways so the point being that you know a lot of people are striking right now and this is making some implications in Hollywood and other places.

1:18So out of recent development, a federal judge reinforced the U.S. Copyright Office's stance, ruling that artwork created by AI does not qualify for protection. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell issued this judgment dismissing Stephan Thaler's appeal against the government's decision to deny copyright registration for AI-generated pieces. Judge Howell highlighted that copyright laws had never extended to, quote, works generated by new forms of technology operating absent of any guiding human hand. So Stefan Thaler, he's the CEO of a neural network enterprise. It's called Imagination Engines. He's the one that is caught up in this whole kind of litigation and legal process right now around this.

2:01And he has been at the forefront of advocating for copyright protections for AI outputs. I will tell you exactly why. Because back in 2018, he created an AI system. He called it Creativity Machine, and he named it as the exclusive creator of an art piece titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise. So this artwork was self-described as autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine. Unsurprisingly, the Copyright Office dismissed the request, emphasizing the indispensable link between human cognition and creative expression for copyright protection. So Thaler actually claimed ownership via the work for hire doctrine instigated.

2:44And so then he instigated legal action against the denial and the office's insistence on human authorship. So this whole thing went into a big legal battle. Essentially, he contested that if AI satisfied authorship prerequisites, it should be recognized as such with the machine's proprietor, you know, retaining the ownership rights. And I think the idea here, he would like his technology to be able to generate images. He would like to have the copyright to them. This would have some really massive implications because that would, you know, essentially mean that systems like Mid Journey and others that are generating images, you'd own the copyright to them.

3:20But of course, there's a bunch of issues there, because if you say, you know, make me draw a Mona Lisa style by Leonardo da Vinci picture of this woman and it does it, then it's like, it sure seems like you're infringing on, you know, the rights of an artist. And while Leonardo da Vinci is long gone and dead, there's a lot of more modern artists that are actively creating art that definitely take a lot of issue in all sorts of realms with this kind of concept, right? That someone could take their artwork, feed it into a machine, generate art and get a copyright for what's essentially a knockoff of their own stuff.

3:55So there's that whole issue here. But I think what's really interesting here is that Thaler said that the office's denial was legally inconsistent, labeling it as, quote, arbitrary and capricious and potentially in breach of the Administrative Procedure Act. So addressing this contention, Judge Howell actually said, quote, in the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by register. No. So reiterating the core principles of U.S. copyright law, Howell emphasized its commitment to safeguarding purely human creations. The judge referenced historical legal precedent to highlight the central role of human creativity, even when channeled through, you know, novel tools or mediums like these AI models.

4:44models. So for instance, while a camera can reproduce a scene, it does so only after a human envisions the photo, making a bunch of different creative choices regarding subjects, arrangements, and lighting. So the judiciary has often upheld this perspective in the landmark case of Burrough Giles litographic company versus Cerrone, the Supreme Court, or versus Cerrone. The Supreme court was unequivocal in asserting that copyright can be extended to photographs, provided they encapsulate the, quote, original intellectual conceptions of the author. So here the author is, you know, understood as the human.

5:25So additionally, in another instance, a federal appeals court ruled out copyright protection for a monkey captured photo, reinforcing the exclusivity of, you know, copyright to humans. So this is kind of interesting, right? A monkey pretty much took a picture and then people were saying like the picture was copyrightable by the monkey, but the monkey didn't get the copyrights. And I think maybe like, I'm trying to remember if it was like the owner of the monkey or the owner of the camera that wanted to, you know, claim the picture or something and say it had copyrights. In any case, that did not happen and it didn't get a P like it didn't get granted copyright because it was not a human.

6:01So Judge Howell reiterated the stance pointing out the glaring absence of any legal precedent recognizing non-human copyright. Furthermore, Judge Howell delved into the foundational philosophy of copyright law, saying it's objective to stimulate human creativity. So the very genesis of kind of American copyright really centered around fostering human innovation, and it was never really tailored for non-human entities. So in parallel, courts are navigating the murky waters, I would say, of AI enterprises using copyrighted content to train their systems. This is definitely a big problem. MidJourney, Dolly 2, everyone is really doing this.

6:41They're feeding copyrighted images into their systems, which are spitting things out. This is the big problem. So several lawsuits have been launched in California's federal court by artists alleging copyright infringement. And if successful, these actually lawsuits might force companies to dismantle their expansive language models, which is going to be very, very interesting to see how that impacts the industry as a whole. So I think the last thing I want to bring up here is the Copyright Office in March did concede that while most AI-generated works are non-copyrightable, certain AI-assisted creations may actually be eligible.

7:15So for work to qualify, a human must have played a crucial role either by selecting or arranging content in a uniquely creative manner. Now, that is incredibly murky. You could argue that coming up with a really creative prompt is that creative process. or perhaps you upload a picture and you tell it to edit a picture in a certain way. There's a lot of murkiness. So it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out in the future because we have these kind of two opposing sides where it's like, in order for it to be a copyright, a human has to create it. But if a human is kind of using it for the creative process, then it passes.

7:57So it's going to be very interesting to see how these future court cases that are currently litigating on play out, especially in light of this one that has just been settled.