So many questions: Are these books copyright by Tom Lesley, ChatGPT, OpenAI, ...? Should he share the money with OpenAI, or with the internet? Do we need to update the definitions of plagiarism? So it goes.
This [1] is, to my knowledge, the latest word on who'd own the copyright. And the answer is most likely the author, with the second most likely candidate being nobody. In a nutshell, "AI" generated content itself cannot be copyrighted since the process is carried out by software instead of a human, and software cannot be assigned ownership of copyright. However, material that is sufficiently recombined in a 'creative way' can be copyrighted.
The case/example mentioned is that a single image from image generation software cannot be copyrighted, but a series of related images being used to tell a story can be copyrighted, because it's a human carrying out the creative task.
> software cannot be assigned ownership of copyright.
More precisely, only human works are subject to copyright. The law simply doesn’t apply to works by animals, AIs, or anything else, even when they are as creative as a human.
So the next business model is to simply copy every work that isn't copyrightable and put it up for sale yourself. Nothing stopping you and you may as well.
Yes, but copyright requires the human to have significant original input into the work for it to be eligible. The human can’t just delegate to the animal or AI.
The degree to which a human has to be creative is very minimal. As SCOTUS said in Feist v. Rural:
> "the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice"
Literally throwing paint at a canvas is enough to suffice.
Arranging the prerequisite conditions and coaxing a monkey into taking a selfie is probably enough as well (as long as you don't hire PETA's dumb lawyers who want to argue for assignment of the copyright to the monkey)
There's not really enough information to determine whether this author would qualify. We don't know how much editing he did if any, nor have we seen these specific cases tested in a court yet.
I think it needs to be evaluated relative to the volume of the work. If you take a novel in the public domain and just change a few sentences, I don’t think you can claim copyright for the modified novel.
The courts are going to always be obsessed with one practical scenario. I take e.g. Harry Potter, put it through an LLM with the prompting of essentially writing the exact same thing with slightly different characters, locations, and phrasings. And then put it up for sale (or free download), making no secret of the fact that it's essentially the same book.
If an LLM reaches a sufficient capability that this can be achieved while maintaining a roughly comparable level of readability, then you'd have just completely legalized 'piracy by proxy'. And the same would come to every single medium from movies to software. This is going to make it an extremely difficult question to answer.
I expect what it come down to is determinism. LLMs are completely deterministic - same model + same input + same seed = same output. And so any seller will be obligated to retain any model composition/data, and any copyright holder of an input training item will have a copyright claim on any output item. In other words, you can only train on stuff you already have the copyright to, or rights to.
There maybe some need to legally clarify how much input is necessary for Tom to claim copyright.
ChatGPT can't, legally speaking only humans are capable of claiming copyright. In the monkey selfie case a few years ago it was determined animals and machines can't claim copyright. In cases where there is no human author, the work is public domain.
Isn't there a difference between a monkey taking a picture (no human author involved) and a person using a tool (ChatGPT) to help them realise their original work?
If I made a drawing with one of those old plastic spirograph tools I'd never wonder if the copyright was mine or the spirograph's.
Sure, even though photos are machine made, Humans claim copyright because they had artistic input on composition and framing. Between fully AI generated stuff, and human artistic input prompts causing output there is a line where the results go from copyrightable to not copyrightable. The question is where is that line, legally.
To me GPT is either very close to or already crosses that line.
OpenAI (ChatGPT, DALL-E, etc.) explicitly assigns their rights to anything generated by their systems to the user.
> OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output. This means you can use Content for any purpose, including commercial purposes such as sale or publication, if you comply with these Terms.
