Stephen Thaler’s Quest to Get His ‘Autonomous’ AI Legally Recognized Could Upend Copyright Law Forever; Art News, January 8, 2024

 Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, Art News; Stephen Thaler’s Quest to Get His  ‘Autonomous’ AI Legally Recognized Could Upend Copyright Law Forever

"Abbott and Thaler’s push for copyright brings up a very basic question for artists today: how do we locate agency and creativity when we make things with machines? When is it our doing, and when is it “theirs”? This question follows the arc of history as humans design increasingly complex tools that work independently of us, even if we designed them and set them into motion. Debates have raged in public forums and in lawsuits regarding to what extent a model like Midjourney can produce genuinely novel images or whether it is just randomly stitching together disparate pixels based on its training data to generate synthetic quasi-originality. But for those who work in machine learning, this process isn’t all that different from how humans work."

The Supreme Court May Force Us to Rethink 500 Years of Art; The New York Times, March 1, 2023

  Blake Gopnik, The New York Times; The Supreme Court May Force Us to Rethink 500 Years of Art

"Any day now, the Supreme Court will hand down a decision that could change the future of Western art — and, in a sense, its history, too. Blame the appeals court judgment from 2021 declaring that Andy Warhol had no right to appropriate someone else’s photo of Prince into one of the Pop artist’s classic silk-screened portraits.

The art world quailed at the ruling."

On AI-Generated Works, Artists, and Intellectual Property; Lawfare, February 28, 2023

Ryan Merkley, Lawfare; On AI-Generated Works, Artists, and Intellectual Property 

"Today’s laws allow only humans to create a new copyright. So far, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has trod lightly to avoid declaring any wholly computer-generated work eligible for copyright. In the coming years, there will be enormous pressure on lawmakers to allow computer-generated works to be eligible for copyright. If there is a line in the sand to be drawn, it’s between humans and computers. Rather than allow computer art to devalue human works, one solution might be to elevate human art and decide that AI art should never have equal value. 

Legal frameworks worldwide rely on laws written sometimes hundreds of years ago before computers even existed. Beyond those laws, there are moral and ethical questions that remain unanswered. What is the good we hope to create, and what are the harms that might result? What kind of competitive market do we want, and who, or what, will we be competing with?... 

If copyright laws were bent to allow algorithms to become authors, it would upend one of the foundational principles of global intellectual property and just might unleash a torrent of new issues so overwhelming that it could spell the end of international treaties like the Berne Convention, already creaking under the weight of the internet."

United States: Art And Artificial Intelligence Collide With Copyright Law; Mondaq, December 29, 2022

Marc D. Ostrow and  Carlianna Dengel, Romano Law , Mondaq; United States: Art And Artificial Intelligence Collide With Copyright Law

"US Copyright law protects "original works of authorship." And at least since the famous "Monkey Selfie" case, the Copyright Office's Compendium of Office Practices III states at section 313.2, "[t]o qualify as a work of 'authorship' the work must be created by a human being." The first example cited in this section as a work that will not be granted a copyright registration is a "photograph taken by a monkey."

This principle has been applied to AI-generated works in both the patent and copyright arenas. Stephen Thaler, the creator of the AI platform, DABUS, an acronym for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, had previously applied for patent protection for a DABUS-created invention. The USPTO denied Thaler's application and he appealed that denial as far as the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In October, that court rejected on the grounds that an inventor must be an individual.

Dr. Thaler had also applied for a copyright registration for artwork created by his computer program, "Creativity Machine." His 2018 application was rejected, and Thaler appealed that refusal to the Copyright Review Board (CRB). In a lengthy letter to Dr. Thaler's counsel dated February 14, 2022 and signed by the Register of Copyrights, the CRB, citing the Compendium III and prior Supreme Court precedent, affirmed the refusal to register the work on the basis that the "author" of the work is not human.

Given the proliferation of open-source AI platforms to generate all manner of creative works, including visual art, poetry and songs and the exponentially increasing number of AI-created works, copyright law may need to be more flexible as to what AI-generated (or partially generated) works may be registered and by whom. Other thorny issues that will need to be addressed either by legislation, regulation or litigation are the use of copyright or trademark protected works to train AI applications or the incorporation of such works into AI-generated creations."

Freed From Copyright, These Classic Works Are Yours To Adapt; NPR, January 5, 2019

Milton Guevara, NPR; Freed From Copyright, These Classic Works Are Yours To Adapt

""Copyright has been overextended so many times, largely at the behest of major copyright holders," says author Naomi Novik. "Even though what that actually does is inhibit people from creating new works and sharing these older works." Novik is a founding member of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit that focuses on preserving fan fiction and art — that is, work created by fans, based on characters and worlds from their favorite written works, film, and TV, which can occasionally come into conflict with copyright law.

"For a character to live, that character has to belong to the audience," says Novik. "Works of art are meant to nourish our collective understanding; they're meant to nourish our conversation." 

Duke Law's entire list of works that entered the public domain this year can be found here."

Illuminating the ‘Dark’ Web and Content Monitoring; New York Times, 6/24/16

Ted Loos, New York Times; Illuminating the ‘Dark’ Web and Content Monitoring:

"Eva and Franco Mattes — married Brooklyn artists and “hacktivists” — use those ideas metaphorically, peeling back the surface of what they call the “sanitized” internet to reveal its murkier side: the world of content monitoring and the elusive individuals who are tasked with tracking and removing offensive material online.

Their latest exhibition, “Abuse Standards Violations,” on view at London’s Carroll/Fletcher gallery until Aug. 27, is a journey into what Ben Vickers, a London curator at the Serpentine Galleries and fan of their work, called “the dark, morbid heart of the internet.”"

Federal Judge Strikes Down California’s Art Royalties Law; New York Times, 5/21/12

Patricia Cohen, New York Times; Federal Judge Strikes Down California’s Art Royalties Law:

"A federal district judge has struck down as unconstitutional a California law that gave artists a part of the profits when their work is resold...

Artists in most of the United States have long complained that unlike composers, filmmakers or writers, they do not receive a share of any future sales — known by the French expression droit de suite — under copyright law."

Review of Lawrence Lessig: Decriminalizing the Remix, Time, 10/17/08

Via Time: Review of Lawrence Lessig: Decriminalizing the Remix:

"In his latest book, the Stanford professor and Wired columnist rails against the nation's copyright laws — regulations he believes are futile, costly and culturally stifling. Citing "hybrid" economies like YouTube and Wikipedia (both of which rely on user-generated "remixes" of information, images and sound), Lessig argues in favor of what he calls a "Read/Write (RW)" culture — as opposed to "Read/Only (RO)" — that allows consumers to "create art as readily as they consume it."

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1851241,00.html

What Is Art For?, New York Times, 11/14/08

Via New York Times: What Is Art For?:

"For the Copy Left, as for Hyde, the last 20 years have witnessed a corporate “land grab” of information — often in the guise of protecting the work of individual artists — that has put a stranglehold on creativity, in increasingly bizarre ways. Over dinner not long ago, he told me about the legal fate of Emily Dickinson's poems. Dickinson died in 1886, but it was not until 1955 that an “official” volume of her collected works was published, by Harvard University Press. The length of copyright terms has expanded substantially in the last century, and Harvard holds the exclusive right to Dickinson’s poems until 2050 — more than 160 years after they were first written. When the poet Robert Pinsky asked Harvard for permission to include a Dickinson poem in an article that he was writing for Slate about poetic insults, it refused, even for a fee. “Their feeling was that once the poem was online, they’d lose control of it,” Hyde told me.

In highlighting the absurd ways in which intellectual copyright has overreached, Hyde brings to mind such iconic Copy Left figures as Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional-law scholar at Stanford. Yet Hyde’s new book, which he allowed me to read in draft form (it is unfinished and untitled), addresses what he considers a more fundamental issue. We may believe there should be a limit on the market in cultural property, he argues, but that doesn’t mean that we have “a good public sense” of where to set that limit. Hyde’s book is, at its core, an attempt to help formulate that sense."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/magazine/16hyde-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=copyright&st=nyt&oref=slogin