Comment by Animats
11 hours ago
> only humans can be granted copyright.
No, a copyright application can be filed with a corporation listed as the author. Watch for the copyright notice at the end of the next major movie you see.
11 hours ago
> only humans can be granted copyright.
No, a copyright application can be filed with a corporation listed as the author. Watch for the copyright notice at the end of the next major movie you see.
Under US copyright law, copyright protection subsists "in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression":
<https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102>.
It's not that corporations can't hold copyright. But a corporation cannot mechanically create "original works of authorship" by a purely mechanical process. That process is limited to human authors. "Works for hire" would be a common case of a human creator (author) resulting in a corporate assignment (ownership), see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire>.
Notably cases:
- The "monkey selfie" copyright case, in which photographer David Slater arranged for monkeys to take selfies. Copyright ownership denied by both the US Copyright Office (against Slater's claim) and (in a separate case arguing the monkey should hold copyright) by an appellate court: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...>, Naruto v. Slater, No. 16‑CV‑00063 (N.D. Cal. 2016).
- Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). Simple compilations are not copyrightable regardless of whether created by humans.
- THALER v. PERLMUTTER (2023). "[T]his case presents only the question of whether a work generated autonomously by a computer system is eligible for copyright. In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No." <https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-dis-col/1149169...>.
This isn't what the copyright means.
The employees and contractors are the authors, and because of the contract they sign they assign copyright to the corporation. Corporations, as a collection of humans are allowed to have authorship.
LLMs are not companies and they are not humans in any way shape or form, and thus cannot get copyright nor grant copyright to a third party.
However, until very recently the creative product must have been created by someone so there is an implicitly created copyright over the product in the first place. With AI output, that might not continue to be true, we don't really know how it'll work out yet.
In any case, the corporation did not create the product, people created it and their contractual relationship with the corporation defined how the ownership of that work was managed. So, I don't find it too unusual that this element of personhood is available to corporations.