Comment by raincole
14 days ago
It means as long as you can find a few employees who testify that they made "creative input" during the process and nobody can disprove that, you're fine.
It's like things that are already in public domain. Even if you make a coloring book out of paintings in public domain, it doesn't necessarily mean others can just print your book as-is.
> It means as long as you can find a few employees who testify that they made "creative input" during the process and nobody can disprove that, you're fine.
Have you been involved in copyright or patent litigation?
Because it's not that easy.
It's usually easier than that, as one by default hold the copyright of their works. Typically a company doesn't need to provide the whole working process and files to the court to claim copyright over their published products / to accuse pirates for violation.
If you're on the defendant side of a copyright violation case, it's extremely hard to use "well the original author didn't really make it...* as a defense. (Patent cases are often defended with this argument though, as a patent grants far boarder protection than copyright and can be rejected on prior art. But still it's very different from "AI made this actually.")
> It's usually easier than that, as one by default hold the copyright of their works.
That's not what we're talking about.
This is a question of copyright eligibility in the first place. An excellent recent(ish) example is Oracle v Google wherein the former claimed copyright over the Java APIs. That particular litigation went on for years and ultimately went to the Supreme Court (though it ultimately ended on a fair use argument and the issue of API copyright eligibility was never settled).
We can probably assume similar high profile cases in the future that turn on quantifying the level of human contribution in code produced through the use of AI.
As for patents, it's literally that easy. Attacking authorship of a patent is an excellent way to invalidate it. It's why any company with a serious patent program requires staff to keep supporting notes for their work and confirm authorship in writing as part of the filing process.
You can blame the governments for all sort of inefficiencies but any operation that impacts taxes runs a tight ship in most developed nations, this include things like copyright law, census, and anything statistics.
If companies get slope with creative output to the point that "a few employees" can reproduce it in shadow markets, don't expect to get copyright protection without giving governments revenue and speech-control.
Perhaps but what about individual works done not via a company. Say you are a author and someone falsely detects a AI watermark in your book. Is the testimony you provide enough to override that falsely detected AI watermark? My feeling is that there will be an industry that arises that proves you contributed to the works you want copyrighted.
(I think) the case depends on what AI watermarks are. As far as I know, things like SynthID has practically zero false positives.
My understanding is that you get back a percentage from SynthID regarding how confident it thinks the text is generated by AI or not. The question is what percentage would be considered undeniable that it is AI generated or require more than just your testimony to prove that you actually did the work yourself. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 (Google Deepmind) was using a "Watermark detectability is measured using the true-positive rate (TPR) when the false-positive rate (FPR) is set to 1%" for instance in their research paper. This 1% was set arbitrary just for the research paper but what percentage should it be set to?
I think you need to provide independent sources for the "SynthID has practically zero false positives". Except a paper written by Google authors about SynthID for images I have not found any study about zero false positives.
Like being an executive producer