Comment by Lazare
14 days ago
Interesting thought experiment is to consider an author who writes a novel in English, but wants to translate it into German.
They have a copyright on the original, and if they hire a human, the human would have a copyright on the translation (which would generally be licensed or transferred back to the author in some way).
If they use an AI for the translation, by the logic here, the translation wouldn't have its own independent copyright, but (based on other long established principles of copyright) it would still be a derived work of the original, so even if this decision holds it would not be legal to make unauthorised AI translations, pirate authorised AI translations, make further translations into other languages (or back to English), etc.
Which seems fairly reasonable! But consider:
If you start with, say, a 90,000 word novel, and ask for a translated novel, you (presumably) have sufficient rights to stop someone making unauthorised copies of the AI translated version.
If you start with a 300 word prompt, and ask for a logo, you (apparently) do not have sufficient rights to stop someone from using it without authorisation.
So some combination of the input (0.3k vs 90k) and the output (logo versus novel) crosses an inflection point between these two extremes, and I think it's interesting to wonder what the boundaries are. Like, in theory you could graph input size versus output complexity, and sketch a frontier between "the author's protected expression survives in the output" and "the author's protected expression does not survive in the output". And I don't have the slightest idea what I think a fair frontier would look like.
> Some combination of the input (0.3k vs 90k) and the output (logo versus novel) crosses an inflection point, and it's interesting to wonder what the boundaries are
It has always been like that though. Copyright is just that arbitrary. You really can't tell if Android violates Oracle's copyright over Java by reading law text.
It's supposed to be arbitrary. Copyright is not some sort of human right or divine commandment that creators have. It's a legal device to incentivize a certain type of behavior. Like tax cuts and subsidies, governments can dangle it in front of people whenever it wants.
Monkeys and LLMs (so far) either don't understand or don't need such incentives, so they don't get copyright.
Humans dont need incentives either, we an abolish it.
2 replies →
All law, in fact, is arbitrary.
I've come to understand that rules are not executable, or not executed. As programmers we understand if we write if(X) {Y} and X happens, Y will.
Laws aren't like that. Laws are just powerful people telling us what we want to do and what they want to do to us if we don't. The difference is subtle: the powerful person's power is not limited by the law. He only writes the law because exercising his power is annoying and he'd prefer that we complied in advance so he doesn't have to. The thing that actually executes is the powerful person's desires, not the law.
Input size and output complexity are not necessarily the only two dimensions involved. There’s no reason to think that such graph would show a continuous frontier.
I don't see why the author of the 300-word prompt couldn't claim copyright of it.
As far as I'm following it, the court didn't suggest the prompt was not a protected work.
But what the court did say is that the logo wasn't (sufficiently) derived from the prompt; those 300 words weren't contained or encoded in the logo, so if you copied the logo without permission from the author of the prompt, this was fine, because you weren't in any meaningful sense copying that prompt, or any other protected work of the author. (Which in my view is fair enough, really!)
Another way of thinking about it is to consider:
1) The number of different prompts that would yield a very similar looking logo. In many cases, a one or two word difference would probably yield a very different logo. (Conversely, you could rewrite an entire chapter of the novel, but the other chapters would still be translated more-or-less unchanged. You'd need to rewrite every sentence to end up with an entirely new set of sentences in the output, and since copyright covers the arrangement of text, not the plot or ideas, that matters.)
2) How feasible it'd be to look at the logo and accurately guess the prompt. (Again considering the hypothetical novel, if you translated the novel back into English, entire passages would likely be word-for-word identical with the original.)