Paul DelSignore on AI and the Law

Paul DelSignore wrote a Medium post titled AI and the Law: What You Need To Know (21 March 2023).

« Who owns the IP of AI-generated content? »

« To be clear on the current law regarding copyrighting AI artwork: “If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it” – USCO director Shira Perlmutter (link to doc) »

« [Director of the U.S. Copyright Office] Shira Perlmutter went on to state the following… Digital art, poems, and books generated using tools like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, ChatGPT, or even the newly released GPT-4 will not be protected by copyright if they were created by humans using only a text description or prompt. »

« If you are generating content using AI tools, you don’t own any of it…

• The beautiful images you generate with Midjourney are not protected. I can take your images, print them on a t-shirt or book cover and sell them without any ramifications.
• If you are a company that is using AI for written documents, articles, or news items, they can be copied and re-used somewhere else.
• If you are using AI to generate fashion and interior design, advertising, or marketing campaigns, music or sound effects, 3D models, magazine covers, billboards, or educational content, none of that is protected under copyright laws.
• If you are creating AI-generated videos, (like what Netflix just did for background animations in an anime), you don’t own the IP for those videos or animations. »

« Fair Use Lawsuits…

• Three artists are taking legal action against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt for allegedly using copyrighted images to train their AI models without obtaining permission or compensating the artists.
• In addition to that lawsuit, Getty Images is also suing Stability AI over an alleged copyright violation.
• Prior to these two lawsuits against AI art, two programmers filed a copyright suit against OpenAI, Microsoft, and GitHub, accusing them of using their code without proper licensing to train the Copilot AI coding tool. »