<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/20/how-allowing-copyright-on-ai-generated-works-could-destroy-creative-industries/>
"Generative AI continues to be the hot topic in the digital world – and beyond.
A previous blog post noted that this has led to people finally asking the
important question whether copyright is fit for the digital world. As far as AI
is concerned, there are two sides to the question. The first is whether
generative AI systems can be trained on copyright materials without the need
for licensing. That has naturally dominated discussions, because many see an
opportunity to impose what is effectively a copyright tax on generative AI. The
other question is whether the output of generative AI systems can be
copyrighted. As another
Walled Post explained, the current situation is
unclear. In the US, purely AI-generated art cannot currently be copyrighted and
forms part of the public domain, but it may be possible to copyright works that
include significant human input.
Given the current interest in generative AI, it’s no surprise that there are
lots of pundits out there pontificating on what it all means. I find
Christopher S. Penn’s thoughts on the subject to be consistently insightful and
worth reading, unlike those of many other commentators. Even better, his
newsletter and blog are free. His most recent newsletter will be of particular
interest to
Walled Culture readers, and has a bold statement concerning AI
and copyright:
We should unequivocally ensure machine-made content can never be protected
under intellectual property laws, or else we’re going to destroy the entire
creative economy.
His newsletter includes a short harmonized tune generated using AI. Penn points
out that it is trivially easy to automate the process of varying that tune and
its harmony using AI, in a way that scales to billions of harmonized tunes
covering a large proportion of all possible songs:
If my billion songs are now copyrighted, then every musician who composes a
song from today forward has to check that their composition isn’t in my
catalog of a billion variations – and if it is (which, mathematically, it
probably will be), they have to pay me.
Moreover, allowing copyright in this way would result in a computing arms race.
Those with the deepest pockets could use more powerful hardware and software to
produce more AI tunes faster than anyone else, allowing them to copyright them
first:
That wipes out the music industry. That wipes out musical creativity,
because suddenly there is no incentive to create and publish original music
for commercial purposes, including making a living as a musician. You know
you’ll just end up in a copyright lawsuit sooner or later with a company
that had better technology than you."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
