Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual ⁠art ‌was ineligible for copyright.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday ⁠to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence can be copyrighted under U.S. law, turning away ​a case involving a computer ​scientist from Missouri who was ​denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by his AI system.

Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual ⁠art ‌at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection ⁠because it did not have a human creator.

Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering ‌a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and purple plant imagery.

The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors ​to be eligible to receive a copyright. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had urged the Supreme Court not to hear Thaler’s appeal.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    54·
    7 hours ago

    Copyright is an intellectual property right, firmly grounded in property law doctrine–you are probably thinking of trademark, which is rooted in consumer protection law, or likeness rights which have their roots in privacy law.

    First of all, “Intellectual property[sic]” is a not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, but they are all significantly different from each other. Trying to lump them together under a single term is disingenuous at best, and using the word “property” in that term is biased loaded language.

    Second, copyright cannot be a property right because ideas cannot be property. In fact, ideas are essentially the opposite of property, as Thomas Jefferson once pointed out:

    it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me.

    What copyright actually is, is a temporary monopoly granted at the whim of Congress. It’s a license, not a right.

    • A property right is a thing the owner is entitled to, and a natural right. In contrast, a copyright is an artificial construct invented as a power of Congress, and granted with the express purpose “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts,” not because the creator of the work somehow deserved it.
    • Ownership of a piece of property exists in perpetuity until it is sold and cannot be taken from the owner without “just compensation.” In contrast, copyright exists explicitly “for limited times” and then it expires and the work reverts to the Public Domain.
    • GamingChairModel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      5 hours ago

      First of all, “Intellectual property[sic]” is a not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, but they are all significantly different from each other. Trying to lump them together under a single term is disingenuous at best, and using the word “property” in that term is biased loaded language.

      You don’t get to redefine words like “property” or “intellectual property” how you see fit, completely untethered to the way the legal system uses those terms with specific meaning.

      Intellectual property rights include all of those things, in the same way that copyright can include copyright over text or musical compositions or sound recordings or photographs or building architectures. But note that copyright over each of those types of media is subject to its own rights and rules, and you’ll need to apply the correct rules to the correct contexts. But it’s still useful to group similar concepts together, and have a name for the category. That’s why people refer to intellectual property.

      A property right is a thing the owner is entitled to, and a natural right.

      This is a naive take. Property rights are natural rights? No, property rights are defined by the legal system of whatever sovereign nation you’re in. And they’re limited by whatever rules of that legal system are.

      If I own land in the U.S., I’m still required to pay taxes on it, and to enforce my property rights against adverse possession, lest I lose that property to the state or to a squatter. If I don’t record my ownership with the county recorder I might lose the property to someone else who comes along and records them buying it from the guy who sold it to me (and fraudulently sold it twice).

      Property rights can be chopped up and distributed in different ways. I might own a house but rent it to a tenant and have a mortgage on it from the bank, each of whom will have certain rights over that land, despite me being the owner.

      And property can apply to tangible things (a painting, a car), intangible things (a checking account balance at the bank, a certificateless share of stock in a corporation, a domain name registered with ICANN), and all sorts of concepts in between (the right to use a particular mailbox in a post office, an easement to use a driveway over my neighbor’s land, the right to use my name and image in a commercial, a futures contract that entitles me to take delivery of a whole bunch of wheat on a particular day at a particular time in the future). All of those are property, and recognized as property rights in U.S. law.

      What copyright actually is, is a temporary monopoly granted at the whim of Congress. It’s a license, not a right.

      Licenses are a right to do something. In fact, copyright owners assign licenses to others to use that intellectual property all the time.

      And the copyright itself is not property over an idea. It’s the right to copy something specific that has already been fixed in a particular physical medium. If you come up with an idea for a melody, you don’t own the copyright until you write it down.

      You’re just pretty far off base because you don’t understand how broad the word “property” is, and you don’t seem to want to examine just how man-made other forms of property are, and think that copyright is something special and different.