Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

[smatovic]

US Appeals Court Rejects Copyrights For AI-Generated Art
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/03/18 ... erated-art

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday affirmed that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office that an image created by Stephen Thaler's AI system "DABUS" was not entitled to copyright protection, and that only works with human authors can be copyrighted. Tuesday's decision marks the latest attempt by U.S. officials to grapple with the copyright implications of the fast-growing generative AI industry. The Copyright Office has separately rejected artists' bids for copyrights on images generated by the AI system Midjourney. The artists argued they were entitled to copyrights for images they created with AI assistance -- unlike Thaler, who said that his "sentient" system created the image in his case independently. [...] U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel on Tuesday that U.S. copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being." "Because many of the Copyright Act's provisions make sense only if an author is a human being, the best reading of the Copyright Act is that human authorship is required for registration," the appeals court said.

This one seems settled, the cases for (copyright protected) training data as fair use and public domain run still through the courts.

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Srdja

[smatovic]

Hmm, now it gets messy, copyright, big tech and politics....

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/12/ ... /?td=rt-3a

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Srdja

[towforce]

US Appeals Court Rejects Copyrights For AI-Generated Art
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/03/18 ... erated-art

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday affirmed that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office that an image created by Stephen Thaler's AI system "DABUS" was not entitled to copyright protection, and that only works with human authors can be copyrighted. Tuesday's decision marks the latest attempt by U.S. officials to grapple with the copyright implications of the fast-growing generative AI industry. The Copyright Office has separately rejected artists' bids for copyrights on images generated by the AI system Midjourney. The artists argued they were entitled to copyrights for images they created with AI assistance -- unlike Thaler, who said that his "sentient" system created the image in his case independently. [...] U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel on Tuesday that U.S. copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being." "Because many of the Copyright Act's provisions make sense only if an author is a human being, the best reading of the Copyright Act is that human authorship is required for registration," the appeals court said.

This one seems settled, the cases for (copyright protected) training data as fair use and public domain run still through the courts.

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Srdja

So... if I say, "Draw a picture of a lion", I can claim copyright over the image, but if I merely say, "draw a picture" then I cannot.

This is obviously silly. Also, right now, any image (or other work of art) created by AI has to have been commissioned by somebody, and so the person who commissioned it should get the copyright protection.

Having said all that, in a world in which producing great art is as easy as turning on a tap, copyright has no value anyway.

[towforce]

Hmm, now it gets messy, copyright, big tech and politics....

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/12/ ... /?td=rt-3a

Double standard: a human consuming art (which will train the neural circuits in his or her brain) does not breach copyright, but a computer consuming art to train its NN does?

[smatovic]

Hmm, now it gets messy, copyright, big tech and politics....

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/12/ ... /?td=rt-3a

Double standard: a human consuming art (which will train the neural circuits in his or her brain) does not breach copyright, but a computer consuming art to train its NN does?

Here it is about the definition of "fair use" in regard of copyright and training commercial neural networks.

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Srdja

[smatovic]

US Appeals Court Rejects Copyrights For AI-Generated Art
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/03/18 ... erated-art

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday affirmed that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office that an image created by Stephen Thaler's AI system "DABUS" was not entitled to copyright protection, and that only works with human authors can be copyrighted. Tuesday's decision marks the latest attempt by U.S. officials to grapple with the copyright implications of the fast-growing generative AI industry. The Copyright Office has separately rejected artists' bids for copyrights on images generated by the AI system Midjourney. The artists argued they were entitled to copyrights for images they created with AI assistance -- unlike Thaler, who said that his "sentient" system created the image in his case independently. [...] U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel on Tuesday that U.S. copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being." "Because many of the Copyright Act's provisions make sense only if an author is a human being, the best reading of the Copyright Act is that human authorship is required for registration," the appeals court said.

This one seems settled, the cases for (copyright protected) training data as fair use and public domain run still through the courts.

--
Srdja

So... if I say, "Draw a picture of a lion", I can claim copyright over the image, but if I merely say, "draw a picture" then I cannot.

This is obviously silly. Also, right now, any image (or other work of art) created by AI has to have been commissioned by somebody, and so the person who commissioned it should get the copyright protection.

Having said all that, in a world in which producing great art is as easy as turning on a tap, copyright has no value anyway.

>> U.S. copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being

That's what Syzygy said all the time.

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Srdja

[smatovic]

Copyright protected material for AI training as fair use and public domain still not settled:

Meta Beats Copyright Suit From Authors Over AI Training on Books
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/2 ... inlinkanon

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta escaped a first-of-its-kind copyright lawsuit from a group of authors who alleged the tech giant hoovered up millions of copyrighted books without permission to train its generative AI model called Llama. San Francisco federal Judge Vince Chhabria ruled Wednesday that Meta's decision to use the books for training is protected under copyright law's fair use defense, but he cautioned that his opinion is more a reflection on the authors' failure to litigate the case effectively. "This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," Chhabria said.

Microsoft Sued By Authors Over Use of Books in AI Training
https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/2 ... inlinkanon

Microsoft has been hit with a lawsuit by a group of authors who claim the company used their books without permission to train its Megatron artificial intelligence model. From a report: Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent and several others alleged that Microsoft used pirated digital versions of their books to teach its AI to respond to human prompts. Their lawsuit, filed in New York federal court on Tuesday, is one of several high-stakes cases brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright holders against tech companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic and Microsoft-backed OpenAI over alleged misuse of their material in AI training. [...] The writers alleged in the complaint that Microsoft used a collection of nearly 200,000 pirated books to train Megatron, an algorithm that gives text responses to user prompts.

Anthropic Bags Key 'Fair Use' Win For AI Platforms, But Faces Trial Over Damages For Millions of Pirated Works
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/06/24 ... ated-works

A federal judge has ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its Claude AI models constitutes fair use, but rejected the startup's defense for downloading millions of pirated books to build a permanent digital library.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup granted partial summary judgment to Anthropic in the copyright lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The court found that training large language models on copyrighted works was "exceedingly transformative" under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Anthropic downloaded over seven million books from pirate sites, according to court documents. The startup also purchased millions of print books, destroyed the bindings, scanned every page, and stored them digitally.

Both sets of books were used to train various versions of Claude, which generates over $1 billion in annual revenue. While the judge approved using books for AI training purposes, he ruled that downloading pirated copies to create what Anthropic called a "central library of all the books in the world" was not protected fair use. The case will proceed to trial on damages related to the pirated library copies.

Meanwhile there are datasets (and models) with free training data:

Harvard's Book Bonanza: 1 Million Public-Domain Books Unleashed for AI Training
https://opentools.ai/news/harvards-book ... i-training

Eleuther AI releases 8TB collection of licensed and open training data
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4 ... -data.html

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Srdja

[towforce]

Copyright protected material for AI training as fair use and public domain still not settled...

No case to answer: copyright protects against copying. It does not protect against reading and then writing something somewhat similar (e.g. link).

[smatovic]

Copyright protected material for AI training as fair use and public domain still not settled...

No case to answer: copyright protects against copying. It does not protect against reading and then writing something somewhat similar (e.g. link).

I think it is more about the definition of "fair use" and "public domain" in legal terms as in the Google Books fair use cases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Legal_issues

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Srdja