US rejects AI copyright for famous state fair-winning Midjourney art

Good. Maybe this could put a stop to the attempts by companies to gut their payroll and replace artists with software.

Pretty sure this case is dead. The copyright office did the same thing with the monkey selfies and the ai art piece from stephen thaler. That "void of ownership" is just public domain. Gonna be interesting what other kind of ai cases come up later though.

If those people have ever tried actually using image generation software they will know that there is significant human authorship required to make something that isn't remotely dogshit. The most important skill in visual art is not how to draw something but knowing what to draw.

If you compare the AI image that was used with the image that one the price after the artist enhanced it to that level you could argue that paintings from sketches are not copyright-able

We're gonna have some juicy legal battles when Hollywood start leveraging generative AI more and more

The article says that he could have copyrighted the work if he disclaimed the AI generated source images in his application. The collage he created is copyrightable but he can't claim copyright on the source images because they were not created by a human. If someone were to take his collage, he'd still be protected.

What's significant about this is that this means that you can't simply copyright an image you had ai generate from a prompt, there needs to be some kind of transformation, and if someone else got ahold of the original AI image before transformation they could use it freely as public domain.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Because Mr. Allen is unwilling to disclaim the AI-generated material, the Work cannot be registered as submitted," the office wrote in its decision.

In this case, "disclaim" refers to the act of formally renouncing or giving up any claim to the ownership or authorship of the AI-generated content in the work.

In August 2022, Artist Jason M. Allen created the piece in question, titled Theatre D'opera Spatial, using the Midjourney image synthesis service, which was relatively new at the time.

The image depicting a futuristic royal scene won top prize in the fair's "Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography" category.

In his appeal, Allen claimed that "the Office is placing a value judgment on the utility of various tools" and that denying copyright protection for AI-generated artwork would result in a "void of ownership."

More recently, it also denied copyright registration for an image that computer scientist Stephen Thaler claimed was autonomously generated by his AI system.

The original article contains 536 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Why do photographers get copyright over their pictures then?
They're just pointing a camera at something and pressing a button.

AI is a tool like any other.

Am I the only one that think the longue they reject it, the more it will participate to it's story behind, and make it worth more and more, and make it more and more "outrageous" and continue etc to make it have more worth?

US has a shitty copyright system. Got it.

Cool. Ugly ass Ai trash