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the real issue is that the Thaler case was a different question: "Can AI be an author?" and the lower Court said no and SCOTUS left it along. But the question of "what is enough for the human to be the author" wasn't even part of the case. That is completely own checked.

Logically, I think there's a big difference between code which was produced from a simple generic prompt without other input vs code which was produced from a multiple complex prompts with large existing code as input.

When I'm feeding AI my code as input and it ends up producing new code which adheres to my architecture, my coding style and my detailed technical requirements, the copyright over the output should be mine since the code looks exactly like what I would have produced by hand, there is no creative input from the AI. It's just a code completion tool to save time.

I understand if someone leaves an LLM running as an agent for multiple days and it produces a whole bunch of code, then it's a very different process.


Also, I don't think there is any example testing the conclusion. There is no case to point at that any of the factors they listed are sufficient to convey authorship. Would love to be pointed to a case where rejecting decisions and redirecting to a different approach was deemed human authorship. What we do know is that you can disclaim the part of the code a human didn't author. In fact, the Copyright Office requires you disclose and disclaim. If anyone out there has more factual and citable sources please share.

It's in fact the opposite from what I've read. In one of the supreme court cases cited by the copyright office itself in its opinion of AI works (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio...) it is deemed that just you advising something to do the work for you, giving criticisms and revisions, isn't enough for authorship or co-authorship.

While it's not code related, the copyright office's opinion is a good read and I don't see any reason to believe it's opinion is different for works of text vs works of physical art: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...


You are right that no court has yet ruled that a specific set of human contributions to AI-assisted work was sufficient to establish authorship. What exists is the inverse: the Copyright Office has granted partial registrations where human-authored elements were separated from AI-generated elements, as in Zarya of the Dawn, where the human-written text was protected but the Midjourney images were not. The Allen v. Perlmutter case pending in Colorado is the first direct judicial test of whether iterative prompting and editing can constitute authorship. Until that decision, the positive threshold is genuinely unknown. The piece reflects this in the calibration section at the end, though your point is worth adding to the authorship discussion more explicitly.

It will just be an arms race if we try to prove "not genAI." Detectors will improve, genAI will improve without marking (opensource and state actors will have unmarked genAI even if we mandate it).

Marking real from lense through digital life is more practical. But then what do we do with all the existing hardware that doesn't mark real and media that preexisited this problem.


I agree. A mechanism to voluntarily attach a certificate metadata about the media record from the device seems like a better idea. That still can be spoofed, though.

In the end, society has always existed on human chains of trust. Community. As long as there are human societies, we need human reputation.


Cost -- it is way cheaper to use IPR and avoid discovery associated with the other factors that happen at trial. Speed, the PTO is generally faster.


It's not really about cost for most people who really like the IPR. It's a way to get a second chance to invalidate a patent and a way to drag out litigation. The cost of an IPR is actually not that much less than the cost of invalidation during a trial (although it saves you on other discovery because you can often stay the trial during your IPR), but it's a second invalidation path you can take at the same time.


The reality is that you get multiple bites at the apple. You challenge at trial and in an IPR. Lose both, challenge with an EPR and appeal the trial. IPRs were initially created to simplify trial and cost, but once the estoppel provisions were determined not to have much teeth, it just became something you did because there was no downside.


There is a fairly vocal contingent of patent people on LinkedIn swearing this is good for the solo guy, the small independent inventor. But yes, it does feel like it will be trolls that are in favor -- maybe some pharma wants this.


Anything "good for trolls" is good for the "small guy" because anything that's not "good for trolls" is good for the "big guy" and anything good for the "big guy" is not good for the "small guy"


Except patent trolls, do not strictly go after big guys. In fact, quite the opposite. They first go after little guys who cannot afford to defend themselves, and - after racking up a series of victories - only then do they go after the big guys. Patent trolls are bad for everyone.


I did not state that "patent trolls" "strictly" go after "big guys"


There was an extension. I don't have link handy, but an extra 15 days were provided.


Generally curious, I don't see anything about hardware. Isn't this is about making a login that doesn't require you to login to MS's cloud. Also, what HW restriction does Microsoft want? Why do they care?


Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0, that's the actual reason a massive number of PCs can't update to it. There's apparently some way you can hack around that and install it. I assumed that's what these videos were about. But from the reddit post it looks like it's talking about both that and the account login issue which I wasn't familiar with.

> including how to install Windows 11 without logging into a Microsoft account and how to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.


Yes this is about a local login, it has nothing to do with hardware.


Actually, the court really only said downloading a pirated book to store in your "library" was bad. The opinion is intentionally? ambiguous on whether the decision regarding copies used to train an LLM applies only to scanned books or also to pirated books. The facts found in the case are the training datasets were made from the "library" copies of books that included scans and pirated downloads. And the court said the training copies were fair use. The court also said the scanned library copies were fair use. The court found that the pirated library copies was not fair use. The court did not say for certain whether the pirated training copies were fair use.


A point of clarifications and some questions.

The portion the court said was bad was not Anthropic getting books from pirated sites to train its model. The court opined that training the model was fair use and did not distinguish between getting the books from pirated sites or hard copy scans. The part the court said was bad, which was settled, was Anthropic getting books from a pirate site to store in a general purpose library.

--

  "To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude
  and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the
  Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was. 
  also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a
  fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central
  library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central
  library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.
  However, Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library. Creating a
  permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic’s piracy."

  "Because the legal issues differ between the *library copies* Anthropic purchased and
  pirated, this order takes them in turn."

--

Questions

As an author do you think it matters where the book was copied from? Presumably, a copyright gives the author the right to control when a text is reproduced and distributed. If the AI company buys a book and scans it, they are reproducing the book without a license, correct? And fair use is the argument that even though they violated the copyright, they are execused. In a pure sense, if the AI company copied (assuming they didn't torrent back the book) from a "pirate source" why is that copy worse then if they copied from a hard book?


> AI company buys a book and scans it, they are reproducing the book without a license, correct

isn't digitizing your own copies as backups and personal use fine? so long as you dont give away the original while keeping the backups. similarly, dont give away the digital copies.


It is, Google Books did it over a decade ago (bought up physical books and scanned them all). There were some rulings about how much of a snippet they were allowed to show end users as fair use, but I'm fairly sure the actual scanning and indexing of the books was always allowed.


> If the AI company buys a book and scans it, they are reproducing the book without a license, correct?

No? I think there are a lot more details that need to be known before answering this question. It matters what they do with it after they scan it.


That is only relevant to whether it is fair use not to whether the copying is an infringement. Fair use is what is called an affirmative defense -- it means that yes what I did was technically a violation but is forgiven. So on technicalities the copying is an infringement but that infringement is "okay" because there is a fair use. A different scenario is if the copyright owner gives you a license to copy the work (like open source licenses). In that scenario the copying was not an infringement because a license exists.


> Fair use is what is called an affirmative defense

Yes

> it means that yes what I did was technically a violation but is forgiven

Not at all. All "affirmative defence" means is that procedural the burden is on me to establish that I was not violating the law. The law isn't "you can't do the thing", rather it is "you can't do the thing unless its like this". There is no violation, there is no forgiveness as there is nothing to forgive, because it was done "like this" and doing it "like this" doesn't violate the law in the first place.


If I have have an app on my phone that lets me point my phone at a page to scan, OCR, and read the page out loud to me, it wouldn't even require fair use, would it?


Anthropic legally purchased the books it used to train its model according to the judge. And the judge said that was fine. Anthropic also downloaded books from a pirate site and the judge said that was bad -- even though the judge also said they didn't use those books for training....


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