Copyright protection for AI-generated art has been scrapped in a landmark ruling.
The US Copyright Office (USCO) decided imagery produced by Midjourney and other AI text-to-image tools for the graphic novel ‘Zarya of the Dawn’ should not have been granted legal protection as they are “not the product of human authorship” and its writer was not their “mastermind”.
Author Kris Kashtanova is now only entitled to copyright for the parts of the book he wrote and arranged, but not for the images produced by Midjourney, the office said in a letter issued this week.
The decision reversing his complete intellectual property protection over the book is one of the first by a US authority on copyright protection for AI-generated works and comes amid controversy over content being turned out and used professionally from AI software such as Midjourney and ChatGPT.
The USCO said in a letter reported by Reuters: “The images in the work that were generated by the Midjourney technology are not the product of human authorship.
“Because the current registration for the work does not disclaim its Midjourney-generated content, we intend to cancel the original certificate issued to Kashtanova and issue a new one covering only the expressive material that (Kashtanova) created.”
Kris said they were considering how best to press ahead with the argument that the images themselves were a “direct expression of my creativity and therefore copyrightable.”
The USCO had told Kashtanova in October it would reconsider the book’s copyright registration because the application did not disclose the role of Midjourney, generates images based on text prompts entered by users.
Kris’ lawyer argued Midjourney was merely a tool that helps humans produce intellectual property that should be copyrighted under current laws.
But the USCO referred to the Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co vs Sarony US Supreme Court case, which decided photographs captured by a camera controlled by a human are copyrighted.
Its letter on the ‘Zarya of the Dawn’ case added: “As the Supreme Court has explained, the ‘author’ of a copyrighted work is the one ‘who has actually formed the picture,’ the one who acts as ‘the inventive or mastermind’.
“A person who provides text prompts to Midjourney does not ‘actually form’ the generated images and is not the ‘master mind’ behind them.”
The post AI art copyright protection scrapped in landmark ruling appeared first on Swisher Post.