Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

[syzygy]

Exactly. There has to be an expression of some human's creativity, and it will be the reporter's even if the copyright belongs to the employer.

I do not know why I want to equate this with the unhealthy obsession we see on here (IMHO...) where people 'play with their engine' others and their engines and then have to balls to say "look at this game I won/played"...only there is not much 'human creativity' involved.

No idea what you are on about, but if you don't like the hobby people discuss here, maybe this forum is not for you.

[CornfedForever]

Exactly. There has to be an expression of some human's creativity, and it will be the reporter's even if the copyright belongs to the employer.

I do not know why I want to equate this with the unhealthy obsession we see on here (IMHO...) where people 'play with their engine' others and their engines and then have to balls to say "look at this game I won/played"...only there is not much 'human creativity' involved.

No idea what you are on about, but if you don't like the hobby people discuss here, maybe this forum is not for you.

Oh, I like using engines plenty plenty...for analysis really - it's just some like to think 'they' are doing something (lots of 'I played...') when it's pretty much entirely the engine. Just sayin'...YMMV.

[towforce]

http://foss.chessbase.com/

https://www.chessengeria.com/post/fat-fritz-2-free

Yay!

Thank you, and well done to the people that achieved this result.

[Ovyron]

This remains the best discussion related to AI, copyright, patents, and outdated laws in the entire Internet. Mainly because forums themselves are dying, now everything is posted in Reddit, with its format that encourages only discussing the latest hottest topics, for a few days as new hot topics take their place, you can't have a discussion that lasts several years like this because new replies to old threads don't bump topics to the top, so threads are archived and die.

I'm talking about the world wide web, but in recent times the deep web has gained significance with the existence of Discord, the most widely used discussion platform where people create their own private clubs, and invite people to them, and whatever is posted there remains private, you can't read it if you're not invited and now the most important discussions are happening before closed doors, it's the worst that could have happened to freedom of information, you even agree to not publish what you find there when joining, but, anyway...

It seems likely to me that tomorrow you'll be able to ask for a film in the style of your favourite film star.

Tomorrow has arrived. Heck, tomorrow arrived at the end of July this year.

They had created an entire South Park Film generated by AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaHIQhStBCE

We have the technology, people can theoretically already do this for free with huggingpace spaces because they give you unlimited access to their resources and their CPUs, GPUs and Internet connection, if you know how to set it up (ironically, the tutorial of how to do it is hidden in some private Discord...)

Apparently, a film consists of 3 parts:

1. The visuals: What appears on your screen when watching the film.

2. The audio: What you hear. Back when films were created they didn't have any audio, and they had some guy playing the piano live at the rhythm of the events. We've had AI generated videos for a while, but they didn't have audio, we never had an AI generated silent film because the technology to generate audio is much easier to use to produce it (they can grab 15 seconds of your voice and have a bot that talks like you.)

3. The content: What happens in the film.

Each AI used for this was built independently for different purposes, they were just put together like this, and what did people think? They critiqued the jokes, and the delivery of the dialogues.

Yes, we jumped from not being able to use AI to generate movies at all, to getting to a level where the main problems are writing good jokes and the lack of emotion in the text to speech dialogues.

I just can't imagine what will be possible by July 2024, but probably if I imagined what would be possible in 2033, I'd get close.

What is scary is not the future, but the speed at which we're getting there.

[towforce]

Thanks Ovyron - that's very interesting!

South Park may not be the best example for me: people complained that the jokes weren't good enough in the AI version: I cannot make sense of the concept that original South Park jokes are better than something an AI can generate!

But maybe my concept of asking for a film in the style of your favourite film star is already outdated: maybe you just have a button to push when you're enjoying the AI's work, another one to push when you're not, and within half an hour the AI will be making video content that you like so much that it's addictive!

[smatovic]

'No Fakes Act' Wants To Protect Actors and Singers From Unauthorized AI Replicas
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/10/12 ... i-replicas

Emilia David reports via The Verge: A bipartisan bill seeks to create a federal law to protect actors, musicians, and other performers from unauthorized digital replicas of their faces or voices. The Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act of 2023 -- or the No Fakes Act -- standardizes rules around using a person's faces, names, and voices. Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) sponsored the bill. It prevents the "production of a digital replica without consent of the applicable individual or rights holder" unless part of a news, public affairs, sports broadcast, documentary, or biographical work. The rights would apply throughout a person's lifetime and, for their estate, 70 years after their death. The bill includes an exception for using digital duplicates for parodies, satire, and criticism. It also excludes commercial activities like commercials as long as the advertisement is for news, a documentary, or a parody. Individuals, as well as entities like a deceased person's estate or a record label, can file for civil action based on the proposed rules. The bill also explicitly states that a disclaimer stating the digital replica was unauthorized won't be considered an effective defense.

What about about CSTal?

--
Srdja

[Albert Silver]

{...]
Put it another way: a newspaper owner asks a reporter to write an article, which is then published. The copyright for that article belongs to the newspaper, not the reporter.

Yea, cos the reporter has a copyright in the first place.

Exactly. There has to be an expression of some human's creativity, and it will be the reporter's even if the copyright belongs to the employer.

The UK copyright act has a provision assigning the copyright on a work that has no human author to "the person by whom the
arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken". But I believe it has not yet been decided whether this means that there can be a copyright without human creativity. (Before Brexit almost certainly not in view of EU copyright law.)

This is no doubt related to cameras and automated cameras set in place, belonging to someone, and which take images (filmed or stills). Think security cameras or more commonly for this issue: cameras set in wildlife areas with movement detection to capture at the right time. How this will now be articulated for AI, a very different situation, is obviously unclear. In the US, the US Patent office declared attempts to copyright AI generated images as invalid. It is obvious such images were still made with someone who had to engineer the prompt, and did so non-randomly, before producing his children's book (if memory serves). Unquestionably we are treading virgin territory here and it will be some time until this is better understood by all involved and sorted out.

I myself am a poweruser of AI image generators (Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and now Dall-E 3) and love the possibilities they offer. The writing AIs though, almost not at all. I do debate and consult on issues, mostly with BingGPT, but not for any text production. For that I have my own skillset and I love writing, so it is not a factor.

[syzygy]

{...]
Put it another way: a newspaper owner asks a reporter to write an article, which is then published. The copyright for that article belongs to the newspaper, not the reporter.

Yea, cos the reporter has a copyright in the first place.

Exactly. There has to be an expression of some human's creativity, and it will be the reporter's even if the copyright belongs to the employer.

The UK copyright act has a provision assigning the copyright on a work that has no human author to "the person by whom the
arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken". But I believe it has not yet been decided whether this means that there can be a copyright without human creativity. (Before Brexit almost certainly not in view of EU copyright law.)

This is no doubt related to cameras and automated cameras set in place, belonging to someone, and which take images (filmed or stills). Think security cameras or more commonly for this issue: cameras set in wildlife areas with movement detection to capture at the right time.

Such images and videos normally will indeed be free of copyright. (I assume this what you meant.)

How this will now be articulated for AI, a very different situation, is obviously unclear. In the US, the US Patent office declared attempts to copyright AI generated images as invalid.

The US Copyright Office (not the USPTO) indeed refused to register certain works based on its interpretation of US copyright law. This does not mean these works are free of copyright, since that is up to the courts.

It is obvious such images were still made with someone who had to engineer the prompt, and did so non-randomly, before producing his children's book (if memory serves). Unquestionably we are treading virgin territory here and it will be some time until this is better understood by all involved and sorted out.

But the idea contained in the prompt is not copyrighted, and the expression of that idea in the prompt normally will not be retained in the AI-generated text that was produced on the basis of the prompt. In that case, the text will be free of copyright.

If you have some high-level idea for a book and hire a professional writer to turn that idea into a book, you might give him or her a "prompt" in the form of a few paragraphs of text that express your idea in your words, and the professional writer will then write a book based on that idea. That book will normally not contain any of your expression. So you won't have any copyright on it (but you might contractually agree that the writer's copyright is transferred to you). If instead you let AI write the book, there is no copyright to transfer to you.

Or as the US Copyright Office puts it:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documen ... telligence

For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style. But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.

In this example the prompt itself is probably not creative, but even when it is, the creativity in the prompt will not control the expressive elements of the output.

In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.”  Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection. In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself.

This policy does not mean that technological tools cannot be part of the creative process. Authors have long used such tools to create their works or to recast, transform, or adapt their expressive authorship. For example, a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image, and a musical artist may use effects such as guitar pedals when creating a sound recording. In each case, what matters is the extent to which the human had creative control over the work's expression and “actually formed” the traditional elements of authorship.

[smatovic]

Another thing I stumbled across, shadow libraries for training neural networks:

https://qz.com/shadow-libraries-are-at- ... 1850621671
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_G ... oogle,_Inc.

It is hard for me to grasp why copyright protected material is allowed to be collected in digital form by the big players.

...glad that Lc0 and SF? open sourced their databases for training (even if you can not copyright plain chess games, but maybe collections).

--
Srdja

[towforce]

{...]
Put it another way: a newspaper owner asks a reporter to write an article, which is then published. The copyright for that article belongs to the newspaper, not the reporter.

Yea, cos the reporter has a copyright in the first place.

Exactly. There has to be an expression of some human's creativity, and it will be the reporter's even if the copyright belongs to the employer.

The UK copyright act has a provision assigning the copyright on a work that has no human author to "the person by whom the
arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken". But I believe it has not yet been decided whether this means that there can be a copyright without human creativity. (Before Brexit almost certainly not in view of EU copyright law.)

This is no doubt related to cameras and automated cameras set in place, belonging to someone, and which take images (filmed or stills). Think security cameras or more commonly for this issue: cameras set in wildlife areas with movement detection to capture at the right time.

Such images and videos normally will indeed be free of copyright. (I assume this what you meant.)

How this will now be articulated for AI, a very different situation, is obviously unclear. In the US, the US Patent office declared attempts to copyright AI generated images as invalid.

The US Copyright Office (not the USPTO) indeed refused to register certain works based on its interpretation of US copyright law. This does not mean these works are free of copyright, since that is up to the courts.

It is obvious such images were still made with someone who had to engineer the prompt, and did so non-randomly, before producing his children's book (if memory serves). Unquestionably we are treading virgin territory here and it will be some time until this is better understood by all involved and sorted out.

But the idea contained in the prompt is not copyrighted, and the expression of that idea in the prompt normally will not be retained in the AI-generated text that was produced on the basis of the prompt. In that case, the text will be free of copyright.

If you have some high-level idea for a book and hire a professional writer to turn that idea into a book, you might give him or her a "prompt" in the form of a few paragraphs of text that express your idea in your words, and the professional writer will then write a book based on that idea. That book will normally not contain any of your expression. So you won't have any copyright on it (but you might contractually agree that the writer's copyright is transferred to you). If instead you let AI write the book, there is no copyright to transfer to you.

Or as the US Copyright Office puts it:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documen ... telligence

For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style. But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.

In this example the prompt itself is probably not creative, but even when it is, the creativity in the prompt will not control the expressive elements of the output.

In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.”  Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection. In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself.

This policy does not mean that technological tools cannot be part of the creative process. Authors have long used such tools to create their works or to recast, transform, or adapt their expressive authorship. For example, a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image, and a musical artist may use effects such as guitar pedals when creating a sound recording. In each case, what matters is the extent to which the human had creative control over the work's expression and “actually formed” the traditional elements of authorship.

Somewhere in this 52 page thread (or a similar thread), I linked an article in which a legal expert said that AI generated art might be able to be copyrighted as "commissioned" art.

If I commission an artist to create a work of art, then the copyright belongs to me, not the artist. It hasn't been tested in court, but the expert said that this might be usable to get a copyright on computer generated art.

The bigger picture, though, is that when the generation of high quality art becomes as cheap as taking water from a tap, copyright will no longer have any value.