this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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I see this more like suing a musician for using a sample of your recording or a certain amount of notes or lyrics from your song without your consent. The musician created a new work but it was based on your previous songs. I'm sure if a publisher asked ChatGBT to produce a GRRM-like novel, it would create a plagiarism-lite mash up of his works that were used as writing samples, using pieces of his plots and characters, maybe even quoting directly. Sampling GRRM's writing, in other words.
Except doing all of that is perfectly legal. With music it's called a remix or a cover. With stories it's called fanfic.
If the AI is exactly replicating an artists works then that is copyright infringment without a doubt. But the AI isn't doing that and it likely isn't even capable of doing that.
But wouldn't the person who made the remix/cover or fanfic have to pay if they made money off of their work? Don't they need permission of the writer to sell that work? That is what I have always known, unless the original work is in the public domain. I'm not talking about someone creating an inspired work for their own private or not for sale use - in my example I was talking about a publishing company creating a work for sale.
No. Remixes are a fair use.
Nope. Those are all transformative works and are fair use. The remix, cover, or fanfic are all considered new works as far as copyright is concerned and the writer of them can do whatever they want with them including sell them. People get their fanfics published all the time they just usually don't sell well. People make covers of songs and sell them all the time. I can think of several youtube channels that only do exactly that. Anyone can just go record themselves playing Wonderwall and try to sell it because them playing that song is a unique work. I think trademarked stuff is more restricted on what you can do with it but I'm not sure on that.
AI is also even more limited in regards to transformative works than humans because you can't copyright the direct output of an AI. So if, for example, you made an AI output a cover of a song you could still do whatever you want with it but you couldn't own the rights to it. Anyone else could also take it and profit off of it. The only way to copyright AI output is to create a transformative work based on that output. You can use the AI output to create a new work but you can't just call the AI output your work. In my opinion that's exactly where the law should be. You can use AI as a creative tool but you can't just have one generate every possible picture of something and copyright them all.