A New York Times copyright lawsuit could kill OpenAI::A list of authors and entertainers are also suing the tech company for damages that could total in the billions.
The problem with copyright is that everything is automatically copyrighted. The copyright logo is purely symbolic, at this point. Both sides are technically right, even though the courts have ruled that anything an AI outputs is actually in the public domain.
Works involving the use of AI are copyrightable. Also, the Copyright Office's guidance isn’t law. Their guidance reflects only the office’s interpretation based on its experience, it isn’t binding in the courts or other parties. Guidance from the office is not a substitute for legal advice, and it does not create any rights or obligations for anyone. They are the lowest rung on the ladder for deciding what law means.
This ruling is about something else entirely. He tried to argue that the AI itself was the author and that copyright should pass to him as he hired it.
An excerpt from your article:
In 2018, Dr. Thaler sought to register "Recent Entrance" with the U.S. Copyright Office, listing the Creativity Machine as its author. He claimed that ownership had been transferred to him under the work-for-hire doctrine, which allows the employer of the creator of a given work or the commissioner of the work to be considered its legal author. However, in 2019, the Copyright Office denied copyright registration for "Recent Entrance," ruling that the work lacked the requisite human authorship. Dr. Thaler requested a review of his application, but the Copyright Office once more refused registration, restating the requirement that a human have created the work.
Copyright is afforded to humans, you can't register an AI as an author, the same as a monkey can't hold copyright.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Between 2011 and 2018, a series of disputes took place about the copyright status of selfies taken by Celebes crested macaques using equipment belonging to the British wildlife photographer David J. Slater. The disputes involved Wikimedia Commons and the blog Techdirt, which have hosted the images following their publication in newspapers in July 2011 over Slater's objections that he holds the copyright, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who have argued that the copyright should be assigned to the macaque.
Slater has argued that he has a valid copyright claim because as he engineered the situation that resulted in the pictures by travelling to Indonesia, befriending a group of wild macaques, and setting up his camera equipment in such a way that a selfie might come about. The Wikimedia Foundation's 2014 refusal to remove the pictures from its Wikimedia Commons image library was based on the understanding that copyright is held by the creator, that a non-human creator (not being a legal person) cannot hold copyright, and that the images are thus in the public domain.