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Opinion: The Copyright Office is making a mistake on AI-generated art
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Technology
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So if someone asks you to paint something and gives you detailed instructions about what they want to see in your painting, do you think they should have copyright over your work?
Under the spirit of copyright law (that, again, I criticise), and depending on how detailed those instructions are, that wouldn't be "my work". It would be "our work", because the person in question is actively creating the work alongside me.
Transposing this reasoning to images generated by Stable Diffusion etc., you'd get co-authorship between the person inputting the prompt and the people who made the works used to feed the model with. You could even theoretically argue a third author - the person/people coding the model. (It's a legal nightmare.)
No, under copyright law it would be your work and your work alone.
Someone who is providing suggestions or prompts to you is not eligible to share the copyright, no matter how detailed they are. They must actually create part of the work themselves.
So for instance if you are in a recording studio then you will have the full copyright over music that you record. No matter how much advice or suggestions you get from other people in the studio with you. Your instruments/voice/lyrics, your copyright.
Otherwise copyright law would be a constant legal quagmire with those who gave you suggestions/prompts/feedback! Remember, an idea cannot be copyrighted, and prompts are ideas.
In the case of Stable Diffusion, the copyright would go to Stable Diffusion alone if it were a human. But Stable Diffusion is not a human, so there is no copyright at all.