[mikehearn]

I still can't believe the guy went to Indonesia, went into the monkeys' habitat, gained their trust, set up the camera on a tripod in a way the monkeys would have access to it, adjusted the focus/exposure to capture a facial close-up -- basically engineered the entire situation specifically for that outcome, and simply because he didn't physically hit the shutter he lost credit for the photo. Meanwhile I can open my phone's camera, spin around three times, take a photo of whatever the hell happens to be in its viewfinder and somehow that is sufficient human creativity to deserve copyright protection.

[tantalor]

It's not difficult to understand.

Replace the monkey with a 2nd human, and it's obvious that "the guy" does not earn the copyright, it goes to the person who took the photo. If there was no person, then there is no copyright.

The AI thing is no different. If I ask my human friend, "please paint a picture using your vast knowledge and experience", then my friend gets the copyright. Replace friend with AI; there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is no copyright. It doesn't default to me just because I asked for it.

[johnmaguire]

Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location? According to Wikimedia's legal analysis, it depends.[0] Furthermore, authorship and copyright are distinct.

[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Authorship_and_Cop...

[saelthavron]

> The AI thing is no different. If I ask my human friend, "please paint a picture using your vast knowledge and experience", then my friend gets the copyright. Replace friend with AI; there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is no copyright. It doesn't default to me just because I asked for it.

Why should an "AI" be considered a who rather than just another tool? To me, current "AI" are image manipulation program and camera replacements instead of people replacement.

[acchow]

> Replace the monkey with a 2nd human, and it's obvious that "the guy" does not earn the copyright, it goes to the person who took the photo. If there was no person, then there is no copyright.

If I set up an entire scene with props and artwork for a photoshoot with a model, but I would like to actually be the model so I ask a friend to go behind the tripod and tap the shutter, the friend holds the copyright?

[ehnto]

It's clear "the guy" did the majority of the creative work, so whilst it's "not difficult to understand" the law, it is a nuanced situation. Pretending it is not because of the letter of the law is just sidestepping the conversation we are trying to have.

[NitpickLawyer]

> there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is no copyright.

Wait, so if I have a script that generates some source-code autonomously (based on whatever trigger I setup say in a ci/cd pipeline) then that code is not copyrightable? What about macros? This seems silly to me.

[donatj]

Who owns the copyright to the footage of a motion triggered security camera? The person breaking in?

Is all motion triggered trail cam footage public domain?

It seems pretty reasonable that copyright should lay with the entity that had the actual intention on creating a work. Not whatever force happened to trigger it.

[DecentShoes]

Why is the person who "took the photo" the thing that pressed the button and not the person who did 99% of the work?

[bagels]

If you pay someone to paint a picture, who owns the copyright?

If you pay for an AI to paint a picture according to your specifications?

[gdubs]

My initial response to this was to think of all the artists who don't actually create their own work. Lots of contemporary artists have assistants that do the actual painting, sculpting, installation, etc. Even way back a lot of masters were credited for work that was done by apprentices.

But, then on the other hand I suppose that in the eyes of the law, a monkey can't legally sign a contract agreeing to pass ownership over to the person 'employing' them as an assistant.

It's a strange grey area though – Warhol's whole thing was how the factory made the art. People have been making generative art for decades before AI came along, and as far as I know – and I went to school for Art and studied Art History pretty extensively – people just said, "oh that's a cool way to call ownership and authenticity into question." But generally nobody doubted that like, Damien Hirst is the copyright holder of his works even if an assistant makes it – and even if they have no formal piece of paper that lays it all out.

[cma]

Is this scenario correct:

If you stick a 360 camera on the outside of someone's car and hit record, and they drive around unaware (but with an earlier agreement that it is ok to mess with their property), you get the copyright. If you stick a 360 camera outside of someone's backpack and hit record and they walk around unaware they get the copyright to the footage as the cameraman.

Assume an earlier agreement that placing/activating video cameras like this at some future time would be ok but no agreement on who would be the author and no copyright transfer agreements.

[concordDance]

In cases like this it's best to ask why we have copyright law in the first place. Do we feel the supply of such photos is naturally lower then we'd like to such an extent that we'd grant a legally enforced monopoly on its distribution?

[SoftTalker]

My employer asserts copyright over everything I produce. Yet I'm the one writing the code.

[Gloomily3819]

If I paint a digital painting, and then ask my friend to click the "save as" button, does he own the copyright? Or even better, what if the painting is auto-saved by the software?

[Sharlin]

Yes it is in fact difficult and nuanced. The act of pressing the shutter button does not create copyright. The creative work done to make the photograph possible does.

[SJC_Hacker]

Ah, I see, so all those Hollywood camera operators own the copyright for all the footage they took for studios.

Multi-trillion dollar class action lawsuit here we come...

[NewJazz]

You can't just replace monkeys with humans when the legal system doesn't treat them as the same class of organism.

[johnisgood]

But what if I made "that guy" to take the photo, just like I "made" (prompted) AI?

[itronitron]

What happens if you ask "the guy" to paint a picture of mickey mouse?

[colordrops]

There was no person that took the photo with a canon digital SLR. It was a bunch of machinery and microchips and a sensor.

[_AzMoo]

And yet my company owns the copyright on all of the content I produce?

[wqaatwt]

> there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is no copyright

Surely then same would apply to any photos edited with any of the fancy filters in Photoshop? Or any other software for that matter…

> just because I asked for it.

It often does (even in the example you have suggested previously). It’s just that you can’t legally hire a monkey to press the trigger unlike a human (even through its effectively the same thing)

[p1necone]

Yeah I'm a little torn on this one. I generally think that much of IP law causes more harm than good, so in the abstract I'm in favor of copyright being weaker. But in this specific case, given the context of existing copyright law and its intent it seems pretty obvious to me that he should have copyright over the photo.

I don't think it's analogous to AI art though - no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process, and it's not like monkeys have any use for money or ownership of intellectual property. (Although the hypothetical situation where you assign the monkeys personhood and give them a bunch of royalties to pay for a better habitat and piles of bananas would be pretty cool.)

[visarga]

> no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process

What would be the creative output of an artist who never saw the creative output of other artists? We think too highly of ourselves, as if creativity happens in a clean room and we are the hero-creators of our works from pure brain magic.

[kube-system]

As I understand that is a misunderstanding of the case. They argued that the animal should get the copyright, and lost, because animals do not qualify. They did not establish that pressing the button is required for the human to qualify for copyright. They established that a monkey pressing the button doesn't qualify the monkey. (because the monkey never qualifies)

If they would have argued that the human should have got copyright for it, they almost certainly would have agreed. It's just, that wasn't the case they put forth.

[shagie]

https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium-12-22-14.pdf

Section 313.2

The copyright office said that photographs taken by monkeys nor murals painted by elephants are works that may be copyrighted. This is based on Burrow-Giles Lithography vs Sarony ( https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/111/53 )

The issue is that the photographer / owner of the camera didn't exercise any creative control over the photograph.

> On 22 August 2014, the day after the US Copyright Office published their opinion, a spokesperson for the UK Intellectual Property Office was quoted as saying that, while animals cannot own copyright under UK law, "the question as to whether the photographer owns copyright is more complex. It depends on whether the photographer has made a creative contribution to the work and this is a decision which must be made by the courts."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

And this is a "it's complicated" and further complicated by the difference in threshold of originality with US law and sweat of the brow for UK law.

[ajross]

It's worth pointing out that this was just a US Copyright Office ruling. It never went to court[1], where the "expert consensus" is that the photographer would have prevailed. But the value of the handful of photographs was tiny in comparison with the publicity (which was always true) so no one ever went to court to try to prove it.

It's not really clear to me how much this AI case matches though. There seems naively to have been a lot more creative work rigging that specific bit of monkey art than there is in applying a decidedly generic AI image generation tool. That AI is so much more capable as a machine for generating art than a camera is seems to cut strongly against the idea here.

[1] Note that PETA then tried to use this case to drive the converse point, suing on behalf of the monkey who they wanted to hold the copyright. They lost, unsurprisingly.

[observationist]

I see this as "That thing which doesn't work is currently not working. Again." The DMCA and copyright laws and regulations in the US are predatory nonsense, carefully crafted by lawyers in order to exploit the maximum amount of cash possible from people who actually do produce things.

The DMCA doesn't support artists and creators even indirectly; it empowers those least deserving and most ruthless to steal the profit, pat themselves on the back, and moralize about "following the law" to everyone else.

Copyright should be implicit and ironclad for 5 years. After that, 99.999% of sales have been made, whether your material is digital or otherwise. From 5 to 20 years, you should retain right to profits from the sale of any copy, but it should be 100% legal to copy, distribute, archive, remix, or whatever else you want with it so long as you aren't trying to sell it. After 20 years, public domain, no exceptions, no carveouts for family, friends, crafty lawyers, important politicians, or anyone else. No grandfathering, no special rules for special people.

Things made with AI should be protected by copyright, with the rights held by the user of the tool that generated the image. Like any other digital art.

There are machines that can paint your Dall-E renaissance creation onto a canvas with the style of your favorite master. The tools we have at hand have empowered us to rapidly and easily explore a vast domain of images, videos, music, voices, creative writing, and to do research and technical projects and write code in ways that were unthinkable 10 years ago.

These judges and lawyers think it's ok for them to rule on things without having the slightest clue as to the operation, function, and consequences of the technology - this ruling does nothing except to reinforce the status quo and empower the entrenched rights holders - the massive corporations, platforms, "studios", agents, and miscellaneous other gaggles of lawyers who trade in rights to media, but produce nothing of value in themselves.

Imagine a world in which content creators got paid a fair return relative to the revenue generated by their work, in which platforms and interlopers were limited to something like 5% of the total generated profit per work, after cost (to the creator). There'd be no incentive for bullshit rulings like this, with no angry mobs of litigious bastards with nothing better to do than sue for tampering with their racket. I cannot possibly see any other path to this ruling than this; else this judge is fortunate beyond words that his community has so uplifted the mentally deficient among them.

[visarga]

> Things made with AI should be protected by copyright, with the rights held by the user of the tool that generated the image. Like any other digital art.

I would agree for carefully crafted outputs where the human had a major contribution. But if I just generate a million texts or images with my model, that should not fly.

[spauldo]

That's a bit inflexible. Some authors spend their entire adult lives writing a single series of books - yanking copyright out from under them just isn't fair. The same is true of movie franchises, comics, and almost any kind of media that gets released over time.

I've spent some time considering the issue and have come to the conclusion that the truly broken part of copyright is that it provides no incentive to release unprofitable works to the public domain.

What I'd like to see is a system where maintaining copyright costs the copyright owners at an increasing rate. For example, set a term for copyright (say 5 years) and set the cost of registering copyright to 10^n, where n is the number of times you've registered the copyright before. Initial registration costs $1, years 6-10 cost $10, years 11-15 cost $100, and so on.

A system like this would benefit small creators (they'd have time to make a profit before renewal became cost prohibitive) and encourage companies like Disney to release works that aren't profitable anymore.

I'd also recommend using the money from this system to fund a digital archive run by the library of congress. You would need to provide a complete copy of the copyrighted work in order to receive a copyright. Any works that enter the public domain would be made available for, say, five years. That way, we wouldn't lose old works that are entering public domain but no copies exist anymore.

Obviously, there's all kinds of issues with a system like that and it would need to be fleshed out and clarified, but I think it'd be a good starting point.

[robertlagrant]

I agree - it's ridiculous. It's not much different to saying "you didn't take the picture; the actuator that opened and closed the aperture did".

[PaulRobinson]

Consider these (rhetorical, I am not sure I'm up for the nuanced debate given IANAL) questions:

1. Who owns the rights to a commissioned piece of art? The artist, or the commissioner? Which rights?

2. What about derived works of art made with or without the permission of the original artist(s)? When a book is turned into a film, who "rightfully" owns what? When the Rolling Stones wrote Sympathy For the Devil, did the estate of Mikhail Bulgakov have a right to feel aggrieved, and should they have received royalties?

3. What rights can be assigned/transferred, and what rights can't be? What needs to happen for that process to be legally binding?

4. Is a monkey capable of being a willing participant in a photograph, or a contract assigning rights in any way?

5. Same question, but for a machine? What does it mean for an AI to assign rights, or assert moral rights?

5. If the law makes it clear that a legal party to a statute (law), or contract must be a human or other legal subject (an incorporated business), can those laws and contracts lawfully apply to an animal or machine?

6. What is the intent of intellectual property law? Many argue it is mostly civil law, that follows the spirit of civil law in striving towards fairness?

We can argue if intellectual property law implementation is just, but your issue seems to be that the time invested in planning a creative act is the central tenet on which a copyright protection should be determined.

If so, Picasso was wrong to argue that his quick sketch on a napkin took him "a lifetime" to create, and your argument is just and correct. I disagree.

Regardless, what do you think the law is attempting to actually protect which is not "time taken to plan and create the work"?

Note when thinking about these questions it might be helpful to remember that ownership, copyright and moral rights are not all equivalent things in law.

[blacksqr]

In the USA:

1. The artist owns the copyright.

2. Derived works without permission of the author are illegal, unless under specific exemptions like fair use. The author of a book made into a film continues to own their words, the filmmakers own their original creative contributions to the work. Concepts and themes can't be copyrighted, so unless the Stones quoted Bulgakov's words verbatim, his estate would have no claim.

3. "The ownership of a copyright may be transferred in whole or in part by any means of conveyance or by operation of law, and may be bequeathed by will or pass as personal property by the applicable laws of intestate succession."

4. You'd have to ask the monkey. No.

5. Copyright law only applies to people, so there is no meaning to those concepts.

5-2. Animals and machines are considered property, so property law is applied to them.

6. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

[SilasX]

It always felt to me like the photographer was trying to have it both ways there:

"Whoa! Isn't this sooo trippy! A monkey showing self-awareness to take a picture of itself!"

Courts: "Okay, the monkey took it, so no copyright for you."

"No, you don't get it! I put in a ton of work to stage that to the point that the monkey just had to be in the right place at the right time. Hell, a worm could have triggered it!"

[lesuorac]

I'm not sure where you arrived at that conclusion.

The photographer has been claiming the entire time it's his copyright while other people (namely PETA) have been arguing the monkey should have it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

[phire]

This case is confusing because there were actually three sides.

Wikimedia (and others) were arguing that the image was in public domain because animals can't hold copyright. PETA were arguing that monkeys should be able to hold copyright. And the original "photographer" was arguing that he should own the copyright because he did everything except push the button.

The only side that actually reached court was PETA, arguing the monkey should hold copyright. And the court promptly ruled against PETA. But that ruling doesn't say the image is public domain, it simply rules the monkey can't hold copyright.

It wasn't even an interesting court case, copyright law is pretty clear that animals can't hold copyright. Nobody (other than PETA) really thought otherwise.

If the original "photographer" actually went to court against the public domain camp, I do think they would have a decent chance of winning back the copyright to that image. But he never scrapped together enough funding for a lawsuit, so it hasn't gone to court.

[m463]

What I can't believe is to funnel every student in school in front of the same photographer, have him/her press a button, and then it costs grandma $110 for an 8x10 and two wallet-sized photos.

[Suppafly]

I think part of it is that he made such a big deal about saying the monkey took his camera and took the photo, to drum up excitement about the whole thing, not realizing that the rest of the world would use that as an excuse to publish his photo without giving him credit for it. I'm not even sure the monkey actually took the photo itself, but the story that made the photo popular has been the story for so long that he can't walk it back now.

[LadyCailin]

I was curious what the copyright was on Wikipedia. It’s listed as public domain, but it also has a link to this article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

So, that is apparently a thing, at least in some cases and places.

[pndy]

> Meanwhile I can open my phone's camera, spin around three times, take a photo of whatever the hell happens to be in its viewfinder and somehow that is sufficient human creativity to deserve copyright protection.

Your comment made me wonder if this rule can open a door to a new legal precedent in which you aren't the owner of photos taken with your smartphone because camera app utilizes AI to "enhance" whatever you had in frame and you can't disable it, exluding your from legal ownership. And copyright to these photos is ceeded to corporation whose device you purchased, and/or one which provided the alrogithms

[marcosdumay]

The photographer didn't get the copyrights exactly because he didn't "engineer the entire situation specifically for that outcome". If he did create the situation, he'd get the copyright.

[johnmaguire]

It's sort of disputed. Here's Slater's account:

> In an attempt to get a portrait of the monkeys' faces, Slater said he set the camera on a tripod with a large wide-angle lens attached, and set the camera's settings to optimize the chances of getting a facial close up, using predictive autofocus, motor drive, and a flashgun. Slater further stated that he set the camera's remote shutter trigger next to the camera and, while he held onto the tripod, the monkeys spent 30 minutes looking into the lens and playing with the camera gear, triggering the remote multiple times and capturing many photographs. The session ended when the "dominant male at times became over excited and eventually gave me a whack with his hand as he bounced off my back".

I don't believe it ever went to court.

[TOMDM]

If only he had wired up the shutter to an AND gate, one for the monkey and one for him.

Since the monkey can't contribute he'd be the sole owner for holding down half of the button.

[tgma]

I think the assumption arises from the flawed premise that everyone who does some difficult activity is (1) automatically entitled to economic renumeration AND (2) entitled to a government bestowed monopoly.

The fact is none of those "rights" are inherent. Copyright is a specific trade between the author and the society to supposedly benefit both parties. The principles that lead to such trade being beneficial may not be true for AI generated work (or in a world with widespread AI in general).

Think of copyright as a form of economic stimulus, not a god given right to everyone who holds a pen. The ideals of liberalism and western civilization can survive with or without copyright or patents.

[amiga386]

All he had to do, if what he wanted was a copyright, is to have pressed the button. He was right there and able to do it. And then his photos would have been like the millions of other photos of monkeys taken by humans, undistinguished, and we could just ignore them and nobody would know or care who he is.

But no, he wanted a "monkey selfie", in other words he insisted he not be the author of the work, that he not be the entity that chose the exact moment and pose to capture, that he not be entity with the spark of inspiration that creates a work.

He made sure he wasn't the author, and is now livid that he's correctly recognised as not being the author

[wqaatwt]

> is to have pressed the button

I don’t think the act of pressing the button is what determines copyright. Presumably that person would have been able to get the copyright to the image had he actually argued that he was the author (which he was).

[Gloomily3819]

Wait a minute. Don't wild life photographers own the copyright of their images if they set up cameras with motion-detection? Like a billion pictures of birds are taken this way.

[thescriptkiddie]

i'm filing this one under "intellectual property is dumb and bad" and leaning my entire body weight on the door of the filing cabinet to try and get it to close

[IlikeKitties]

Copyright is actually really easy to understand:

> Does the Situation Benefit Large Corporations holding the copyright?

Falls 100% into the category of protected by copyright

> Does the Situation Benefit small Artists or the individual consumer?

Copyright does not apply, how dare you?

Always has been this way, always will be. And that's why you should teach your children how to pirate media, circumvent DRM and use FOSS whenever possible.

[artur_makly]

god bless him. he did a mitzvah to humanity ..and all our brethren monkeys.