The belief that only humans can be creative is interestingly parallel to intelligent design creationism. The latter is fundamentally a religious faith, but it strongly appeals to the intuition that anything that happens needs a humanoid creator.
I have been thinking the exact same.
Better movie comparison: A.I. Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg
The Statute of Anne 1710 gives this justification: […]for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books.
There are many precursors, but I don’t think they can be called copyright in the modern sense. All guilds had monopolies which they defended at the expense of society. It was a feature of feudalism that the elites sought to prevent change to preserve their positions.
But yes, copyright is the major remaining limitation on the freedom of the (printing) press.
(It’s interesting how many of the demands to regulate AI are parallel to the controls on the printing press, in the first few centuries after its introduction in Europe.)
Not as far as I know. The continental European copyright-equivalent preserves feudal ideas.
Rulers granted monopolies to their cronies to allow them to extract money. These privileges were finally abandoned in the wake of the French Revolution. Ethical considerations aside, this was necessary to allow for industrialization/economic development. Except for “copyright”, which is democratized by automatically granting it to everyone, rather than being a special favor. The continental patent system works much like the US one, granting a “mere” 20 year monopoly. Copyright duration is tied to the death of the author, showing its nature as a personal privilege.
Small wonder then that the US copyright industry has come to dominate. Unfortunately, it has leveraged this power for rent-seeking so that much of the harmful, European model was adopted in the US.
You are right, though, that the European model has no regard for public benefit but is quite concerned with the “honor” of the creator.
The situation today is that AI images are copyrighted (or not) just like any other images.
Given the power of the copyright industry, I doubt that this will be cut back. In the interest of society, it should be, but denying copyright to AI imagery is not the best place to do this.
The original intention of copyright was the same as that of patents: To encourage the creation of new works by making it possible to monetize them through licensing. AI images can be very expensive to make, depending on what goes into them. Without copyright on these images, we might miss out.
ETA: This purpose of copyright is given in the US Constitution (though it is older). US Americans could think about that. IP is property created to serve the public. That’s the only justification for property to be found in that document.
Copyright is, at its heart, about the right to make copies. If no direct connection can be made to another work then it is clearly not a copy and therefore…
Your fears don’t seem plausible, either. A person or company doing AI training only needs 1 single copy. It’s hard to see how that would translate to more than a few extra copies sold; at best, maybe a few dozen or a few hundred in the long run. I can see how going to court over a single copy of each item in their catalog is worth it for the larger corporations but what you fear just doesn’t make financial sense to me.
Do you have more info on that case, please? It’s fine if it’s in danish.