It's curious that there is no mention of this ruling's possible effect on AI art. A side-effect of the ruling may be that AI art is uncopyrightable in the UK.
A law was passed in the UK in 1988 that said computer-generated art could be copyrighted by the person who set up the computer to produce it, even if the person played no role in the generation of the work.
However, in 2010 the UK (as part of the EU) signed on to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which only allows copyright protection for works directly produced by humans.
The Court of Justice of the European Union has made rulings that machine-generated works are not eligible for copyright, nor are any works generated within a strict framework of rules that limit human creativity. For example, somebody tried to copyright a football game, the court said that even though humans were exercising creativity within the game, the strict framework of the rules of football within which the creativity was exercised made the game ineligible for copyright.
But the UK is no longer part of the EU, so European court rulings are presumably void there (although the UK is still a signatory to the WIPO Copyright Treaty). So I find it interesting that the judge in this ruling has largely reiterated the reasoning of the European court in the matter of the constraints the WCT imposes on machine-generated copyright (“This criterion is not satisfied where the content of the work is dictated by technical considerations, rules or other constraints which leave no room for creative freedom”.)
So on its face this ruling seems to nullify the 1988 law and make AI-generated art uncopyrightable in the UK. It will be interesting to see if anyone tries to establish this explicitly.
In reality all generative art (both AI generated and old fashioned procedurally generated art) involves a human tweaking the knobs a lot and then selecting the best ones out of a sea of duds. To me it is clear that there is plenty of space for human creativity.
In many ways its no different than electronic musicians building songs based on short samples of older songs. I have no doubt there will be rulings supporting the sort of creativity you're discussing at some point in the not so distant future.
But the key is that not all creativity can be copyrighted. Both US law and the Berne Convention (which almost all countries are party to) permit copyright only for artifacts fixed in a tangible medium, and it must be a human that does the fixing.
Tweaking knobs or writing prompts before the actual fixing is done doesn't count. Selection can't be copyrighted, just as ideas and mathematical formulas can't be.
Yes, but, it will be very dangerous for somebody using AI generated art to pursue a claim because they may find that the other party generated the same image first. :)
That raises an interesting situation as I expect that one would be able to copyright the 'prompt' but not the generated image, and since the generated image does not include a representation of the prompt then someone else could generate the same image without violating the copyright since they are not reproducing/publishing the prompt. Prompts are then best protected as a trade secret.
the Judge in the case explicitly referenced decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and suggests that those decisions are still in force in the UK, despite the UK no longer being part of the EU.
The REUL act to cancel Retained EU Laws (REULs) starts to bite as of 1 January 2024, AFAIAA.
It maybe that copyright is not currently for the chop, but it seems - in my personal opinion - that the Tory government wish to cancel many EU laws in order to prevent Labour from moving us back towards the EU in the next couple of parliamentary terms. The REUL Act came from Jakob Rees-Mogg MP and it's very much in meeting with his ethos to 'salt the land' and cause damage for generations if he can get a couple of bags of silver out of the deal.
Long story short: we're still following EU law in a lot of areas, but not for much longer. As with the pandemic, the Tory government are no doubt using this as an opportunity to do nefarious deals in order to steal from the taxpayer.
A law was passed in the UK in 1988 that said computer-generated art could be copyrighted by the person who set up the computer to produce it, even if the person played no role in the generation of the work.
However, in 2010 the UK (as part of the EU) signed on to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which only allows copyright protection for works directly produced by humans.
The Court of Justice of the European Union has made rulings that machine-generated works are not eligible for copyright, nor are any works generated within a strict framework of rules that limit human creativity. For example, somebody tried to copyright a football game, the court said that even though humans were exercising creativity within the game, the strict framework of the rules of football within which the creativity was exercised made the game ineligible for copyright.
But the UK is no longer part of the EU, so European court rulings are presumably void there (although the UK is still a signatory to the WIPO Copyright Treaty). So I find it interesting that the judge in this ruling has largely reiterated the reasoning of the European court in the matter of the constraints the WCT imposes on machine-generated copyright (“This criterion is not satisfied where the content of the work is dictated by technical considerations, rules or other constraints which leave no room for creative freedom”.)
So on its face this ruling seems to nullify the 1988 law and make AI-generated art uncopyrightable in the UK. It will be interesting to see if anyone tries to establish this explicitly.