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.
Oof, this gets into all sorts of weird legal grey areas.
- All of our phones do a bunch of computational photography where AI tooling improves a photo in various ways. In that case, is any photo taken by a modern phone not copyrightable?
- If it is copyrightable, what if someone uses an Img2Img tool or inpainting with something like Stable Diffusion (or Photoshop) in order to slightly modify an image. Is that no longer copyrightable?
(FYI, my questions aren't directed at or attacking you -- just interesting hypotheticals.)
There's a startup doing something close to this. I can't remember the name and I'm not going to look it up, but the pitch is that you feed it a copyright stock image and it uses AI to create a usable-but-clearly-different near equivalent - a situation where absence of copyright is a feature, not a bug.
Technically it's a derivative work. Practically you'd never tell, and proof of derivation is impossible.
The law as it currently stands is completely unable to deal with these issues.
It's not even clear what the issues are, because copyright is primarily about protecting income rights from significant original invention. The mechanical act of making a copy is somewhat incidental.
When invention is mechanised (or if you want to be less charitable, replaced by algorithmic grey goo) the definition of "significant original invention" either needs to be tightened up or replaced.
In short, in situation 1 there is no issue. In situation 2, if the original image can be copyrighted, AI tooling to augment the image doesn’t prevent copyright. The copyright offices guidance on the subject is a worthwhile read, since they detail out the difference between using AI as a tool to modify human authorship, vs the AI taking minimal input alone and generating a resulting image.
What if the ai augments the shutter timing because you were shaking? The ai monkey pressed the shutter so no copyright I guess? Pretty sure several apps do this on night photo mode.
Then I would assume it’d be treated as a tool in the creative process, similarly to a ruler helping you draw a straight line, but the author is still the human.
But they say when you assume you make an ass out of you and me, and we all know the law is an ass, so who knows.
"Minimal input" like pushing a button on a camera? Seems to me that is more minimal than some of the elaborate prompting it takes to get AI to output a desired image.
There's a saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words".
Regarding poetry, while I share your sentiment, what I notice in these discussions is that the emotional response to "done by AI" vs. "done by human" (or, on other forums, "done by furry") counts for a lot.
You better be willing to question whether photographs can be copyrightable at all, because they are all result of several mechanical systems not created by the camera operator.
Just limiting yourself to only "digital computation" being magical enough to invalidate copyright is an arbitrary restriction. Unless you clarify why you think the computation performed by the lens system doesn't have that property, further discussion seems pointless because it will just collapse to a circular "digital computation is magical enough", which is your implied premise.
The other aspect here is you can't copyright an observable truth. For instance, sports companies tried to sue other sports companies for scraping their scores feeds but courts ruled you can't copyright the fact Patriots beat the Falcons 35-30, because that's simply what happened. There isn't any proprietary scoring keeping mechanism. Anyone who observed the game also can determine those numbers. It is an observable truth. So maybe that applies to the raw photo. You are simply capturing what happened from that POV at that moment in time. Sure if you do something with that photo, then it may become more than an observable truth.
>You better be willing to question whether photographs can be copyrightable at all, because they are all result of several mechanical systems not created by the camera operator.
That is a good point that a lot of people don't want to address. A lot of the 'creative' part of the process is actually being done by the software in the camera.
The limits of copyright are intrinsically arbitrary, since the right has its foundations in fantasy, i.e. supposed spiritual labour. An extension of the idea that your physical labour gives you property rights to the fruits of it, into the religious realm of the soul.
> - If it is copyrightable, what if someone uses an Img2Img tool or inpainting with something like Stable Diffusion (or Photoshop) in order to slightly modify an image. Is that no longer copyrightable?
The number 5 is not copyrightable, but if I take your short story and replace every space with the number 5 it's still subject to the original copyright.
- All of our phones do a bunch of computational photography where AI tooling improves a photo in various ways. In that case, is any photo taken by a modern phone not copyrightable?
On a related note, I believe it's just a question of time that in some high profile case (murder, rape, thief) direct photographic evidence of the perpetrator will have to be discarded, because it was taken with a smartphone and it's imposible to determine to which degree it was altered.
There was a post someone made, some time ago, where they took a picture of a rabbit, with its head turned away from the photographer, so its eyes were not visible, and their iPhone painted an eye on it, because the profile was the same as if the rabbit had its head facing forward.
It was in the discussion about the fake Samsung moon photos.
This has sort of already happened. There was a fair bit of fuss around a very similar topic during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. The prosecution were not allowed to zoom in on drone footage because the defence successfully argued that zooming in results in the creation of information through interpolation which was not there in the original recording.
To some degree it wouldn’t be hard to do non-destructive editing and save the original sensor data, and embed the developed jpeg (or heif) in it. This is already normal for digital cameras when shooting RAW.
I hate how impossible it is nowadays to buy a phone with a camera that just takes photos without 'shopping them somehow. Even Pixels apply unnatural filters. It just ruins photos, which you often can't ever go back and retake...
(I know you can shoot in RAW, but I don't have time to develop every photo I take and I really shouldn't have to. Some phones' RAWs are actually post-filtering, too, and not actually "raw".)
They pretty much have to. The sensors on smart phones are so tiny that a true RAW file out of them would be pretty much unusable. They simply don't capture enough light. The only way at this point to improve photo quality out of a phone is a bigger sensor, or software. Thus far, everyone has chosen doing it in software.
Though you should definitely be able to adjust the amount of post processing, some is always going to be necessary if you don't want a grainy mess of a photo.
I'd be awesome if there was a phone meant for photographers (who can't be arsed to carry a DSLR all the time). Like, take the sensor off a compact point-and-shoot and slap it on a smartphone. Because honestly it feels silly that point-and-shoots still exist in 2025; you'd think they'd have gone the way of the mp3 player.
I carry a point and shoot for photographing my kids -- it's amazing. You can take it out without looking at it, turn it on, take a photo and turn it off and return it to your pocket in 10 seconds.
Also the sensor is 10x the size of my phones, the photos are printable (and don't look like mud when printed like many camera phone photos), and the battery last for months.
Maybe just get a point and shoot? I traded in an old DSLR for an OM tough camera and my kids even take photos with it (and get copyright! unlike AI lol)
> Because honestly it feels silly that point-and-shoots still exist in 2025; you'd think they'd have gone the way of the mp3 player.
It's a shame there aren't more dedicated MP3 players really. Every so often I run into people looking for one and often their options are very limited. Just having the ability to listen to music without someone logging and/or tracking what you listen to, when, and how often is becoming harder to attain. It's also nice to have a dedicated player when you listen to music often because it saves your battery for other things.
Today there are still plenty of reasons for simple digital cameras and even film cameras. I certainly hope they continue to remain available, even if many people are happy using whatever their phones give them.
Oh shit. Who owns your photo if your phone does any amount of software-based manipulation to it? Like making faces look better?? Is this how google claims it can use all of your pixel photos in its AI training?
Let me add something even more funny: in Germany, some buildings and art installations are copyrighted which means they aren't allowed to be photographed for non-private usage despite being literally out in the open for everyone to see [1].
> The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.
This gets further complicated by sculptural works that are not part of the architecture of the building which have their own copyright. For example, the sculpture of lions in front of the New York Public Library are works of sculpture and not part of the architecture of the building and so photographs of them are derivative works... though that's not an issue now as they've fallen into public ___domain (they were the example given when I started photography as a sculpture that was often photographed along with architecture)... but are trademarked.
Then you get things like the Eiffel Tower which is public ___domain, but the lights (installed in 1985) are not... so a photograph of it, by night, is under copyright.
Yup, that's insane, all of it. Anything that is visible with the human eye or a reasonable camera (i.e. no 1200mm superzoom into someone's residence where a painting hangs) from the open street or any area accessible to the general public such as parking lots, airports and the likes should be freely redistributable.
> in Germany, some buildings and art installations are copyrighted which means they aren't allowed to be photographed for non-private usage despite being literally out in the open for everyone to see [1].
I think most people agree that that is ridiculous. I'm not sure how they manage to enforce that, even with Europe's generally strong ideas around copyright and moral ownership and such.
> I'm not sure how they manage to enforce that, even with Europe's generally strong ideas around copyright and moral ownership and such.
Copyright holders use Google's reverse image search to find anyone who posts such photos to Twitter, Facebook or whatever, and then file civil damage claims.
Do “you choose” to angle the phone slightly up 5 degrees to capture a bit of the sky? Or do “you choose” the moment to take the photo when the timing is right? There is always some creative decision involved by the person who presses the shutter
So if I ask someone to take a photo, but I tell them "tilt the camera", I am the copyright holder, but if they do so without me "prompting" them, then I no longer am?
What if Louis XVI ask Antoine Callet to use a lighter color for his skin? Does he own the Callet painting copyright?
You can prompt whatever you want but won’t own the copyright. Photographer will choose himself if he follow or not your "prompt", what side and angle he tilt, the zoom, when to press the shutter…
What if I set a delay but it is not technically me who presses the key? Would that count because it was me who set the delay? What if I tell a friend to set the delay?
All this is pretty much grey area anyways. Both sides have merit.
There's plenty of jurisprudence on these issues for posters here to interact with, but in classic HN style, they will just keep pushing these arguments back and forth based on the headline for this one instance. People just want to play law, not actually interact with it.
Mises supported intellectual property rights, including copyright, as a necessary legal tool in a free-market economy to incentivize creativity and innovation. He viewed intellectual property as a socially constructed right to protect creators' labor but cautioned against excessive or monopolistic extensions that could harm competition and economic efficiency.
Rothbard opposed intellectual property rights, including copyright, as state-enforced monopolies that interfere with the free market. He argued that ideas, being non-rivalrous, cannot be owned like private property. Rothbard believed intellectual property could be protected through voluntary contracts, without state involvement, in a truly free market.
To say on topic:
Mises: Likely supports copyright for AI-generated art if the human user contributes creatively (prompt, modifications).
Rothbard: Opposes copyright for AI-generated art, as he believes intellectual property should be based on human labor and not state-enforced monopolies.
To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression.
I wonder about something like this[0]. So much awesome engineering went into it. And the guy is clearly an artist and considers himself an artist[1]. As it is his own tool, are the random splatters it generates not copyrightable?
>To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression.
Depending on if the prompt met other guidelines for copyright, it would be pretty uncontroversial to say you own the copyright on the prompt.
Copyright on the picture, is about as assignable as if you invited ten painters over to your house and read the prompt as spoken word poetry, then received one painting at random. The fact that your prompt won't reliably produce the same picture suggests that you are not in control of the artistic choices made, and therefore have no claim to the copyright.
>a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression.
Then it's the prompt that is copyrighted, not the end result.
US copyright law specifically states that only works fixed into existence by a human author can be copyrighted, and specifically excludes processes or procedures by which a work might ultimately come to be fixed.
In terms of AI, then it should be clear that the prompts (that AI used to generate my work) are my creative expressions. Sure, the AI may alter it in some unknown ways, but does this make it any less so my creative expression?
Take out the second person and imagine if you set the camera to a timer.
Perhaps we record the path of the sun every day for a year to create an analemma. That's something artistic that should absolutely qualify for copyright.
Who owns the copyright then? Nobody? Because if so, that feels like bullshit. Like we're making up the rules completely arbitrarily with no logic at all.
At some level in many electronic systems there is some kind of autonomous human out of the loop subsystem. It'd be easy to target almost any of these and say a machine is responsible for making the content. No human is making quaternion calculations by hand, for instance.
If a human put in work, regardless of any automations, a human deserves the copyright. Either that, or nobody deserves copyright.
I believe the correct answer is “nobody deserves the copyright”. It’s a big fat myth that creatives would starve if copyright disappeared tomorrow. Think of all the countless hours society has wasted arguing about who owns creative expression. If we assign it to the public, we can move on and find better ways to keep creatives housed and fed.
No they really wouldn't. Companies and fans would commission art. We pay our damn food service staff on “would you like to pay a little extra today” tips method. Don’t tell me, especially with zero justification, that creatives depend on the need to control who copies our society’s ultimately culture. There are absolutely other ways and we’re too scared to try them.
They don’t have a right to extract art from artists… commission means pay for a piece up front, not after the fact. And on top of that you can only make digital copies cheaply.
Again they would not be “stillborn”. We’ve figured out crowdsourcing and popularity-based compensation (YT, patreon, etc.). You are just making statements without backing them up with readonable arguments.
The person you're replying to explicitly stated that a different way to compensate creatives for their talents should be put in place in case copyright is eliminated.
We already have systems that work better. None of them depend on copyright. Crowdfunding [generally commissions], patreon-type platforms, sponsored content, live performances, etc etc etc.
Every bit of open source is founded on the license enforced by copyright and the ability for the creator to authorize the creation and distribution of derivative works.
Without it, anything that is published could be taken (once the copyright has expired), repackaged in some user inaccessible way and resold.
It is copyright that enforces the license of GPL. Without copyright, no license on creative work has any teeth.
The GPL is considered by its author to be a “hack” on the copyright system to perpetually enforce source availability. Most consider it unnecessarily restrictive and would prefer a world without it, Stallman included. But since Xerox used copyright to sue people trying to fix their own broken copiers, which they owned, here we are.
Point is, removing copyright also removes the need for the GPL in the first place. All knowledge should be public ___domain.
Removing copyright allows a company to take something that is in the public ___domain, make changes to it and not release the changes.
Yes, the GPL is a hack on the distribution of derivative works... but without those teeth to bite with and enforce, then nothing prevents one from taking some code that is not-copyrighted, making changes to it, and keeping the code to it completely in house while releasing it in a way that is not user modifiable.
The ideals of the GPL (and AGPL) of sharing the contributions back to the community to further progress would be unenforceable and lost.
You forget that because the company cannot enforce copyright, I can just take whatever bits the company distributes to me and do what I please with them. I wouldn’t he opposed to a broad law requiring software companies to make buildable sources available for all software they use to deliver a product, but I doubt we’re that liberal yet. That is essentially what Stallman was asking for and the GPL is a means.
If I took iText, made changes to it, rebundled that behind a web service - that would be in violation of the AGPL. The thing that prevents that from happening is that the AGPL prevents it based on copyright.
It would be unreasonable to say that every web site out there or SaaS service needs to provide the source code to rebuild their site by someone else.
I will also point out the "write a law" would only apply to one country. Host it in another country and you could thumb your nose at the law. You would really want an international treaty such as the Berne Convention, or TRIPS, or WCT... which are implemented as copyright. Any changes to copyright would imply that that country is withdrawing from those treaties.
And we just had to suffer with waiting. It would take an hour or two to
get your printout because the machine would be jammed most of the time.
And only once in a while -- you'd wait an hour figuring "I know it's
going to be jammed. I'll wait an hour and go collect my printout," and
then you'd see that it had been jammed the whole time, and in fact,
nobody else had fixed it. So you'd fix it and you'd go wait another
half hour. Then, you'd come back, and you'd see it jammed again -- before
it got to your output. It would print three minutes and be jammed
thirty minutes. Frustration up the whazzoo. But the thing that made it
worse was knowing that we could have fixed it, but somebody else, for his
own selfishness, was blocking us, obstructing us from improving the software.
So, of course, we felt some resentment.
And then I heard that somebody at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy
of that software. So I was visiting there later, so I went to his
office and I said, "Hi, I'm from MIT. Could I have a copy of the printer
source code?" And he said "No, I promised not to give you a
copy." [Laughter] I was stunned. I was so -- I was angry, and I had no
idea how I could do justice to it. All I could think of was to turn
around on my heel and walk out of his room. Maybe I slammed the door.
[Laughter] And I thought about it later on, because I realized that I was
seeing not just an isolated jerk, but a social phenomenon that was
important and affected a lot of people.
Now, this was my first, direct encounter with a non-disclosure agreement,
and it taught me an important lesson -- a lesson that's important because
most programmers never learn it. You see, this was my first encounter
with a non-disclosure agreement, and I was the victim. I, and my whole
lab, were the victims. And the lesson it taught me was that
non-disclosure agreements have victims. They're not innocent. They're
not harmless. Most programmers first encounter a non-disclosure agreement
when they're invited to sign one. And there's always some temptation --
some goody they're going to get if they sign. So, they make up excuses.
They say, "Well, he's never going to get a copy no matter what, so why
shouldn't I join the conspiracy to deprive him?" They say, "This is the
way it's always done. Who am I to go against it?" They say, "If I don't
sign this, someone else will." Various excuses to gag their consciences.
Nothing required Xerox to give Stallman the source code to the printer driver. And in a world without copyright, nothing would require Xerox to give Stallman the source code to the printer driver either. And it wasn't copyright that prevented Carnegie Mellon from giving him the source code - it was a separate contract - an NDA.
The four freedoms are guaranteed for open source because of copyright. Without copyright, the first freedom (with the access to the source code) for open source software is not possible. Copyright gives the author the ability to force others who use the software that they've licensed to be similarly open.
Consider this challenge - write a license on top of some public ___domain ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-domain_software#Public-... ) work that requires that I follow it and that the work that I do provides the four freedoms - that would prevent me from taking the code and repackage it in my own binary in a way that I'm not obligated to disclose to you or that you wouldn't be able to replace with your own library.
> Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist ___location?
because you asked and they complied, there's a work contract between said photo-button presser and you. The implicit agreement is that you own the copyright to the photo, and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you.
Now on the other hand...if you dropped your phone, and a stranger with no prior interaction picked it up, and pressed the button, then you can argue that they own the copyright.
> Now on the other hand...if you dropped your phone, and a stranger with no prior interaction picked it up, and pressed the button, then you can argue that they own the copyright.
If they've performed an Unauthorized Access to a Computer System then they may want to drop any copyright claim.
> because you asked and they complied, there's a work contract between said photo-button presser and you.
That's not how contract law works.
> The implicit agreement is that you own the copyright to the photo, and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you.
Even if there was an otherwise valid contract, with this as an implicit term, you can't transfer copyright ownership from the actual author by implicit agreement: "A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent." (17 USC Sec. 204)
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Authorship_and_Cop...