Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI
This announcement has immediate, significant practical impact for creatives.<p>The most important document a creative had, up until today, was their portfolio -- typically, a look-book of finished pieces.<p>Now, that portfolio needs to include, for every piece, proof-of-work -- snapshots of the whatever-it-is in various states along the road to completion, in sufficient quantity to dissuade any legal claim that the work was AI-produced.<p>At the limit, those aim to sell organic-certified free range content will want to surveil themselves during the entire creative process, and associate that recording indelibly with the created work.<p>That&#x27;s a whole lot of extra work and a whole lot of extra privacy violation, but the alternative will be to devalue one&#x27;s own work: for to the extent to which it may have been produced by AI, it will be a liability to downstream consumers.<p>For example, a film director might commission a score from a composer, but unless that score comes with timestamped, SHAsummed video of <i>enough of the composition process to preclude invalidating the broader claim to a copyright</i> (and thus salable work), that composition becomes a financial risk for the director.<p>The consequences of <i>not</i> doing so are severe: At minimum, if the score cannot be copyrighted, then it can be borrowed, free-of-charge, by another film director, and at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film (IANAL; am I getting this right?)<p>&quot;Creative&quot; just became the most surveilled job on the planet.<p>We also may have just found the first agreeable use for blockchain -- an indelible public record of organic artistic creation, bearing SHAsums associated recorded twitch and youtube streams (along with logs of workstation network traffic) permanently with the finished work.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be hilarious if AI copyright law saved crypto?