Resources for Arts Professionals

There are two Copyright/Intellectual Property issues related to AI tools:

• Can the companies making image-generation and text-generation tools train the tools using copyrighted images/text?
  • For example: If you ask an image-generation tool to create an illustration of The Joker, should it be allowed to generate an image of a copyright-protected character?  What if you ask the tool to create an image of a "clown-like superhero villain"? If the tool was trained on a bunch of images of The Joker, you still might end up getting an image that violates DC Comics' copyright.
  • Resource: We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.
  • Resource: Franzen, Grisham and Other Prominent Authors Sue OpenAI
    • (Visit our Newspapers guide for a link to get a free New York Times Account)
• If you create an image using an AI tool, do you own that image and does that image have copyright protection?
  • There is a debate amongst authors, artists, and government agencies about whether works created by image generation tools like Midjourney or Adobe Firefly are protected by copyright law and owned by the human who entered the prompts.  Some examples of opposing viewpoints:
    • "Some commentators assert that some AI-generated works should receive copyright protection, arguing that AI programs are like other tools that human beings have used to create copyrighted works. For example, the Supreme Court has held since the 1884 case Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony that photographs can be entitled to copyright protection where the photographer makes decisions regarding creative elements such as composition, arrangement, and lighting. Generative AI programs might be seen as a new tool analogous to the camera, as Kashtanova argued." --Legal Sidebar (Congressional Research Service)
    • The US Copyright Office is rejecting human authorship and assigning authorship to the tool itself, which makes the works ineligible for copyright protection because they don't have a human author (see the links below for a detailed discussion/explanation).

The terms of a license can dictate how much you should charge for something. For example, consider:

• Am I selling ownership of this image, so I can no longer use it myself?
• Am I only selling usage rights, so that I can keep ownership and sell usage rights to multiple people/orgs?
• What are the terms of the usage rights, how long do they have usage rights, where, and how much money will they be making?

Search the web for up-to-date information, ask other artists in your discipline what they consider when pricing artwork (ask your friends, professors, or artist discussion boards like Reddit), and check out these resources:

Search the web for "copyright infringement" and the name of the app/website to see if they have a form you can fill out, or if there are options to report specific posts.  For example:

Search the web for "legal resources", your geographic area, and your artistic medium to find resources local to you.  Try to find information published by organizations, rather than one individual's advice.  Here are some examples: