The author of the Zarya of the Dawn comic strip has had her copyright partially revoked by the United States Copyright Office, which states that images generated by the AI Midjourney are not eligible for protection.
Copyright and AI don’t mix: The US Copyright Office has partially revoked protection it granted Kristina Kashtanova for her comic book last fall Zarya of the Dawn. The artwork features images created from text sent to Midjourney, an artificial intelligence image generator similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E.
The Office states in a letter that it learned only a posteriori that the images had been produced by Midjourney, by observing publications of the author on social networks which indicated it. Without these incriminating publications, the institution could never have discovered the pot of roses. However, Midjourney was well credited on the cover of the book, but the Office had judged that ” this did not constitute notification to the office that an AI tool had created all or part of the work »
Read: Midjourney: AI-generated artwork wins competition and sparks outrage
According to this letter sent to Kristina Kashtanova’s lawyer, the Copyright Office decided that she ” is the author of the text of the work as well as the selection, coordination and arrangement of the written and visual elements of the work “. On the other hand, the images themselves are not the product of human authorship », and the protection initially granted was cancelled.
A first for copyright and the use of AI
In the USA, copyrights are not valid if the author of a work is not human. Thus, the Copyright Office justifies its decision by invoking the case of the famous snapshot taken by a monkey: the owner of the camera had not been able to enjoy the copyright for this selfie, which had fallen directly into the public domain.
In addition, the Office takes into account the way in which Midjourney produces images: ” The fact that the outcome of Midjourney cannot be predicted by users makes Midjourney different for copyright purposes from other tools used by artists. The Office also rejects the argument that changes made to some of the images make them eligible for copyright, finding that such changes are ” too minor and imperceptible to provide the creativity needed for copyright protection »
This decision is one of the first taken by a US organization on the scope of copyright protection for works created using AI, in a context of the rapid growth of their use with ChatGPT, Midjourney or Dall-E.
