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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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AI-generated works are public domain in most countries

This sounds suspicious to me. I have no idea about Indonesia, but the usual criterion for copyright is creativity, not the tool.

In its complaint, Spyder Games quotes a 2023 statement of policy from the US Copyright Office.

If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user.… When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright.

This statement remains in force, though the Copyright Office is continuing to investigate the topic.

You didn't specify why any of these actors are claiming they own this character.

Spyder Games alleges in its complaint that the characters are AI-generated, but Mementum Lab actually denies this allegation in its amended counterclaim.

[1] Defendant Mementum Lab describes itself as “the (Brainrot) Memes Agency”. [2] Even though the law provides that AI-generated content isn’t protectible by copyright, defendant claims that it owns or controls the copyrights to over a dozen brainrots in the Game that were generated by artificial intelligence tools (and more than 50% of the entire “brainrot universe”). [3] For example, defendant contends that it owns or controls the copyrights to the brainrots known as “Tung Tung Sahor” and “U Din Din Din Din Dun Ma Din Din Din Dun”.

Answering Paragraph 7: [1] Defendant admits the allegation in the first sentence of this paragraph. [2] While the allegation in the second sentence of this paragraph that the law provides that AI-generated content isn’t protectible by copyright calls for a legal conclusion, to the extent a response is required, Defendant denies this allegation on information and belief, admits the allegation in this sentence that it claims it holds copyrights relating to over a dozen brainrot characters in the Game, and otherwise denies the allegations in this sentence. [3] Defendant admits the allegation in the third sentence of this paragraph that it contends it holds the copyrights relating to the referenced brainrot characters.

On page 9 of the amended counterclaim begins a five-paragraph section with the title "Defendant’s Creators Use an Involved, Artistic Process to Create Some of the Most Iconic Brainrot Characters, including Tung Tung Sahur", in which AI is not mentioned at all.

Policy statements are not dispositive. Cite the statute.

The statement mostly cites court decisions in support.

In the Office's view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term “author”, which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans. The Office's registration policies and regulations reflect statutory and judicial guidance on this issue.

In its leading case on authorship, the Supreme Court used language excluding non-humans in interpreting Congress's constitutional power to provide “authors” the exclusive right to their “writings”. In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead created by a camera. The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no doubt” the Constitution's Copyright Clause permitted photographs to be subject to copyright, “so far as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the author”. The Court defined an “author” as “he to whom anything owes its origin; originator; maker; one who completes a work of science or literature”. It repeatedly referred to such “authors” as human, describing authors as a class of “persons” and a copyright as “the exclusive right of a man to the production of his own genius or intellect”.

Federal appellate courts have reached a similar conclusion when interpreting the text of the Copyright Act, which provides copyright protection only for “works of authorship”. The Ninth Circuit has held that a book containing words “authored by non-human spiritual beings” can only qualify for copyright protection if there is “human selection and arrangement of the revelations”. In another case, it held that a monkey cannot register a copyright in photos it captures with a camera because the Copyright Act refers to an author's “children”, “widow”, “grandchildren”, and “widower”—terms that “all imply humanity and necessarily exclude animals”.

Modern AI systems are so far beyond anything we have seen before that I would treat these court opinions as advisory.

I want this to be the case that makes it to the Supreme Court. Meme magic is real.

This seems useful for the case of a particular image, but I believe copyright extends to the full fictional character, like I can't draw e.g. Lion King characters even in novel settings and poses and make a product out of it, and this is not just due to trademarks, as I understand.

Now in that case, we'd need to know the very first original brainrot images. If the person created one version without AI, then also prompted some AIs to make the character, that presumably doesn't reset the copyright. Like, if I describe Simba's appearance to AI and it draws me a Lion, it doesn't mean it's now public domain. Of course one would have to prove there was a non AI version.

But if the fictional characters can be copyrighted as such, not specific renditions of them, then does the specific execution of a particular depiction really matter? The creativity is in the invention of the character itself.

What are the traditional elements, when it comes to the design of a character in the abstract, as opposed to the creation of a particular image as artwork?

(It's also a question what is with 3D renderers like Blender, which use complex shaders to make the final image. Is that traditional? How about photoshop and generative content fill? Does it have to involve mouse movements that move on top of the image? Or does it have to be deterministically predictable what it will look like if I click a button labeled "Render" as opposed to "Generate"? What's up with procedurally generated textures and terrains?)

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