“All Allen could copyright was what he did to the image himself” - so if he trained the model himself, would that make the work copyrightable? Does that mean midjourney has the copyright of all the images created with it?
The image gatcha does not create a new copyright. There might be a copyright in the text of a complex prompt (do you feel lucky in court?) Mere “sweat of the brow” does not generate a new copyright in the US, so e.g. retouching work on a photo does not generate a new copyright and photos of a public domain artwork do not create a new copyright.
This doesn’t touch on the old copyrights of the stuff Midjourney trained on to make its computer-mediated collages. Those copyrights still exist.
Does the computer-mediated collage launder the previous copyrights? The answer is “do you feel lucky in court?”
so if he trained the model himself, would that make the work copyrightable?
I think if he “trained” the model on art he himself created you might have an argument.
Not in the US, there art can only be created by a human.
If it’s created by an algorithm or animal supernatural being it’s public domain.
Interesting facts:
- when photography was invented there was a debate whether photos can be copyrighted
- if you claim to have written down something revealed to you by a supernatural entity, it’s public domain
- the following image is public domain because it was taken by a monkey