Copyright and protecting your intellectual property in the creative industries

 Protecting your work from being stolen is significant within the creative and animation industries so that no individual or company can copy and steal your work. Intellectual property is defined by Wipo as “Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce.”

Material that counts as your intellectual property can be various things such as a brand name you own, a piece of art or written work you created, a product you invented or even the appearance of a property you made. So long as you are responsible for making the product, you own the copyright to it and have the right to prevent other people or companies from stealing your work and making profits from it.

 

Why does copyright matter within the industry?

Within the animation industry where many creative people come up with ideas, artwork or collaborate with other artists to create projects, theft of other artists work is greatly looked down upon. As aforementioned companies or individuals with malicious intent may try and copy, steal or claim your work as their own and make money out of it. 

Whether you are working on art and animation as a freelancer or for a company having your work stolen can be a detriment, especially if you are self-employed and rely on commissions and temporary contracts to get by. Being unable to receive the money you need for the bills, food, and other life essentials while the company or individual who committed theft makes monetisation out of your work can feel demotivating and frustrating, and I believe that is why copyright laws to protect intellectual properties is important within the animation industries.

 

 

What is Generative AI and is it stealing from artists?

 

Within the last year there has been an ongoing debate within the art and animation spaces both online and in person about the ethics of AI image generation and if copyright can be applied to them. To explain what generative AI is, nvidia describes it as the following:

 “Generative AI enables users to quickly generate new content based on a variety of inputs. Inputs and outputs to these models can include text, images, sounds, animation, 3D models, or other types of data.”

There are many generative AI tools that are now being used to create images and writing such as ChatGPT, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion to name a few. With the ability of being able to type words on a computer many people have been using AI to create images that resemble 3D and 2D artworks and even real-life people. However, with the ability to produce such images and the large number of possibilities for what AI can generate there then rises some questions and concerns about these tools. How is AI able to produce these images, where does it get its data from, can these tools be used for malicious intent and is it stealing work from artists of various fields within the creative industries?

Many of these generative AI tools rely on being given data to be trained on so that they can replicate and produce various images, as described by Stephen Amell on medium.com when discussing how to train a generative AI model, one of the steps to training AI is to give it “large amounts of data” and “Collect a diverse dataset that aligns with your objective. For example, if you want to train an image generator, gather a wide range of images in the desired style or genre.”

 

To produce images that resemble 2D and 3D artworks or real-life photos these AI models must take in large amounts of data from across the internet and older artworks, a huge majority of the data that AI models use is without the knowledge or consent of the artists and people who created the original works. 

This lack of permission from the artists who have their work stolen, which is then copied by AI without payment and credit to the original artist, while the individuals who use AI tools make monetisation from these generated images is what raises the concerns of people working within the creative industry and if images from these AI tools can even be copyrighted in the first place.

 

Can AI images be copyrighted?

 

Some may argue that preventing people from accessing these AI tools to create their own images and monetising it is preventing more creativity however as of 2023 within the United States and many other countries, AI generated work is not considered to be copyrightable. An article that goes more in depth about AI and its relation to copyright is an article written by Ruby Heyler on makeuseof.com. To summarise, a product or piece of work can only be copyrighted if a human is responsible for the idea and creating the work themselves. For example, an AI generative tool cannot come up with ideas and concepts on its own, they do not learn how to draw and use references like a human would and instead need to be given data sets to copy from which consist of stolen images from the web. Even if a human is responsible for giving a prompt to the AI the image it produces will always come from a mixture of existing images that have likely been taken without the knowledge and consent from the original creator.

 

 

There are many arguments as to whether producing these AI images counts as theft or not. Some may argue that much like humans learning to draw using references, AI too is simply using the data it’s been given as a reference to learn from and produce these images. Many self-proclaimed AI artists will explain how spending hours typing in prompts and slightly altering the image in photoshop afterwards counts as creating artwork.

Despite these defences for AI generation tools, I personally do see it as stealing artwork and copying from other artists. I believe this is why copyright and protection of intellectual property is greatly appreciated within the creative industries to protect companies and individuals’ properties and works from being used without their permission.