An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
The problem is “intellectual property” and capitalism more generally. As technology makes art harder to define and control, the absurdity of violently controlling art will hopefully collapse along with capitalism in general.
Intellectual property as a concept is incompatible with the continued advancement of human knowledge. Before copyright and patenting, we still had trade secrets and sensitive information, and those things cost us insights into metalworking we are still slowly recovering to this day. We still can’t figure out how Roman’s stumbled upon some of their glass blowing breakthroughs, and we just recently figured out Roman concrete.
Capitalism didn’t invent greet, but it’s certainly allowed greed to flourish as a core precept of its design.