>All I'm doing here is turning the knobs and testing the variables here. I realize it might be crude, I apologize for that. You're probably a lawyer, and you probably hate this.

I understand what you are doing. Lawyers have been doing it for over 100 years litigating copyright, and it's reflected in the caselaw, which has much deeper answers for the questions you are poking at.

>The line I'm trying to understand is this: Mockey has three buttons and was generated by an AI, and looks similar to Mickey. I can copy that art and become the human owner of it (my hands are the 'spark of creativity' mentioned in our Wikipedia article), then sell it. Disney will claim that selling this art can infringe on its copyright, but nobody earns copyright to the AI-generated art itself. I own copyright to my physical, hand drawn copy of it. Okay;

The question you are asking is what's a copy. That's a really complicated answer, that is dependent upon numerous factors, which as I mentioned before, is best answered through the caselaw on the subject. There is no clear line. There never was a clear line. By the way, you didn't respond to my hypothetical!

>Taking that apart: Disney's copyright is infringed when? The sale? The second I drew Mockey? Or the second the AI created it? Or is it when the AI was trained?

Take a copyright class somewhere! I'm sure there's some free ones online. I work with the VLA and we provide such classes to member artists. There are numerous rights associated with copyright and they can be violated in a numerous ways.

>If I train a model on Mickey and all permutations thereof, sell the model, and when the user prompts it, it hallucinates none other than Mickey in his enigmatic circular perfection, who copied it and when? Who violated Disney's copyright? You might say the AI (nobody) copied it, and nobody (the AI) violates Disney's copyright until some human tries to ctrl+c/ctrl+v the file from the AI's 'electronic threshhold' to a file on their desktop, and it's the viewer who copied it.

You are describing what could be contributory infringement, on top of direct infringement. Once again, I promise you that taking a class or reading about it (on wikipedia, lets say) will be a better guide than this dialogue has been.

>So let's extend that 'electronic threshhold' in the following scenario: a sufficiently impressive AI makes a video game world simulation and incidentally hallucinates a Mickey Mouse character model. I sold the -game-, is there a violation of copyright? Absurd.

Independent authorship is a thing. Two people can write the same poem independently of the other. In that case, there is no copying. If there is no copying, then they both have a valid copyright (I'm talking about human authors, because as I've repeatedly explained to you that computers and algorithms cannot obtain copyrights).

>Sorry for being facetious but, throughout the history of US case law, I'm not finding good refs for these cases. You think maybe tech outstrips law? :D It just seems to me: if AI art can't be copyrighted as there is no human source, then there is no human responsible for incidental copyright violation either. "By golly lightning struck that tree and it looks like Mickey Mouse! Sue God!"

Literally so much of what you describe is in the oldest caselaw out there. The one thing I find surprising here is that for all the intelligent people that post here, so many put effort into trying to distinguish their own thought as being inventive or creative, when in reality, you are expressing nothing new.

https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2020/09/historic-court-cases...

For example, your question of what is a copy is addressed in Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, which is from 1884! It's hard to believe that you are genuinely engaging with the material, given the questions you are asking. Either you have read the material and are incorrect, or you haven't and you are just making it up that you thought of something not in the caselaw.

> It just seems to me: if AI art can't be copyrighted as there is no human source, then there is no human responsible for incidental copyright violation either.

This is just your misunderstanding. I already explained to you that I can violate your copyright by using a xerox machine, but a xerox machine cannot obtain a copyright. They are separate concepts with different requirements.