Pragmatic: relating to matters of fact or practical affairs often to the exclusion of intellectual or artistic matters. Practical as opposed to idealistic.
Left: Gary Borstelmann, aka Gary Sladek, aka the Amazing Sladek, performs at an NBA All-Star game in Toronto, 2016.
Right: Rong Niu, aka Krystal Niu, aka Red Panda, performs at an NBA All-Star game in Toronto, 2016.
This is another view-from-my-office photo.
A pragmatic photographer is more concerned with getting the job done rather than making an artistic statement.
Many people who take pictures with their cellphone camera are pragmatic photographers. They want a photo without any fuss and without much thought.
News photographers must often take a pragmatic approach to their work. They do try to make eye-catching photos but sometimes it’s just not possible because they can’t control what they’re photographing. Journalism ethics dictate that news photographers don’t control their subject matter. This keeps their pictures authentic and trustworthy.
When a photo is plain and perhaps even boring, news photographers used to say, “It’s not art but it’s a picture.” And that picture is still considered to be original and it can be copyrighted.
Art or Artificial
Images created by artificial intelligence (AI) generators such as Dall-E, Midjourney, and many others, have become extremely popular over the past couple years.
This has now brought new copyright issues to the forefront. Can AI-generated images be copyrighted?
Canadian copyright law requires the author to be a natural person. Term of copyright is tied to the lifespan of the author, with some exceptions. This implies that a machine can’t be an author or hold copyright in Canada.
But the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) in 2021 registered a copyright for an AI-generated image. In this case, a human was the co-author along with a machine. Note that registration does not guarantee copyright and CIPO could withdraw the registration. Canada is currently studying AI copyright issues.
The US Copyright Office (USCO) has so far refused to copyright any work solely created by a machine because “substantial human involvement” is required for copyright. A test case in the US tried, and failed, to make an algorithm the author of a work it created. But in mid-2022, USCO did register a copyright for an 18-page comic book that had a mix of human-produced work and AI-generated images.
UK copyright law allows for computer-generated works where there is no human creator. But the author of a computer-generated work is “the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.”
Countries that will copyright computer-generated works will grant copyright only to a human and not to a machine or an algorithm. This seems to be a good pragmatic approach because copyright was designed to benefit humans. This approach gets the job done without any fancy manoeuvres and it doesn’t drop anything.
Added March 16, 2023: Today the US Copyright Office released a guidance paper that clarifies its view of works containing material generated by artificial intelligence.
In summary, the US Copyright Office will recognize only human authors. Non-humans cannot register a copyright. Both the US Constitution and the US Supreme Court have referred to “authors” as being humans.
Text prompts used by AI technology are merely a set of instructions like those given to a commissioned artist.
The US Copyright Office will register a copyright for a work containing both human-generated and machine-generated material but it will depend on how much of the work was machine-generated. In all cases, copyright will protect only the human-authored aspects of the work and the machine-generated elements won’t be copyrighted.
