Don't post the entire article in the OP, please. You'll end up getting C&D's sent to your instance admins if publishers keep seeing this, because it's - ironically enough in this context - copyright infringement.
Just post a snippet to stay within fair use. Don't ruin Lemmy for all of us over something so silly.
That's great! It means artists can continue to use AI art for projects they don't intend to sell, and Hollywood, which already has too much power, still relies on others.
Artists can still make money and copyright their stuff. You just can't use exclusively AI to create the images. Cleaning up an AI generated image count as artistic work. Color correct, add missing fingers, make the eyes point the same way, remove background monstrosities. It all adds up.
Unfortunately this also goes for Hollywood. They can generate the bulk of the work and have one guy do the editing and suddenly they own the edit.
The real losers in this are the people that generate images with no modifications and post it as is while pretending that they are doing art.
You are correct. Hollywood will simply change up a couple things and then use the assets.
However, I‘m still undecided about how I think about whether generating AI art should count as Human-generated or not. On one hand, people can spend hours if not days or week perfecting a prompt with different tools like ControlNet, different promptstyles and etc. On the other hand, somebody comes up to midjourney, asks for a picture of a dragon wearing a T-Shirt and immediately gets an image that looks pretty decent. It’s probably not exactly what they wanted, but close enough, right? AI gets you 90% there what you want, and the other 10% is the super-hard part that takes forever. Anyway, sorry for dumping my though process from this comment chain on here xD
Yeah while this suit covers a very specific scenario, a large majority of AI driven content does have human interaction and does qualify for copyright.
Even just a draft, fed into an AI finishing system, has some human interaction. Nothing is going to stop the AI revolution.
It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, "The Creativity Machine" register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.
The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI's the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What's clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn't work for them.
You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.
The ruling is excellent, and I'm glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:
In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.
This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.
I wonder could you interpret this as AI created movie script isn't copyrightable but the actual filmed movie is. That would invite some weird competition, like we've seen over the years with the copycat movies.
I wonder could you interpret this as AI created movie script isn’t copyrightable
This first but I don't think that is how it can be interpreted like that. Looks like it comes down to how much human input was used to guide the AI in the works. The more the human guided the AI the more they have a claim to the copyright is how I read that. Not just all AI content cannot be copyrighted. Which IMO seems like a fair way to apply copyright to AI generated content.
The latter part is basically already handled - look at any film created from a public domain works, Shakespeare plays being a big example here. I would expect non-collectable AI works adapted to film to to be handled the same way. Though I suspect that to create any good movie script with AI you would need significant human input which could lean towards to script having a stronger copyright claim by those that guided the AI.
Yes , but let's say Marvel writes the next Avengers movie with AI. Somebody else could come along and make their version of it. They'd need their own characters though, because those are copyrighted by marvel comics.
Hope: AI gets so good that people using a personal computer can produce full TV series with a single prompt, delare it uncopyrightable, and share the best results online as a alternative to corporate stuff.
Fear: IP law becomes so disconnected from the current situation that it prompts governments start over from scratch. New IP law is written by the corporations for the corporations, and any form of creativity is restricted and monetized.
It sorta already happens. No one owns the copywrite to vampires hence all the stuff that is only slightly above fanfics becoming big. You are welcome to hate on Twilight but you can't deny it's popularity.
This doesn't change much because of a simple difference: This was an AI product put in wholesale.
There was no human intervention in (visually) creating this product, thus no human can claim copyright.
Studios aren't gonna do this when replacing some of their writers, because AI may not be good enough yet. Instead, it'll be a smaller team, they'll do the edits, and they can claim copyright.
This only really matters If AI advances to the point where we can completely create a full movie or TV show from scratch with just purely prompting, which, currently, we can not.
A spoof of Seinfeld runs 24/7 from only AI input after the initial prompt. It is bad, but exists. Depending on your quality standards, we are there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
That's what I see likely. Writers will eventually use this as a tool. Say setup a scene and generate 40 versions. Pick the best one, edit it, feed back what you improved, generate another 40...
We are still reading Shakespeare and I think part of the reason was how he wrote those plays.
Write the scene, pass to actors, actors have notes, rewrite scene, pass to actors, have actors act out scenes, make changes, run changes by actors, rewrite scene, perform scene, watch audiences (are they laughing at the jokes? Are they sad when they are supposed to be sad?), make edits,.....
He did it like a collaborative activity and gradual refinement. Almost none of his plays have an official indisputable version, instead we have multiple versions with slight differences.
Stop worrying about your jobs writers, this is a tool. Use it.
It's only a tool for lazy, shot by, hack writers. Like the writers for Big Bang or any kids show by Disney.
Why would a real writer need AI to steal words from others? Do you think Neil Gaimon needs help from a shitty program to write? Or any other high caliber writer? No. Because AI is for untalented artists and writers. They are the ones getting terrified that it might replace them.
Yes, there were millions of people's work that was in the training data that was used to make whatever AI program created those AI images, but (at least right now) that isn't considered for legal ownership.
The US Copyright Office is taking the stance that there must be human effort that can be seen/pointed to in the final product directly in order to count as an "Author".
Think about that guy with the monkey taking a photo, and how that got into the public domain. Just because the company selling the camera "created the camera used to take the photo" (made the AI model) or because someone using the camera "set their own settings for the photo to be its best quality" (typed in a proper prompt for the model) doesn't mean that either party "owns" that image.
That whole paradigm could maybe change if/when AI LLM programs get seriously regulated, but even so, I personally don't think that changes the chain of ownership, nor should it.
By that logic, all human art is derivative work achieved via biological means. No artist works in a vacuum. Everything an artist sees subtly influences their style.
Hollywood will just do what they always do. Pour billions more into lobbying the government until they pass something that will allow certain exemptions.
This doesn't mean artists or movie studios can't make AI creations and sell them. It just means they can't stop people from copying and distributing them.
If a well regarded artist uses generative AI to make art, then prints a single copy or a limited edition and signs them, they can sell them. Other people can copy it, but it won't be the same. They won't have the same value as the ones the artist produced, and they won't be signed.
The hollywood model is based on ownership of IP. Can you imagine if "Stranger things" was AI generated by Netflix, had a hit first season, then Disney released a second season with new actors? Meanwhile, CBS premieres "Stranger things : Miami?"
It would be a mess and put their entire business model into a tailspin.
This ruling may be the biggest bouy the writers have gotten so far in their strike.
I think that in this scenario, Netflix could hold copyright over the idea and characters. Only the script would be out of reach. Lawyers would ensure that they hold onto the right bits to prevent this scenario.
If I asked AI to write a story for a child, the whole thing is up for grabs. If I give it characters with specific traits and a story arc, that would still be mine. Only what the AI filled in wouldn't be protected.
People could pay the studios that made the version of the show they wanted most. Instead of having no choice but to buy from whoever paid the most in the collectable copyright trading card game.
Maybe I want the "Tron 3" Dreamworks would make, instead of Disney.
I believe this is wrong. They can't copyright an AI-generated script, but the performance and film based on a script is copyrightable.
Think about this: can you copy and sell the Leonardo and Claire Danes Romeo and Juliet because Shakespeare's work is in the public domain? No. You cannot.
If they can't copyright it, everyone can just copy their shit and it's not considered theft. I could buy that single, unique print, copy it and sell it myself more than once and make more than the dude who generated it. And it would be legal since it's public domain and not copyrighted. Would it be the same as the original? No. Do most people care about that? Also no.
Actually, it has nothing to do with human creators at all. It means that AI can't hold a copyright. But the person who wrote the article would have to actually be able to comprehend court documents to understand that, so here we are.
On the record designed by plaintiff from the outset of his application for copyright
registration, this case presents only the question of whether a work generated autonomously by a computer system is eligible for copyright. In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No.
Given that the work at issue did not give rise to a valid copyright upon its creation, plaintiff’s myriad theories for how ownership of such a copyright could have passed to him need
not be further addressed. Common law doctrines of property transfer cannot be implicated where no property right exists to transfer in the first instance. The work-for-hire provisions of the Copyright Act, too, presuppose that an interest exists to be claimed. ... Here, the image autonomously generated by plaintiff’s computer system was never eligible for copyright, so none of the doctrines invoked by plaintiff conjure up a copyright over which ownership may be claimed.
"Need to get away with murder? Easy! Just say 'it wasn't me, it must of been someone else who done it'. For bonus points, combine with a wink to the hot judge/juror of your choice."
As a person who creates both visual arts and music, though admittedly for my own enjoyment alone, I can't bring myself to ever recognize any of the AI generated stuff as Art. None of it is any good if you look at it close. It's wrong in every way. The machines were supposed to come for our jobs, but that was supposed to mean factory production and construction and shit.
It's not about being technically good or not for me, it's a question of expression. A human can express internal thoughts and feelings. An AI, at least the ones we currently have, can only do an awkward imitation. There's no intention or awareness.
I think it can be art in the same way as photography: In both cases, the human influence is far less intentional than things which start with a blank canvas, and the ease of creation means that most examples aren't art, but there are a few where someone happened to use the fullest understanding of their technical skill to capture a moment and a sensation of value. I wouldn't say all photography is art, but I wouldn't say that no photography is art, and I think generative images are similar.
I support the idea of making it uncopywrightable. I think it is obviously dependent on so many creators that granting sole use to anyone seems inappropriate.
Unfortunately at worst the machine will only improve to the point where it is unnoticable.
Its a program designed exactly to be bullied into place by humans, were just only halfway through the bullying and still coorp's are pushing it like its done.
Eventually it'll have to be accepted as just another tool by artists.
That being said I support copyright less than I do "AI rights" so I'd say this is an overall win
If you think art is at all dependent on each individual recognizing it as good, then I think you've completely missed the point of a lot of art. Most art only appeals to some.
When I make art I make it for myself. I have no interest whatever if it anyone else feels one way about it. I talked with the robots. I didn't like it. Felt dirty, cheap.
As someone who creates a variety of art in pretty much any medium I find AI art to be something deep and subconscious in us. It taps into something we can't reach unless on mind altering drugs.
I find it to be an amazing study of the human psyche. I have never been able to connect to most "art" especially any of the classical stuff, as well as most music. While people enjoy and even request certain pieces of art from me, all but sculpting leaves me disconnected from my work because what I visualize and what create aren't thr same. AI art has that missing piece.
So, as someone who doesn't do visual art, mainly writing and music as hobbies, my opinion is if there is intent, ie from the prompt or there editorial process of tweaking the model, then there is at last an attempt by a human to convey a message through the piece.
Whether or not it has good composition, or achieves something that resonates with a human viewer is valid criticism, but I think irrelevant as to whether or not it is art or a piece of creative expression. If someone has bad technique and can't really get their idea across well in a painting, is it no longer art? Is a painting made during a paint and sip where you're coached through the painting not art because there is no intent? These are more to gauge what you mean by art than as gotcha questions.
I would disagree that a prompt is sufficient to express human intent, specifically in writing. How many stories can you list that don't follow the heroes journey vs the ones that do? The most important part of any writing is not the setting and overarching narrative, it's the small choices the author made all along the way that make it truly human. AI can parrot those choices, but a human can't get an AI to make truly new unique decisions with any amount of prompting.
On the subject of tweaking the model, that's not really how AI models work. Users don't edit the model and keep the prompt the same to try to get different outputs. The only interface exposed to users is the input.
Most of what people generate with AI is shit because the people using it have no idea about art. When an actual artist picks up those tools you get quite different results.
The neat thing is that it doesn't really matter what kind of artist you are. You don't need to be a painter, a sculptor has just as trained eyes yet can prompt an oil painting. Heck I'd bet random musicians get significantly better results than the general population.
Talk about an inaccurate headline. The conclusion here isn't that AI art can't be copyrighted, it's that AI cannot be a copyright holder. But it's AI, so we can't actually expect anyone to pull their head out of their ass and give it enough thought to write an article that isn't garbage.
Instead we have yet another thread about this case in which no one actually has any idea what the ruling was. Very informative.
Both parties have now moved for summary judgment, which motions present the sole issue of whether a work generated entirely by an artificial system absent human involvement should be eligible for copyright. See Pl.’s Mot. Summ. J. (Pl.’s Mot.”), ECF No. 16; Defs.’ Cross-Mot. Summ. J. (“Defs.’ Mot.”), ECF No. 17. For the reasons explained below, defendants are correct that human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim, and therefore plaintiff’s pending motion for summary judgment is denied and defendants’ pending
cross-motion for summary judgment is granted.
AI being the copyright holder was never even in question. Some guy tried to register AI art in his company's name, using the AI as the author of a work for hire. The Court found that he couldn't get the copyright as a work for hire since no copyright existed in the first place.
In another case, the a federal appeals court said that a photo captured by a monkey can’t be granted a copyright since animals don’t qualify for protection, though the suit was decided on other grounds. Howell cited the ruling in her decision. “Plaintiff can point to no case in which a court has recognized copyright in a work originating with a non-human,” the order, which granted summary judgment in favor of the copyright office, stated.
This limitation is too easy to get around.
Have AI generate a picture. Take a photo of that picture and destroy the original. Copyright is now owned by the photographer.
Have an AI write some music, change one note of that music and call in your arrangement of that piece, destroy the original music, and only your arrangement that you have a copyright on exists.
etc.
The thing I'm seeing that does sort of skirt the issue is that it's very obvious a lot of YouTubers have jumped on AI image generation to produce static images instead of drawing the images themselves or farming it out to an artist on Fiverr or something. So if they want "evil Jerome Powell with flames in his eyes" they hand it to the AI, it spits something out, and into the video it goes, to be published on YouTube as a memey splash image in the video.
Now that it's in the video, along with all the other clear acts of human creativity that form a video, it's sort of "washed" in the money laundering sense, and I don't see how you legally separate that image from the video in a way that makes the image ineligible for copyright. I don't see a court being flummoxed by that, at all. If you filch the image from the original video, or try to pull excerpts from the video featuring Evil JPow, you're in violation of copyright, and we're on pretty solid, well established legal ground with that. At the very least, you are not completely in the clear to just yank that image for yourself.
So while the original raw image of Evil Jpow that the AI spit out was not eligible for copyright by itself, now it is as part of a larger work, open and shut.
Near the end of the article it affirms pretty much that, saying, "An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” [as quoted from the copyright office]
My quote is a bit messy there (i'm quoting the article who is quoting the copyright office) but you get the point.
The raw AI output, assuming no human was involved, cannot be copyrighted, but as soon as the AI output is somehow arranged into a larger work by a human, that changes everything.
So yeah, a bit of arranging, some editing, and the completely AI generated footage can be copyrighted all day. At the very least there would be a court case there.
More than 100 days into the writers strike, fears have kept mounting over the possibility of studios deploying generative artificial intelligence to completely pen scripts.
The ruling was delivered in an order turning down Stephen Thaler’s bid challenging the government’s position refusing to register works made by AI.
Copyright law has “never stretched so far” to “protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell found.
His complaint argued that the office’s refusal was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with the law” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which provides for judicial review of agency actions.
While cameras generated a mechanical reproduction of a scene, she explained that it does so only after a human develops a “mental conception” of the photo, which is a product of decisions like where the subject stands, arrangements and lighting, among other choices.
In another case, the a federal appeals court said that a photo captured by a monkey can’t be granted a copyright since animals don’t qualify for protection, though the suit was decided on other grounds.
The original article contains 858 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Well, of course not, because since some diffusion generation are deterministic, that would mean that a specific set of parameters is now copyrighted, so nobody else gets to type in that particular set of numbers into the UI without paying the copyright holder, which of course makes no sense.
Same reason you can't copyright, say, cooking recipe for a burger.
No. Recipes are not copyrightable because they're largely functional things for instructing a process to create a food, which simply is not in the purview of copyright. Specific recipes could very well be patented, depending on the specifics. There are no "explicit exclusions" here.
Some AI work is created with a simple prompt, but the best stuff uses lots of in painting and out painting and adjustments. That would be copyrightable, there's lots of human control beyond a prompt, there are lots of cool videos of the process on YouTube. By the time AI will be able to generate full processes, videos, storylines, voices, etc, without human intervention, we won't need the movie studios either. I'm hoping we reach that in 3 years.
If a human uses AI to create a story and then edits and tells it in greater detail the new work would be copyrighted via the editor's transformative act. This ruling is not a win for the WGA or other creatives that don't want to use AI.
AI will just become our ghost writer, which is a practice as old as writing.
That would be a fraud on the copyright office. Nothing is "stopping" people from committing fraud other then it's fraud and has legal repercussions if found out.
Should have figured this would be the judgment when that monkey took a selfie of itself and the ruling was that it was public domain because a human didn't take the shot, and monkies don't have rights.
The point is that ML can generate works in bulk outpacing humans by a ridiculous rate. And that it explicitly is meant to cover expression, but ML models don't actually express anything, they just emit statistical averages of the input.
You don't want a company with obviously way too few human employees to have created all of their works to be able to go look for similar art from others and threaten copyright lawsuits. By forcing humans to be involved in the process of creation you strongly limit the ability of such legal trolls to hurt other creators. Such copyright trolls ALREADY exists prior to ML, but extending copyright to unsupervised ML would superpower their lawsuits. They just have to spam various websites with some samples and then pretend everybody copied them.
This precedence is just what it should be. The reference to photos is completely correct. The creation of a sequence of bits isn't in itself protected, it's the selection of inputs in which the creativity lies that then carries over into protection of the output. Photos can be copyrighted because a human express something in their choice of motive. A surveillance camera for example don't automatically give its operator copyright!
And it still doesn't prevent you from using ML in the creation of things and claiming copyright, it just requires you to be the one directing the process instead of leaving it unsupervised.
Don't want to be that guy, but they absolutely don't "emit the statistical averages of the inputs". Otherwise they would create a single, most likely unicolor, image
In practical terms? If you are going to generate content using AI either don't say it was AI generated or lie about how much human involvement it had. Also you can't use "this work was completely made by AI" as a hook.
"Yo, it's Ja Rule in the house! You know, AI-generated art is an interesting twist in the game. But when it comes to copyright, I gotta say, it's a bit of a gray area. I mean, can a machine really claim ownership, right? But then again, if a human's involved in training that AI, there might be some room to argue. At the end of the day, it's all about respecting the craft and the creators, whether they're human or machine. We'll see where the courts take us on this one!" - JaRuleGPT
So does a prompt not count as human input
Edit: ok so if i train a style lora based on my own style and then prompt the ai to generate artwork , then I still don't deserve the copyright? What if I do all that and then do touchups by hand is that somehow different? I find all this stuff so silly tbh but it is interesting to discuss.
If I'm sitting on the couch and I want sushi, I can open up a website, pick exactly what I want, even maybe make a few substitutions for me specificity, and get it delivered right to my house, but that doesn't mean I made sushi. I just HAVE sushi.
Anyone who has ever actually supported a real artist and commissioned work understands that they don't own the copyright, unless extra agreements have been made to transfer it. It still belongs to the original artist.
And as stated, AI can't own that. So no one does. Who would want to? It's garbled, derivative work and anyone with access to the same prompt and models could generate it themselves, which is why I find the prompt guarding so hilarious. It's all so blatantly dumb and transparent.
I mean, sure, an orange room doesn't qualify for copyright.
But if you instruct helpers to help you make a copyrightable work to your specifications (e.g. architects instructing workers to build the building), then you own the copyright.
It all comes down to who had what part of the creative process.
For example, if I create a digital artwork and I use an AI tool to increase the resolution, I totally still own the artwork.
I am also pretty sure I retain the copyright if I let an AI fix my spelling in a story I wrote.
But if my input is negligable ("Write me a short story."), I definitely don't have the copyright.
Copyright law is complicated and there's never a clear general answer.
On projects over a certain revenue the AI could say how much it was influenced (trained on) by the respective copyrighted content and then royalties could go out to the people who own that content in percents.
My 4c:
There could be an intellectual property blockchain and everything that can be used to train an AI gets a token.
Again, I think all of this should only be mandatory for huge corporations, similar to how unreal engine is free under 1 million dollar earnings.
This could also be an interesting way to see how human made content makes its way through the "minds" of AIs.
So basically anything generated procedurally just lost its copyright protection because of this wacky definition of "mental conception." Anyone with skill and talent can exert control over the output of an AI. Likewise, someone with no idea how to paint will not produce what they're "mentally conceiving."
That may be true if the LLMs are wholly-deterministic. Speaking of procedural generation, humans don't take its outputs as-is and call it a product. As it is, it's more like running an RNG while you specify the seed number.
From my reading it was more like if you created art with a hammer the copyright doesn't automatically go to the hammer which would then transfer to you via the "work for hire" clause. So if you then say lent out that hammer to a bunch of other artists to make art with you would theoretically have a copyright claim to everything they made using your hammer.
So if I use a hammer to create art I can’t protect it because I used a hammer? Exchange hammer for AI
Only if it is some sort auto-magic hammer that you can give a description of what you want, but the hammer actually decides what the final piece of art looks like and produces it on the medium without you needing to make the strikes.
Now if you took the output of that auto-magic hammer and than significantly reworked it to meet your vision, that derivative output would be copyrightable.
Giving a description of what you want doesn’t count as producing it is what this seems to be saying. Which is not in favor of people who just want to plug random things into a black box to use that black box as a cash machine.
This also means that the person who owns the black box can’t steal ownership of your output by merely being the owner of the black box. This would be equivalent to you leasing a printer and the company you’re leasing it from saying they own anything you print.
So good ruling. You can copyright the output if YOU rework the output, but you can’t copyright the direct output.
Way I see it a hammer is a tool, like a paintbrush or a camera or Photoshop or chatGPT.
If you use the hammer to break a plate and call it art, you get the copyright.
If you set the hammer up on a machine and feed it a million plates to smash, but with your direction and intent - to choose the types of plates, speed of the hammer, to use the tools to output different results - its still art and you still get the copyright.
But if your hammer sits inside a Platesmasher 9000 which randomly takes plates as input, selects which plates to smash, smashes them, assesses the results, smashes more, then outputs a perfect smashed plate without you doing anything - that's not copyright able. You can't sya you deserve the copyright, as you did not meaningfully contribute to the work - the Platesmasher did everything. You cant point to the output of the system and say "the system made that and deserves copyright" because it's just an algorithm, it doesn't know or have intent behind what it's doing, and can't be assigned a right.
What this does is stop corporations from building a million Platesmashers and claiming copyright on a billion versions of smashed plates - human intervention is required as part of the creative process to use the tools in order for there be a right in the first place.
It's a good thing they weren't making an argument then - but asking a (flawed) question. Just like comparing machine learning to stealing is a flawed comparison.
It's a bit of a flawed comparison (AI vs a hammer) - but let me try.
If you put a single nail into wood with a hammer, which anyone with a hammer can also do, and even a hammer swinging machine could do without human input, you can't protect it.
If you put nails into wood with the hammer so that it shows a face, you can protect it. But you would still not be protecting the process of the single nail (even though the nail face is made up of repeating that process many times), you would specifically be protecting the identity of the face made of nails as your human artistic expression.
To bring it back to AI, if the AI can do it without sufficient input from a human author (eg. only a simple prompt, no post processing, no compositing, etc) it's likely not going to be protectable, since anyone can take the same AI model, use the same prompt, and get the same or very similar result as you did (which would be the equivalent of putting a single nail into the wood).
Take the output, modify it, refine it, composite it, and you're creating the hammer equivalent of a nail face. The end result was only possible because of your human input, and that means it can be protected.