What it comes down to there is whether the act of selection is an act of art. If there is no skill other than picking, I’m not sure I’d consider it an artistic act. (For similar reasons I’m very much on the fence about a lot of modern art.)
When it comes to selection, we already have a valid form of copyright which is explicitly that- compositions. If I take a bunch of royalty-free songs, and make a book of sheet music where I hand selected songs to be in that book, I can own a copyright on the composition without owning any of the featured material.
So, if someone selects a bunch of individual elements in an image using img2img, is that now a composition?
What it comes down to there is whether the act of selection is an act of art. If there is no skill other than picking, I’m not sure I’d consider it an artistic act. (For similar reasons I’m very much on the fence about a lot of modern art.)
When it comes to selection, we already have a valid form of copyright which is explicitly that- compositions. If I take a bunch of royalty-free songs, and make a book of sheet music where I hand selected songs to be in that book, I can own a copyright on the composition without owning any of the featured material.
So, if someone selects a bunch of individual elements in an image using img2img, is that now a composition?