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As much as I wish this was true, I don’t really think it is.
It’s just unsettled law, and the link is basically an opinion piece. But guess who wins major legal battles like this - yep, the big corps. There’s only one way this is going to go for AI generated code
It is true that AI work (and anything derived from it that isn’t significantly transformative) is public domain. That said, the copyright of code that is a mix of AI and human is much more legally grey.
In other work, where it can be more separated, individual elements may have different copyright. For example, a comic was made using AI generated images. It was ruled that all the images were thus public domain. Despite that, the text and the layout of the comic was human-made and so the copyright to that was owned by the author. Code, obviously can’t be so easily divided up, and it will be much harder to define what is transformative or not. As such, its a legal grey area that will probably depend on a case-by-case basis.
Yeah, it’s like products that include FOSS in them, only have to release the FOSS stuff, not their proprietary. (Was kind of cute to find the whole GNU license buried in the menus of my old TiVo…)
So, you’re telling me I can copypaste 100% some of the ai slop books on amazon and resell it as mine? Brb, gonna make a shit site an absolute diarrhea
Even if it were, it would be for you or I, but not for Microsoft, apple, Google, or Amazon.
The US copyright office confirms this. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf
The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output. Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
I’m not sure where you get that from, I’m pretty sure vibe coding still complies with these indications
“AI-generated” works can be copyrighted. However, on the condition that the AI-generated elements are explicitly mentioned in the “Excluded Material” field. In other words, the parts generated by AI are not protected, only the parts that are expressed by human creativity. Courts in the U.S have already rejected registration for many AI works because of that. Regardless, it’s still a contentious matter.
P.S. I am completely opposed to (generative) AI as well as the copyright system. I’m just stating my findings researching the law and court cases.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread it won’t matter either way unless tested in court and that will never happen for most companies.
Did you even read your own report? It says that AI works are copyrightable in certain circumstances, not that they make a whole project public:
Copyright law has long adapted to new technology and can enable case-by- case determinations as to whether AI-generated outputs reflect sufficient human contribution to warrant copyright protection. As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements.
“AI-generated” works can be copyrighted. However, on the condition that the AI-generated elements are explicitly mentioned in the “Excluded Material” field. In other words, the parts generated by AI are not protected, only the parts that are expressed by human creativity. Courts in the U.S have already rejected registration for many AI works because of that.
P.S. I am completely opposed to (generative) AI as well as the copyright system. I’m just stating my findings researching the law and court cases.
This whole post has a strong ‘Sovereign Citizen’ vibe.
I do not give Facebook or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages, or posts, both past and future.
I think, to punish Micro$lop for its collaboration with fascists and its monopolistic behavior, the whole Windows codebase should be made public domain.
does the public really want more garbage than they already has?
Do you not want all the hardware support Linux is missing to suddenly become available?
We don’t have to use it for anything other than compatibility.
Personally I’d very much like for ACPI to be un-fucked
Haven’t we been exposed to enough horror?
Probably wouldn’t work, at this point I doubt they’re capable of feeling shame anymore, if they ever were.
That’s not even remotely true…
The law is very clear that non-human generated content cannot hold copyright.
That monkey that took a picture of itself is a famous example.
But yes, the OP is missing some context. If a human was involved, say in editing the code, then that edited code can be subject to copyright. The unedited code likely cannot.
Human written code cannot be stripped of copyright protection regardless of how much AI garbage you shove in.
Still, all of this is meaningless until a few court cases happen.
So wait, if my start up does a human written “Hello World” and the rest is piled on AI slop it can’t be stripped of copyright? Or is “Hello World” too generic to hold a copyright at all?
Granted, as you said this all has to be defined and tested in court, I’m just trying to understand where the line as you see it is.
https://www.reinhartlaw.com/news-insights/only-humans-can-be-authors-of-copyrightable-works
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf
A human must be involved in the creation. A human can combine non-human created things to make something new, but the human must be involved, and the non-human created elements likely lack protection themselves.
“Hello World” is prior art.
deleted by creator
People will believe anything if the icon on the tweet looks authoritative and the grammar is sound.
That sounds like complete bullshit to me. Even if the logic is sound, which I seriously doubt, if you use someone’s code and you claim their license isn’t valid because some part of the codebase is AI generated, I’m pretty sure you’ll have to prove that. Good luck.
There was a case in which a monkey took a picture and the owner of the camera wanted to publish the photo. Peta sued and lost because an animal can’t hold any copyright as an human author is required for copyright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
As you also find in the wikipedia article, this case is used to argue that ai generated content is not by an human author and consequently not copyrightable.
I’d argue that this is a different scenario, as AI is a tool, not a being. At least at this point.
A complex tool, but really just a tool. Without the human input, it can’t do shit.
There’s already rulings on this holding that the prompt for all LLM or image generator isn’t enough to count the result as the human’s expression, thus no copyright (both in USA and other places)
You need both human expression and creative height to get copyright protection
I’d argue that it is wildly different to vide coding.
Exactly. If I use online Photoshop or whatever, and I use the red eye removal tool, I have copyright on that picture. Same if I create a picture from scratch. Just because someone like OpenAI hosts a more complex generator doesn’t mean a whole new class of rules applies.
Whomever uses a tool, regardless of the complexity, is both responsible and benificiary of the result.
Not quite how copyright law works. Photoshop and similar gives you copyright because it captures your expression.
An LLM is more like work-for-hire but unlike a human artist it doesn’t qualify for copyright protection and therefore neither does you
Well, not how USA copyright works, but point well taken. It seems I was too naïve in my understanding of copyright.
I work for a large enterprise firm, our corporate lawyer has told be about this exact scenario so I’m inclined to believe it’s real.
That being said, for established projects it won’t be that hard to prove the non-AI bit because you have a long commit history that predates the tooling.
Even if you were to assume that all commits after a certain date were AI generated, the OP is slightly off in their attestation that any AI code suddenly makes the whole thing public domain, it would only be if a majority of the codebase was AI coded (and provably so).
So yes all the vibe coded shite is a lost cause, but stuff like Windows isn’t in any danger.
I’ll stay sceptical until there is court cases supporting this logic as a precedent.
I think that’s actually quite sensible, our lawyer wasn’t flagging some clear cut legal certainty, he was flagging risk.
Risk can be mitigated, even if the chance of it panning out is slim.
A bit besides the point, but it is pretty crazy to me that we’re moving towards a world where if you create by yourself, you’re outcompeted, but if you use AI like everyone else, you own nothing.
Aren’t you all forgetting the core meaning of open source? The source code is not openly accessible, thus it can’t be FOSS or even OSS
This just means microslop can’t enforce their licenses, making it legal to pirate that shit
It’s just the code that’s not under copyright, so if someone leaked it you could legally copy and distribute any parts which are AI generated but it wouldn’t invalidate copyright on the official binaries.
If all the code were AI generated (or enough of it to be able to fill in the blanks), you might be able to make a case that it’s legal to build and distribute binaries, but why would you bother distributing that slop?
Counterpoint: how do you even prove that any part of the code was AI generated.
Also, i made a script years ago that algorithmically generates python code from user input. Is it now considered AI-generated too?
i made a script years ago that algorithmically generates python code from user input. Is it now considered AI-generated too?
No, because you created the generation algorithm. Any code it generates is yours.
Not how I understand it, but I’m not a lawyer. The user that uses the script to generate the code can copyright the output and oop can copyright their script (and the output they themself generate). If it worked like you said, it would be trivial to write a script that generates all possible code by enumerating possible programs, then because the script will eventually generate your code, it’s already copyrighted. This appear absurd to me.
If the script copies chunks of code under the copyright of the original script writer, I typically see for those parts that the original owner keeps copyright of those chunks and usually license it in some way to the user. But the code from the user input part is still copyrightable by the user. And that’s that last part that is most interesting for the copyright of AI works. I’m curious how the law will settle on that.
I’m open to counterarguments.
This is a really good point, and it’s making me rethink my own idea about the subject.
Computer output cannot be copyrighted, don’t focus on it being “AI”. It’s not quite so simple, there’s some nuance about how much human input is required. We’ll likely see something about that at some point in court. The frustrating thing is that a lot of this boils down to just speculation until it goes to court.
This reminds me of that scene in Breaking Bad where the two morons were talking about how if you ask an undercover cop if they’re cop they legally have to tell you the truth
That’s not what that research document says. Pretty early on it talks about rote mechanical processes with no human input. By the logic they employ there’s no difference between LLM code and a photographer using Photoshop.
So by that reasoning all Microsoft software is open source
Not that we’d want it, it’s horrendously bad, but still
windows would be OSS, not FOSS.
if you can’t enforce copyright, how do you stop others from giving it away for free and editing it, making it foss…?
Patents, trademarks and ToS.
This is why CC0 should not be used for code. Its public license fallback explicitly does not give patent rights. Compare that to MIT which implicitly does by saying you can use the software however you want. CC0 literally has this clause in the public license fallback.
No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.
Oh darn, our CEO told us to use LLMs to write all this code, and now the good parts might be used for something that helps people. Not our copyrights!
To the CEO, “helps people” means “spreadsheet line goes up”.
how can you tell if it’s AI generated? you can’t
The same way you tell if it’s copy & pasted from Stackoverflow or some other search result!
that’s not my experience, it codes in your style if you give it the correct pointers, examples, and so on
1- Code it in fortran 77.
2- DO NOT use DO or WHILE or any other non-compliant f77 code. Instead, use GOTO
3- makes the spaghetti so spaghetty that it curls in itself.
4- Make sure to use COMMON blocks everyhere! Not only for efficiency purposes but to also holds all that spaghetti in a tiny Schrondinger cat’s box.
5- last step is to do all that to write “Hello World!”
How the hell did he arrive at the conclusion there was some sort of one-drop rule for non-protected works.
Just because the registration is blocked if you don’t specify which part is the result of human creativity, doesn’t mean the copyright on the part that is the result of human creativity is forfeit.
Copyright exists even before registration, registration just makes it easier to enforce. And nobody says you can’t just properly refile for registration of the part that is the result of human creativity.
Yeah, a lot of copyright law in the US is extremely forgiving towards creators making mistakes. For example, you can only file for damages after you register the copyright, but you can register after the damages. So like if I made a book, someone stole it and starting selling copies, I could register for a copyright afterwards. Which honestly is for the best. Everything you make inherently has copyright. This comment, once I click send, will be copyrighted. It would just senselessly create extra work for the government and small creators if everything needed to be registered to get the protections.
Edit: As an example of this, this is why many websites in their terms of use have something like “you give us the right to display your work” because, in some sense, they don’t have the right to do that unless you give them the right. Because you have a copyright on it. Displaying work over the web is a form of distribution.
That edit had confused so many users over the years. They think they are signing away rights to their copyrighted work by agreeing to the platform’s EULA, but the terms granting them license to freely store and distribute your work? That’s literally what you want their service to do because you’re posting it with the intention of the platform showing it to others!
Granted, companies are using user data for other purposes too, so that’s a problem, but I’ve seen so so many posts over the last couple decades of people complaining about EULAs that describe core site functions…
According to this guy…
