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I hope this is tested in court and found to be correct
As much as I wish this was true, I don’t really think it is.
If the AI generated code is recognisably close to the code the AI has been trained with, the copyright belongs to the creator of that 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…)
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
Worst case is that its the owner of the agent that recieves the copyright, so all vibe coded stuff outside local ai will be claimed by the big corpos
I actually think that’s the best case because it would kill enterprise adoption of AI overnight. All the corps with in-house AI keep using and pushing it, but every small to medium business that isn’t running AI locally will throw it out like yesterday’s trash. OpenAI’s stock price will soar and then plummet.
The big AI companies would just come out with a business subscription that explicitly gives you copyright.
Damn
Unlikely since, as you say, it would deter business. OpenAI already assigns rights of output to the end user according to their licensing and terms.
One would hope it could be first tested against a small time company that can’t afford a good lawyer
Sadly, any lawsuit that opposed AI will have an army of lawyers defending the AI company.
Precedent affects all, and big companies know this.
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.
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.
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
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
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?
The kernel and NTFS seem decent from what i heard. Or at least was (the kernel, no guess what they vibecoded into it now).
About NTFS: it was actually pretty good for it’s time (90s), but the tooling makes no use of some of it’s better features and abuses some others close to breaking point. Literally pearls for the sows.
There were decent (at least, worked for me) NTFS drivers for Linux like 20 years ago. (Back when I felt the need to dual boot)
This whole post has a strong ‘Sovereign Citizen’ vibe.
The Windows FOSS part, sure, but unenforceable copyright seems quite possible, but probably not court-tested. I mean, AI basically ignored copyright to train in the first place, and there is precedent for animals not getting copyright for taking pictures.
If it’s not court tested, I’m guessing we can assume a legal theory that breaks all software licensing will not hold up.
Like, maybe the code snippets that are AI-made themselves can be stolen, but not different parts of the project.
That seems a more likely outcome.
So, if I wrote an AI preface to somebody else’s book, they lose their copyright?
Seems very unlikely. Can you cite any case law for this?
I think it would depend on if there’s a way to differentiate what parts are ai generated or not (the preface could be part of public domain but not the rest of the book)
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.
“Hello World” is prior art.
Just add it after ai writes everything else then.
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.
windows engineers have probably been copying snippets from stackoverflow for decades, which may have been copied from the kernel or some other copyleft product
How may Windows engineers have you met?
99% of the ones I met and worked with were very, very good.
Don’t confuse maintaining backwards compatibility and managing real concerns of large customers with bad engineering.
you can still be a good engineer and still copy code from stack exchange. i wasn’t saying windows engineers are bad
You are saying they don’t know how to make code.
have you met an engineer who doesnt copy code from stackexchange? I’m not saying they blindly paste it in and forget about it, but copying a line or two that you (now) understand is fine.
