> Works predominantly generated by AI without meaningful human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection
Note the word "predominantly", and the discussion that follows in the article about what the courts and the copyright office said.
Nor does it give a single answer.
Mere prompting is still not enough for copyright, and the problem is unsolved on how much contribution a human needs to make to the generated code.
In the case for generated images copyright has been assigned only to the human-modified parts.
Even worse, it will be slightly different in other nations.
The only one that accepts copyright for the unchanged output of a prompt is China.
AI to review - shallow minutia and bikeshedding
AI to edit - wrote duplicated functions that already existed
AI to test - special casing and disabling code to pass the narrow tests it wrote
AI report - "Everything looks good, ship it!"
Plus what if Anna Karenina was GPL?
How much code do you need to change in order for it to be original? One line? 10%? More than 50%?
That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.
Yeah but that’s what the legal system ostensibly does. Splitting fine hairs over whether a derived work is “transformative” is something lawyers and judges have been arguing and deciding for centuries. Just because it’s hard to define a bright red line, doesn’t mean the decision is arbitrary. Courts will mull over whether a dotted quarter note on the fourth bar of a melody constitutes an independent work all day long. It seems absurd, but deciding blurry lines are what courts are built to handle.
Sure the courts could mint a communist society with a few weird decisions about property rights, but this being the US do you really suppose that's likely?
There's really no legal question of any kind that models aren't people and therefore cannot own property (and also cannot enter into legal contract as would be required to reassign the intellectual property they don't and can't own)
That's why the intern signs an employment contract that reassigns their rights to their employer!!
I think that the gold rush approach happening right now around me (my company EMs forcing me to work with claude as fast as possible) show really short-sight of all the management people.
First - I lose my understanding of the code base by relying too much on claude code.
Second - we drop all the good coding practices (like XP, code review etc.) because claude is reviewing claude's code.
Third - we just take a big smelly dump on the teamwork - it's easier and cheaper to let one developer drive the whole change from backend to frontend, despite there are (or were) two different teams - one for FE, one for BE.
Fourth - code commenting was passe, as the code is documentation itself... Unless... there is a problem with the context (which is). So when the people were writing the code, they would not understand the over-engineered code because of their fault. But now we make a step back for our beloved claude because it has small context... It's unfair treatment.
I could go on and on. And all those cultural changes are because of money. So I dub this "goldrush", open my popcorn and see what happens next.
Agree with your other points, but IMO this one has always been better. You often need to design the backend and frontend to work with each other, and that requires a lot more coordination when it's separate teams.
After all, is this not what happens with compilers as well? LLM agents are just quite advanced compilers that don't require the specification to be as detailed as with traditional compilers.
Obviously depends widely on the nature of what you’re building and how good you are with the default decisions it makes.
If you provided a human contractor with the specifications for the code you want, the courts have repeatedly made clear you have not provided the creative input from a copyright perspective, and the contractor needs to explicitly assign those rights to you if want to own the copyright on the code.
This comes up in a few places as a kind of vindictive battle. One example is Oracle suing Google for too closely mimicking their API in Android. Here is an example:
> private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + ") > toIndex(" + if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
And it was deemed fair use by the Supreme Court. Other times high frequency hedge funds sued exiting employees, sometimes successfully. In America, anyone can sue you for any reason, so sure, you'll have Ellison take a feud up with Page and Brin all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In 99.9% of instances none of this matter. Sure there's the technical letter of the law but in practice, and especially now, none of this matters.
You'd be surprised! Among non-software management types, they often think of the code as extremely valuable IP and a trade secret. I'm a CTO and I've made comments before to non/less technical peers about how the code (generally speaking) isn't that big of a secret, and I routinely get shocked expressions. In one case the company almost passed on a big contract because it required disclosure of the source code (with an NDA). When I told them that was a silly reason and explained why, they got it, but the old way of thinking still permeates and is a hard habit to break.
Edit: Fixed errant copy pasta error. Glad that wasn't a password :-)
You, right now, are taking about convergence.
If there is no artwork, there can be no copyright. If every character of the code to write is basically predetermined by the APIs you need to call, there is no artwork and no copyright.
Build a novel new API, and you'll be protected though.
I think this is an unusual opinion.
Code may not be copyrightable in as small chunks as you put there, but in terms of larger pieces I think companies and individuals very often labour under the belief that code is intellectual property under copyright law.
If code isn't copyrightable, from where comes the GPL?
And why does anyone care if (for instance) some Microsoft code might have accidentally ended up in ReactOS, causing that project to need to go into a locked-down review mode for months or years? For that matter why do employers assert that they own the copyright in contracts?
I think it's the opposite - almost everyone thinks their code is copyrightable, outside of APIs and interop stuff, or things so simple as to be trivial.
Then why does reverse engineered code need to be a clean room implementation?
Ask any emulator developer or the developers of ReactOS
Anthropic "solved" this by intermingling the texts extracted from pirated books (illegal) with texts extracted from the physical books they bought and destroyed (legal), so no one can clearly say if the copyrighted material it spits out came from a legal source or not. Everyone rejoiced.
Or is it still IP even if it is not copyrightable? That would feel weird: if it's in the public domain, then it's not IP, is it?
Twice in my career the owners of a company have wanted to sue competitors for stealing their "product" after poaching our staff.
Each time, the lawyers came in and basically told us that suing them for copyright is suicide, will inevitably be nearly impossible to prove, and money would be better spent in many other areas.
In fact, we ended up suing them (and they settled) for stealing our copyrighted clinical content, which they copied so blatantly they left our own typos and customer support phone number in it.
Go ahead, try to sue over your copyrighted code, 10 years and 100M later you will end up like Google v Oracle. What if the code is even 5% different? What about elements dictated by external constraints; hardware, industry standards, common programming practices, these aren't copyrightable.
Then you have merger doctrine, how many ways can we really represent the same basic functions?
Same goes with the copyleft argument, "code resembling copyleft" is incredibly vague, it would need to be verbatim the code, not resembling. Then you have the history of copyleft, there have been many abuses of copyleft and only ~10 notable lawsuits. Now because AI wrote it (which makes it _even harder_ to enforce), we will see a sudden outburst of copyleft cases? I doubt it.
Ultimately anyone can sue you for any reason, nothing is stopping anyone right now from suing you claiming AI stole their copyleft code.
If computer generated code is not copyrightable, ownership cannot be reassigned either.
If vibe coded work is not copyrightable, it cannot be reassigned to the employer and become copyright protected.
Or were you planning to reproduce the (say) Ford Motor Company's trademarked symbol in wood? If so, you're right back in the stinkin' swamp.
This is like a machine you ask for timber and you get timber but you didn’t need to provide any wood