[Daviey]

I can only talk about the law in England & Wales, but:

For code generated by an LLM the human user would likely be considered the author if you provided sufficient creative input, direction, or modification.

The level of human involvement matters, simply prompting "write me a function" might not be enough, but providing detailed specifications, reviewing, and modifying the output would strengthen the claim.

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), Section 9(3) staes, "In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken". This was written before LLM's existed, but recent academic literature has supported this position, https://academic.oup.com/jiplp/article/19/1/43/7485196?login...

However, a comparable situation was tested with Thaler v Comptroller-General, where courts emphasised that legal rights require meaningful human involvement, not just ownership of the AI system. - https://www.culawreview.org/journal/unlocking-the-canvas-a-l... and https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/uk-supreme-co...

I do acknowledge there is uncertainty, and this is highlighted here in "The Curious Case of Computer-Generated Works under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.", with "section 9(3): the section is either unnecessary or unjustifiably extends legal protection to a class of works which belong in the public domain" - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4072004

Today, I think it's doubtful that a functional application can be entirely vibe coded without decent direction and modification, but I don't think that will always be the case.

[ffsm8]

At least for art there is already precedent in US courts with someone trying to copyright an image generated by midjourney and it getting revoked in 22, because ai generated art cannot be copyrighted.

for code it hasn't been challenged yet, but I find it doubtful they'd decide differently there

[whs]

I was reading Doe 1 v. GitHub for my paper. The case involves open source developers suing Github Copilot which were trained on, and generating open source code including code with MIT and AGPL license.

So far, the judge believe that training models on open source code is not a license violation as the code is public for anyone to read, but by "distribution or redistribution" (I assume, of the model's outputs?) it is still up for the court's decision whether that violate the terms of the license, among other laws.

The case is currently moved to Ninth Circuit without a decision in the district court, as there are other similar cases (such as Authors Guild's) and they wanted that the courts would offer a consistent rules. I believe one of the big delay in the case is in damages, which I think the plaintiff tried to ask for details of Microsoft's valuation of GitHub when it was acquired, as GitHub's biggest asset is the Git repositories and may provide a monetary value of how much each project is worth. Microsoft is trying to stall and not reveal this.

[kopecs]

Assuming you're referring to Thaler v. Perlmutter, Thaler claimed to the copyright office that the image at issue was "autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine". So the question of "if you claim the LLM did it itself" is settled (shocker, cf. Naruto v. Slater, 888 F.3d 418), but that definitely did not settle "_I_ used the LLM to do it".

[ffsm8]

Tbf, IANAL and was only repeating what journalists wrote back then. Ultimately, I have no deeper knowledge of the laws in question and thus don't have a qualified opinion on the matter.

[NoahZuniga]

Also, if there isn't enough human involvement for the code to be copyrightable, then its basically equivalent to being in the public domain. This is more permissive than any code license (ie GPL), so should be fine no matter what.