Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Aloisius 251 days ago
What's up with people (or I suppose AI) including copyright licenses in AI generated code?

At least it's an MIT license, but since AI output isn't copyrightable, I'm unsure what the point is since people can legally ignore the license.
1 comments
hugh-avherald 251 days ago
^ (not legal advice -- far from it)
link
Aloisius 251 days ago
If there some reason why one wouldn't be able to ignore the copyright license of something not protected by copyright, I'd love to hear it.

The copyright office has been quite clear (rightly so imo) that AI output is not protected by copyright without substantial human creative expression in the final product and purely prompt-created works simply don't qualify.

Indeed, I expect people muddling their codebases with AI output are going to find themselves in an interesting position of having to prove how much code humans actually wrote to enforce copyright claims if their code ever gets leaked.

link
kragen 251 days ago
That's just the copyright office of one country out of a couple hundred, the courts can overrule them, and legislation can change. However, I agree that currently in the US (or on code written in the US) copyright probably doesn't inhere in AI-written code.
link
Aloisius 251 days ago
The US constitution limits copyright to protection for authors and inventors. I'm skeptical that a simple law could extend protection to machine generated works without being ruled unconstitutional nor does there appear to be any significant government or public support for such a thing.

And while yes, the US is just one country, but it does have a bit of an outsized software development industry. I also haven't hear of any other countries lining up to give machine-generated works copyright protection.

link
kragen 251 days ago
The US already extends copyright to the output from compilers, on the flimsy basis that it is a "literary work", and enacted a sui generis 20-year "mask works" right for chip layouts, which are generally output from EDA tools. It's hard to predict what politics will do, except in the very general sense that policies that have no constituency will not be enacted.
link