[simonw]

I feel like the more important question here is whether AI-generated code can be copyrighted.

Companies responsible for several billion dollars worth of software written over the past ~36 months would really like to know the answer to that one.

[keeda]

For many, many reasons, I suspect patents will become much more important now. After all, it's the ideas that matter now. Which I maintain, has always been the case, because "execution" is nothing more than a series of smaller ideas, except those typically needed money. How convenient for those with capital!

Patents have the drawback of being expensive and very slow to acquire, but having worked on a bunch, they are uniquely suited to be radically optimized by GenAI.

Also patents are very flawed in practice, but the only real protection that is left. Copyright is meaningless when, as people have done, you can reproduce entire saas products by feeding AI screenshots.

Intellectual Property as a whole has been in need for a revamp for a while now, but it's even more critical in the age of AI.

[freejazz]

Patents aren't going to cover the vast majority of what exists as code because patents only cover inventions and not common every day code.

> Copyright is meaningless when, as people have done, you can reproduce entire saas products by feeding AI screenshots.

What do you mean?

[keeda]

> What do you mean?

People are taking screenshots of existing products and feeding them to AI to reproduce them from scratch. From this site: https://ghuntley.com/real/

> Any product features or platforms that were designed for humans. I know that's going to sound really wild, but understand these days I go window-shopping on SaaS companies' websites for product features, rip a screenshot into Claude Code, and it rebuilds that product feature/platform.

Also this comment where backend code could be reproduced wholesale from the APIs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259485

And this whole thread about relicensing AI-rewritten open source projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257803

> Patents aren't going to cover the vast majority of what exists as code because patents only cover inventions and not common every day code.

Agreed, but as we're finding out, everyday code is now cheap enough that there will be questions about how much of it is worth protecting... and, given the unclear stance on AI-generated code, maybe even if it is protectable at all.

Yes, the bar for patents is way too high for every day code, but you can always get one by making the claims narrow enough. I think that will actually serve one of the underlying goals of patents by incentivizing people to build things that are actually novel and non-obvious rather than just a slight variation of another project.

For projects where there is absolutely nothing technically novel (which is rarely true, cf "claims narrow enough") moats could be in hoarding data, network effects, and the like.

Note, I'm not necessarily happy about all this, this is just how I think it could play out absent larger changes to IP laws.

[freejazz]

>Also this comment where backend code could be reproduced wholesale from the APIs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259485

Do you mean deduced instead of reproduced?

>Agreed, but as we're finding out, everyday code is now cheap enough that there will be questions about how much of it is worth protecting... and, given the unclear stance on AI-generated code, maybe even if it is protectable at all.

AI generated code is likely not protectable at all under copyright, but that was expected by anyone who follows this area of the law seriously.

> Yes, the bar for patents is way too high for every day code, but you can always get one by making the claims narrow enough.

Not really, and if you did it would likely not be enforceable because the getting past a §101 motion isn't likely.

>Note, I'm not necessarily happy about all this, this is just how I think it could play out absent larger changes to IP laws.

I'm not sure any of it is a bad thing. Why should AI generated code be protectable under copyright? It can still be protected by trade secret, which seems fairly sufficient for what it ultimately is.

[keeda]

Yes "deduced" makes more sense, though I guess the code was not really the point. I really should have said the backend functionality is being reproduced. As copyright doesn't protect functionality, the closest proxy we had was the code itself, and now that is meaningless.

> AI generated code is likely not protectable at all under copyright, but that was expected by anyone who follows this area of the law seriously.

I haven't followed too closely, but the ruling on AI art seems to leave the door open for "significant human creative input" like "editing, arrangement." This leaves room for photography, but can also be covered by "architecture, followed by iterative prompting and potentially manual editing to refine the code", which is still needed for any non-trivial AI-generated code.

I think the situation is not great because the law is too fuzzy and outdated, and could allow for "AI laundering" of copyrighted works, as the relicensing thread suggests, which is especially not great for open source where trade secrets are not an option.

> Not really, and if you did it would likely not be enforceable because the getting past a §101 motion isn't likely.

Not a lawyer, but I've seen tons of such issued patents out there, and many have even been upheld in lawsuits. §101 is often trivially bypassed adding "computer readable media" or some "non-abstract side-effect" language to claims. Like, one pattern of claims is "A method of - algorithm - algorithm - algorithm - show something to the user / write to a DB / transmit a message / etc."

[freejazz]

>Yes "deduced" makes more sense, though I guess the code was not really the point. I really should have said the backend functionality is being reproduced. As copyright doesn't protect functionality, the closest proxy we had was the code itself, and now that is meaningless.

But is was only ever so meaningful because as you point out, copyright does not protect functionality.

> I haven't followed too closely, but the ruling on AI art seems to leave the door open for "significant human creative input" like "editing, arrangement." This leaves room for photography, but can also be covered by "architecture, followed by iterative prompting and potentially manual editing to refine the code", which is still needed for any non-trivial AI-generated code.

I don't think this kind of analogizing does anyone any benefits tbh.

>Not a lawyer, but I've seen tons of such issued patents out there, and many have even been upheld in lawsuits. §101 is often trivially bypassed adding "computer readable media" or some "non-abstract side-effect" language to claims. Like, one pattern of claims is "A method of - algorithm - algorithm - algorithm - show something to the user / write to a DB / transmit a message / etc."

I can't agree with this observation, unfortunately.

[_DeadFred_]

Patents are what allowed the industrial revolution to happen. No one is bringing a cotton gin from idea to design to manufacturing to market if the second you release it every manufacturing company in the world can start making their won.

[joquarky]

I wonder how things were invented before patents.

[freejazz]

The king paid for it

[keeda]

This strawman pops up often. The purpose of IP is to "promote" progress. The word was carefully chosen.

And luckily we have years of research, empirical and otherwise, showing the impact of IP on innovation and the arts. It's a very complex, multi-dimensional topic where outcomes vary depending on a combination of things like industry, subject matter, time frame, level of economic development of the country, strictness of enforcement, and more.

However overall the impact of IP is much more positive than HN would think, largely because the material and discourse that has gotten airtime here is something that aligns more with the "information wants to be free" crowd.

[ben_w]

Perhaps. Even that may not be important if the METR progress line continues much longer, because then all those billion dollars "worth" of software written over the past 3-ish years get re-invented for cents on the dollar.

Separately, I think code is more like an invention than a work of art, and should have been subject only to patent laws instead of (and not in addition to!) copyright laws. This doesn't really make much difference now, as AI doesn't (at least in the UK) have personhood for either copyright or patent law: https://www.briffa.com/blog/can-you-obtain-a-patent-for-inve...

[layer8]

I would assume that the same “substantial human authorship” criterion applies. Copyright is about human creativity, it doesn’t otherwise matter if something is art, prose, typesetting, or code.

[uhfraid]

Yep. Not just copyright but patents as well

> The Supreme Court previously rejected Thaler's request to hear his argument in a separate case involving prototypes for a beverage holder and a light beacon concerning whether AI-generated inventions should be eligible for U.S. patent protection. His patent applications were rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on similar grounds.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de...

[yorwba]

It doesn't really matter as long as you keep physical control of the code and don't let others copy it.

[sowbug]

That would effectively rely on the doctrine of trade secret rather than copyright. A major difference is that accidental or malicious disclosure of a trade secret usually ends the trade secret status, forever. In an alternate universe where computer source code had never been copyrightable, famous leaks (Microsoft Windows, 2004; id Quake, 1997) would have effectively open-sourced those codebases, and other companies could have openly and legally used them.

As source code becomes more of a generated artifact of software development the way object code is an artifact of compilation, we might be moving toward a world where secrecy, constant forward motion, and moats become even more of an asset (vs plain IP protection).

[joquarky]

> would have effectively open-sourced those codebases, and other companies could have openly and legally used them.

It's actually better if we keep re-creating the wheel. Keeps more people employed.

[beej71]

Nor does it matter if code has no value.

I do think what happens in this case is SCOTUS will ultimately rule that AI-built code is copyrightable while art is not. I'm sure there's some rationale thick enough for them.

[sowbug]

It's strange how hard it is to think of a situation that could lead to that case. Who would bother filing an infringement lawsuit for code whose very existence proves that it can be derived by anyone from LLM prompts? What would the damages even be?

Interesting world we live in. Soon it'll be faster to one-shot the tiny slice of functionality I need from Adobe CS than to navigate their subscription cancellation obstacle course.

[beej71]

> Soon it'll be faster to one-shot the tiny slice of functionality I need from Adobe CS than to navigate their subscription cancellation obstacle course.

Pretty sure you're already in that world. ;)

[joquarky]

This is precisely why copyright is practically obsolete. You can't legally forbid someone from paraphrasing, and now we can easily automate it to just within the threshold set by legal cases.

[beej71]

I view this as a massive personal challenge. Can I write instructional materials that are better than an AI summary? I'm going to keep trying, even as books become obsolete.

[asacrowflies]

So I can reverse engineer in peace without Nintendo ninjas lawyers coming after me?

[joquarky]

You can always distribute a prompt instead of the product.

[teeray]

Can you imagine the chaos if suddenly all the slop code wasn’t owned by the company? Even though that result would be consistent with this ruling, it undermines the narrative the economy is now riding on, so there will likely be special exemption.