[marcus_holmes]

> For me personally, what is more interesting is that we might not even be able to copyright these creations at all. A court still might rule that all AI-generated code is in the public domain, because there was not enough human input in it. That’s quite possible, though probably not very likely.

As I understand it, the US Supreme Court has just this week ruled exactly this. LLM output cannot be copyrighted, so the only part of any piece of software that can be copyrighted is that part that was created by a human.

If you vibe-code the entire thing, it's not copyrightable. And if it can't be copyrighted that means it is in the public domain from the instant it was created and can't be licensed.

[graemep]

> As I understand it, the US Supreme Court has just this week ruled exactly this. LLM output cannot be copyrighted, so the only part of any piece of software that can be copyrighted is that part that was created by a human.

Your understanding is incorrect. The case was about whether an LLM can be an author, and did not whether the person using it can be (which will be the case). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260110

[marcus_holmes]

Cory Doctorow (and almost every other source I'd found online commenting on this) disagrees with you.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/

Quoting from that post:

> At the core of the dispute is a bedrock of copyright law: that copyright is for humans, and humans alone. In legal/technical terms, "copyright inheres at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity."

[jagged-chisel]

This is the correct understanding. Go back to the selfie of the monkey. Is the monkey the creator of the photo? Does he own the copyright? No. The photographer who created the opportunity for the monkey to take the selfie is the holder of the copyright on that image.

Similarly, the operator of the LLM is the holder of the copyright of the LLM’s output.

[magicalist]

> This is the correct understanding. Go back to the selfie of the monkey. Is the monkey the creator of the photo? Does he own the copyright? No. The photographer who created the opportunity for the monkey to take the selfie is the holder of the copyright on that image.

This is incorrect. The monkey is unable to have a copyright on the photograph, but there was no court case suggesting the owner of the camera (Slater) has a copyright on the photo, and the Copyright Office's rules actually say the opposite, that it isn't copyrightable at all (the Wikipedia summary of the situation is good, pointing out the Copyright Office specifically added an example of "a photograph taken by a monkey" to their guidance to make their point clear).

[jagged-chisel]

I was indeed misremembering part of this.

The professional photographer claimed he engineered the situation that led to the photo and thus he owns the copyright on the images. That specific claim appears to not have been addressed by the court nor by the copyright office. Instead Slater settled by committing to donations from future revenue of the photos.

[observationist]

If it were a trained monkey, and the photographer held a button in his hand that triggered the photo taking mechanism, there'd be no question of copyrightability. Similarly, vibe-coding and eliciting output from a software tool which results in software or images or text created under the specification and direction and intent and deliberate action of the user of the tool is clearly able to be copyrighted.

The user is responsible for the output of the software. An image created in photoshop isn't the IP of Adobe, nor is text in Word somehow belonging to Microsoft. The idea that because the software tool is AI its output is magically immune from copyright is silly, and any regulation or legislation or agency that comes to that conclusion is silly and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Until they get over the silliness, just lie. You carefully manually crafted each and every character, each pixel, each raw byte by hand, slaving away with a tiny electrode, flipping each bit in memory, to elicit the result you see. Any resemblance to AI creations is purely coincidental, or deliberate as an ironic statement about current affairs.

[greyface-]

Copyright is positive law created by humans, not natural law that we happen to recognize. The idea that adopted legislation or established caselaw can be wrong about what copyright fundamentally is makes no sense.

[semi-extrinsic]

> And if it can't be copyrighted that means it is in the public domain from the instant it was created and can't be licensed.

I don't think this follows? If I vibe code something and never post it anywhere public, I can still license that code to a company and ask them to pay me for using the code?

So as a corollary, the business model of providing software where you can choose either free (as in beer) and restrictive license (e.g. GPL), or pay money and get a permissive business-compatible license, will cease to exist.

I think that's a shame actually, because it has been a good way of providing software that does something useful but where large companies that earn money from the use will have to pay the software creator.

[marcus_holmes]

If the code has been entirely a product of an LLM, you don't have copyright so you can't license it. Copyright is only applicable to human creativity, so you can only copyright the bit of the product that was created by a human. And all licensing derives from copyright.

There might be a path to this business model via Trade Secrets (you register your source code as a Trade Secret, and sell only binaries).

And, of course, you can still sell support as the paid-for service, which has worked for a lot of people.

[ketzu]

> I can still license that code to a company and ask them to pay me for using the code

I believe you can do that with public domain/copyright free material in general. There is no requirement to tell someone that the material you license them is also available under a different one or that your license is not enforceable.

[magicalist]

Depending on how you do it and they find out, you could certainly be sued for fraud and misrepresentation, though. And, if you put a "copyright by me" at the top of a public domain work, it's technically a crime under 17 U.S.C. § 506(c) - Fraudulent Copyright Notice

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506#c

[prmph]

Technically how will vibe code be identified? And how does one determine the level of human involvement that would make code copyrightable? What of the prompts? Are those copyrightable? What about the architectural and tactical design of the code if I do those myself?

I don't vibe code; I am firmly in charge of the architecture and code style of my projects, and i frequently give detailed instructions to AI tools I use. But, to me, this is leading to a weird place. Why would the result of using a tool to create something new not be copyrightable simply due to the specific tool used?

I think this whole hullabaloo is self inflicted. Code or an other creative work should stand on its merits. There is no issue with copyright and no issue with the ship of Theseus. The current copyright approach is still applicable: code (or any other creative work) that appears to be lifted verbatim from another work could be a copyright violation. Work that is sufficiently original (irrespective of how it was created) is likely not a copyright violation.

[marcus_holmes]

It's the courts' opinions that count. And they say that copyright only attaches to human creative work, and that does not include LLM output.

I can see there's going to be some huge court fights over this in the next ten years - there's no way some of the big media companies are going to be OK with their content being public domain, and no way are they going to just miss out on being able to produce it so cheaply with an LLM.

[BerislavLopac]

Code is one thing, but what about writing? There is no 100% foolproof way to identify content written by LLMs, and human writing routinely gets incorrectly flagged as such. If I write a book, and a checker says that it's written by LLM, is it automatically in the public domain?

[marcus_holmes]

Really good question.

My understanding is that only human creativity can be copyrighted. So if you sketched out the plot and got the LLM to write all the words, then only the plot is copyrightable. So someone else can copy all the words, as long as they don't copy your plot.

However, as you point out, someone has to determine which bits the LLM created and which bits you created. If you wrote the whole book, and a tool incorrectly flags your writing as LLM writing, and then someone copies chunks of your book because they believed the tool and assumed they could (and assuming you filed a DMCA claim and they denied it using the tool's output as proof) then there's going to have to be a court case.

I suspect there's going to be a few court cases about this.

[BerislavLopac]

> only the plot is copyrightable

But the plot can't be copyrightable, as the copyright applies only to a tangible representation of an idea (e.g. written text), and not to an idea itself.

[marcus_holmes]

Your sketch of the plot is copyrighted then.

I think there are going to be a quite a few court cases thrashing this out to its conclusion