[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.

[observationist]

Not what I'm saying - if you meet the technical, intentional definition of a process, substantiated by precedent, then the law should support any variation of the process which has those same technical features meeting the definition.

Using AI as a tool to produce output, no matter how complex the underlying tool, should result in the authorship of the output being assigned to the user of the tool.

If autocorrect in Word doesn't nullify copyright, neither should the use of LLMs; manifesting an idea into code and text and images using prompts might have little human input, but the input is still there. And if it's a serious project, into which many hours of revision, back and forth, testing, changing, etc, there should be absolutely no bar to copyright.

I can entertain a dismissal based on specific low effort uses of a tool - something like "generate a 13 chapter novel 240 pages long" and seeing what you get, then attempting to publish the book. But almost anything that involves any additional effort, even specifying the type of novel, or doing multiple drafts, or generating one chapter at a time, would be sufficient human involvement to justify copyright, in my eyes.

There's no good reason to gatekeep copyright like that. It doesn't benefit society, or individuals, it can only benefit those with vast IP hoards and giant corporations, and it's probably fair to say we've all had about enough of that.