Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fc417fc802 103 days ago
> AI generated code isn't owned by anyone, it can't be copyrighted, so it cannot be licensed.

Translation: AI generated code is in the public domain in the US (until and unless something changes).

You can freely incorporate public domain code into any other codebase. You can relicense it as you see fit. Public domain material is not viral the way the GPL is.

Furthermore, if you make changes to public domain code the derivative product is subject to copyright.

2 comments

You can "relicense" it as you see fit, but anyone can just copy it and ignore your license and its terms entirely, it's not your property to put a license on.

See also Red Hat IP lawyer's opinion on trying to license the chardet "rewrite": https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/334#issuecomment-4...

From a copyright office report [0] linked in that issue section:

> in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements

I'll just note that "unlikely" doesn't mean "not possible".

It's an interesting question but it's perplexing to me that an IP lawyer of all people would be suggesting to remove a license that might or might not apply in practice. Removing it could have legal consequences if it turns out to be copyrightable. Whereas leaving the notice there wouldn't be expected to have any consequences in the event that it turns out not to apply. Particularly the notice for a permissive OSI license.

To begin with the project is MIT licensed which amounts to public domain with extra steps. So it's the same thing at the end of the day regardless of how the law turns out.

On top of that, even if we suppose the LLM output to be public domain as soon as you later make modifications to the file the license in the header would come into force. It's functionally no different than copy-pasting a piece of public domain code and then editing it a bit.

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

Big tech employees better be quick then!