[redfloatplane]

There are gonna be some really interesting legal decisions to read in the coming years, that’s for sure…

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The rest of this comment is irrelevant, but leaving for posterity, I had the wrong Viktor - it's getviktor.com not viktor.ai:

Edit: this one particularly interesting to me as both parties are in the EU. VIKTOR.ai is a Dutch company and the author of this post is Polish.

The ToS for Viktor.ai include the following fun passages:

> 18.1. The Agreement and these Terms & Conditions are governed by Dutch law and the Agreement and these Terms & Conditions will be interpreted in accordance with Dutch law.

18.2. All disputes arising from or arising in connection with the Agreement and/or the Terms & Conditions will be submitted exclusively to the competent court in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

7.3. The Customer is not permitted to change, remove or make unrecognizable any mark showing VIKTOR's Intellectual Property Rights to the Software. The Customer is not permitted to use or register any trademark or design or any domain name of VIKTOR or a similar name or sign in any country.

8.5. The Customer may not cause or allow any reproduction, imitation, duplication, copying, sale, resale, leasing or trading of the Services and/or the Software, or any part thereof.

[zvqcMMV6Zcr]

Terms of service might matter more for terminating that user account. Whole ordeal is just plain copyright violation. The author had no licence to that internal code, and whitewashing it with LLM will achieve nothing. That case is much clearer than that recent GPL->BSD attempt story.

[duskdozer]

If LLM-generated code isn't considered a derivative work of the original, then whether the author was licensed to use the code doesn't matter. But I'm sure the courts will rule in favor of your view regardless. Laundering GPL is in corps' interest and laundering their code is not.

[bigbadfeline]

I'm not sure why people are clinging to some fuzzy and stretched out notion of copyright and the GPL in a particular. LLM's do NOT just copy code, with the right prompting, they generate entirely new code which can produce the same results as already existing code - GPLed or not.

If copyright is extended to cover such cases we'll have to become all lawyers and do nothing but sue each other because the fuzziness of it will make it impossible to reject any case, no matter how frivolous or irrelevant.

[duskdozer]

You either destroy the GPL and proprietary software at the same time, or neither. In a sane world of course.

[singpolyma3]

And if that's true it's also true in this case where there was no GPL involved

[kennywinker]

Tell that to anyone who made sample based music in the late 80s and early 90s.

[cwillu]

If I use metallica samples to make a rendition of happy birthday, the copyright holders of happy birthday aren't suing me for the damages to metallica from my use of their samples; the question of whether my use of the samples is transformative is simply irrelevant to the question at hand.

[kennywinker]

My point was: sampling was widely used by a large subculture (hiphop) just like ai is widely used by programmers. Then a few landmark legal cases changed things entirely. The Verve never saw a cent from Bittersweet Symphony - they wrote a song using something normal to them, and then the law came and knocked their teeth in.

No garaurantees that doesn’t happen with AI in the next few years.

[skeledrew]

According to US courts, the output can't be copyrighted at all. It's automatically in public domain after the "whitewash", regardless of original copyright.

https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-de...

[limagnolia]

Thats not at all what this ruling said. What the courts found was that an AI cannot hold copyright as the author. That copyright requires a human creative element. Not that anything that was generated by an LLM can't be subject to copyright.

As an example, a photo taken from a digital camera can be subject to copyright because of the creative element involved in composing and taking the photo. Likewise, source code generated by an LLM under the guidance of a human author is likely to be subject to the human authors copyright.

[skeledrew]

> That copyright requires a human creative element.

Sure, but the aim of that creative element would also be a consideration I'd think (and lawyers will argue). If someone sets up a camera on a 360° rotating arm and leaves it to take pictures at random intervals, it's unlikely to be considered "creative" from a copyright perspective.

Same for source code generated by an LLM, with the primary guidance of the human author being to "create a copy of this existing thing that I got", vs "create a thing that solves this problem in a way that I came up with". The former is recreating something that already exists, using detailed knowledge of that thing to shape the output. The latter is creating something that may or may not exist, using desire/need and imagination to shape the output. And I can't see reason for the former to be copyrightable.

But also, in either case, an ultimate objective was achieved: liberating the thing from its "owners" and initial copyright.

[fc417fc802]

> Likewise, source code generated by an LLM under the guidance of a human author is likely to be subject to the human authors copyright.

That's probably going to depend an awful lot on the exact details of the guidance. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

> As described above, 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. The Office continues to monitor technological and legal developments to evaluate any need for a different approach.

But let's assume that the viktor prompts themselves were subject to copyright. In this case those prompts were used to generate documentation which was then used to generate an implementation. It's certainly not a clean room by any stretch of the imagination but is it likely to be deemed sufficient separation? The entire situation seems like a quagmire.

[redfloatplane]

I think it comes down to the company's appetite for legal action, doesn't it? This case is imo pretty clear but the vibe has quite the smell of Oracle v Google to me.

But, yeah. More than likely this case is a simple account termination and some kind of "you can't call your clone 'openviktor'" letter.

[NicuCalcea]

Isn't this exactly what LLMs themselves do? They ingest other people's data and reproduce a slightly modified version of it. That allows AI companies to claim the work is transformative and thus fair use.

[singpolyma3]

There's no difference between ARR copyright infringement and GPL copyright infringement. Either it is infringement or it is not.

[scotty79]

If the internal code was LLM generated it has no copyright.

[MartiCarmona]

Someone tell every startup in YC they are criminals

[codetiger]

There are also new jobs emerging to safeguard a companies assets that were created by AI. New white hat hacking opportunities.

Anyways, however you put this, I see this as a property theft and taking pride at open sourcing does not justify it.

[ralferoo]

It's also disingenuous to call it open source as that might tempt others to use it believing that it actually is open source.

Let's call it what it is - stolen IP and released without permission of the author. Sure, it's good that it opens the debate as to whether that's ethical given that's essentially what the model itself is doing, but it's very clear in this instance that he's just asked for and been given a copy of source that has a clear ownership. That's about as clear cut as obtaining e.g. commercial server-side code and distributing it in contravention of the licence.

[redfloatplane]

It's not completely clear that this is the original source. According to the post it's a reimplementation based on documentation created from the original source, or perhaps from developer documentation and the SDK. Whether that's the same thing from a legal standpoint, I don't really know - I think from a personal morality standpoint it's clear that they are the same thing.

[vrganj]

It feels more like clean room reverse engineering by llm, technically.

[cycomanic]

Well first they need to proof that Viktor was actually copyrightable. If it was largely written by an llm, that might not be the case? AFAIK several rulings have stated that AI generated code can not be copyrighted.

[metalcrow]

This is a common misreading of the law. AI cannot hold authorship of code, but no ruling has claimed so far that ai output itself can't be copyrighted (that I know of)

[ralferoo]

This would suggest that there has been and that there seem little will to revisit it: https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-...

That said, the article says "Okay, prompts, great. Are they any interesting? Surprisingly... yes. As an example workflow_discovery contains a full 6-phase recipe for mining business processes out of Slack conversations, something that definitely required time and experiments to tune. It's hardcoded business logic, but in prompt instead of code."

So the article author clearly knows this prompt would be copyrighted as it wasn't output from an AI, and recognises that there would have been substantial work involved in creating it.

[metalcrow]

That Reuters article is misleadingly worded. The Stephen Thaler case in question is because Thaler tried to register the AI itself as the author of the copyright, not that he tried to register the output for copyright under his own name. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/03/the-f...

[fc417fc802]

Suppose I illicitly get my hands on the source code for a proprietary product. I read through this code I'm not supposed to have. I write up a detailed set of specifications based on it. I hand those specifications off to someone else to do a clean room implementation.

Sure, I didn't have a license for the code that I read. But I'm pretty sure that doesn't taint my coworker's clean room implementation.

[dsjoerg]

it's not viktor.ai it's getviktor.com

[redfloatplane]

Ah, you're right. Headquartered in Delaware. Oh well. Thanks for spotting!

[zggf]

I could do the same thing but not publish it, still getting the value of their product without legal concerns. Now, what happens when it becomes even easier thanks to AI improving, and takes few hours instead of few days?

[redfloatplane]

You could certainly do that in private but that doesn't mean it's not 'without legal concerns'. But, not shouting about it and not creating a repo called 'openviktor' would probably be a safer bet.

I certainly think the whole idea of IP ownership as related to software will become very interesting from a legal standpoint in the coming years. Personally I think that, over time, the legal challenges will become pretty overwhelming and a sort of legal bankruptcy will be declared at some point in one direction or another (as in, allowing this to happen or making it extremely easy to bring judgement and punishment, similar to spam laws). However, I would not want to be the first to find out, especially in Europe.

[skeledrew]

They have to let it happen. There's no stopping the tide here.