[Luker88]

Just remember that "reviewed" is not enough to not be considered public domain.

It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts.

Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored.

I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".

[shakna]

For those who might wonder how accurate this is, there is advice from the Federal Register to this effect. [0] Its quite comprehensive, and covers pretty much every question that might be asked about "What about...?"

> In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself.

[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...

[martin-t]

I cannot take seriously any politician or layer using the words "artificial intelligence", especially to models from 2023. These people have never used LLMs to write code. They'd know even current models need constant babysitting or they produce unmaintainable mess, calling anything from 2023 AI is a joke. As the AI proponents keep saying, you have to try the latest model, so anything 2 years old is irrelevant.

There's really 2 ways to argue this:

- Either AI exists and then it's something new and the laws protecting human creativity and work clearly could not have taken it into account and need to be updated.

- Or AI doesn't exist, LLMs are nothing more than lossily compressed models violating the licenses of the training data, their probabilistically decompressed output is violating the licenses as well and the LLM companies and anyone using them will be punished.

[shakna]

If monkeys can't hold copyright, which is an actual case discussed above, then no, an LLM probably can't either. "Human" is required.

[martin-t]

Yeah, an LLM, being a machine obviously shouldn't hold copyright. But that doesn't stop people claiming that running vast amounts of code through an LLM can strip copyright from it.

Ultimately LLMs (the first L stands for large and for a good reason) are only possible to create by taking unimaginable amounts of work performed by humans who have not consented to their work being used that way, most of whom require at least being credited in derivative works and many of whom have further conditions.

Now, consent in law is a fairly new concept and for now only applied to sexual matters but I think it should apply to every human interaction. Consent can only be established when it's informed and between parties with similar bargaining power (that's one reason relationships with large age gaps are looked down upon) and can be revoked at any time. None of the authors knew this kind of mass scraping and compression would be possible, it makes sense they should reevaluate whether they want their work used that way.

There are 3 levels to this argument:

1) The letter of the law - if you understand how LLMs work, it's hard to see them as anything more than mechanical transformers of existing work so the letter should be sufficient.

2) The intent of the law - it's clear it was meant to protect human authors from exploitation by those who are in positions where they can take existing work and benefit from it without compensating the authors.

3) The ethics and morality of the matter - here it's blatantly obvious that using somebody's work against their wishes and without compensating them is wrong.

In an ideal world, these 3 levels would be identical but they're not. That means we should strive to make laws (in both intent and letter) more fair and just by changing them.

[MarsIronPI]

If consent to use of your code in AI training can be revoked at any time, that makes training impossible, since if anyone ever withdraws consent, it's not like you can just take out their work from your finished model.

[martin-t]

Yup. Not my problem.

You could even say it strongly would very strongly incentivize the LLM companies to be on their best behavior, otherwise people would start revoking consent en-masse and they'd have to keep training new models all the time.

If you want something more realistic, there would probably be time limits how long they have to comply and how much they have to compensate the authors for the time it took them to comply.

There absolutely are ways to make it work in mutually beneficial ways, there's just no political will because of the current hype and because companies have learned they can get away with anything (including murder BTW).

[adrian_b]

Almost all the productivity enhancement provided by an AI coding assistant is provided by circumventing the copyright laws, with the remaining enhancement being provided by the fact that it automates the search-copy-paste loop that you would do if you had direct access to the programs used during training.

(Much of the apparent gain of the automatic search-copy-paste is wasted by skipping the review phase that would have been done at that time when that were done manually, which must then be done in a slower manner when you must review the harder-to-understand entire program generated by the AI assistant.)

Despite the fact that AI coding assistants are copyright breaking tricks, the fact that this has become somehow allowed is an overall positive development.

The concept of copyright for programs has been completely flawed from its very beginning. The reason is that it is absolutely impossible to write any kind of program that is not a derivative of earlier programs.

Any program is made by combining various standard patterns and program structures. You can construct a derivation sequence between almost any 2 programs, where you decompose the first in some typical blocks, than compose the second program from such blocks, while renaming all identifiers.

It is quite subjective to decide when a derivation sequence becomes complex enough that the second program should not be considered as a derivative of the first from the point of view of copyright.

The only way to avoid the copyright restrictions is to exploit loopholes in the law, e.g. if translating an algorithm to a different programming language does not count as being derivative or when doing other superficial automatic transformations of a source program changes its appearance sufficiently that it is not recognized as derivative, even if it actually is. Or when combining a great number of fragments from different programs is again not recognized as derivative, though it still kind of is.

The only way how it became possible for software companies like Microsoft or Adobe to copyright their s*t is because the software industry based on copyrighted programs has been jumpstarted by a few decades of programming during which programs were not copyrighted, which could then be used as a base by the first copyrighted programs.

So AI coding agents allow you to create programs that you could not have written when respecting the copyright laws. They also may prevent you from proving that a program written by someone else infringes upon the copyright that you claim for a program written with assistance.

I believe that both these developments are likely to have more positive consequences than negative consequences. The methods used first in USA and then also in most other countries (due to blackmailing by USA) for abusing the copyright laws and the patent laws have been the most significant blockers of technical progress during the last few decades.

The most ridiculous claim about the copyright of programs is that it is somehow beneficial for "creators". Artistic copyrights sometimes are beneficial for creators, but copyrights on non-open-source programs are almost never owned by creators, but by their employers, and even those have only seldom any direct benefit from the copyright, but they use it with the hope that it might prevent competition.

[martin-t]

> The reason is that it is absolutely impossible to write any kind of program that is not a derivative of earlier programs.

And that's why copyright has exceptions for humans.

You're right copyright was the wrong tool for code but for the wrong reasons.

It shouldn't be binary. And the law should protect all work, not just creative. Either workers would come to a mutual agreement how much each contributed or the courts would decide based on estimates. Then there'd be rules about how much derivation is OK, how much requires progressively more compensation and how much the original author can plainly tell you what to do and not do with the derivative.

It's impossible to satisfy everyone but every person has a concept of fairness (it has been demonstrated even in toddlers). Many people probably even have an internally consistent theory of fairness. We should base laws on those.

> abusing the copyright laws and the patent laws have been the most significant blockers of technical progress during the last few decades

Can you give examples?

> copyrights on non-open-source programs are almost never owned by creators, but by their employers

Yes and that's another thing that's wrong with the system, employment is a form of abusive relationship because the parties are not equal. We should fix that instead of throwing out the whole system. Copyright which belongs to creators absolutely does give creators more leverage and negotiating power.

[martin-t]

Nice, -4 points, somebody, many somebodies in fact, took that personally and yet were unable to express where they disagree in a comment.

Look, if you think I am wrong, you can surely put it into words. OTOH, if you don't think I am wrong but feel that way, then it explains why I see no coherent criticism of my statements.

[akerl_]

When your comment is about how you can’t take your counterparty seriously and they’re a joke, you’re incentivizing people who disagree to just downvote and move on.

The signal you’re sending is that you are not open to discussing the issue.

[martin-t]

It's a fallacy. Someone being utterly wrong and dismissing them for it so does not logically make me claim easily dismissible.

[akerl_]

Yea, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

[lrvick]

Meanwhile I expect that intellectual property protections for software are completely unenforceable and effectively useless now. If something does not exist as MIT, an LLM will create it.

The playing field is level now, and corpo moats no longer exist. I happily take that trade.

[Luker88]

Isn't the "corpo moat" bigger now?

They can wash the copyright by AI training, but the AIs don't get trained on closed source.

"corpo" also has a ton of patents, which still can't be AI-washed.

What will become unenforceable are Open Source Licenses exclusively, how does that make it a "level field"?

[lrvick]

Because AI is also proving to be very good at reverse engineering proprietary binaries or just straight up cloning software from test suites or user interfaces. Cuts both ways.

[Luker88]

Reverse engineering is illegal in many jurisdictions, and especially in the USA thanks to the DMCA.

If the argument is just "They won't catch me", then yes you are correct.

But some of us are still forced to follow the law, whatever it might be.

Also: They still have patents on it.

[lrvick]

> Reverse engineering is illegal in many jurisdictions, and especially in the USA thanks to the DMCA.

Only if they can prove it. It is amazing how much stuff just shows up on the internet done by anons.

[jacquesm]

Oh sure, AI is a fantastic protection against copyright law. You do realize that if you're not going to be able that you wrote something you're wide open to claims of copyright infringement, especially if your argument is going to be 'it wasn't me that did the RE, it was the AI, the same AI that wrote the code'.

It's going to be very interesting to see 'cleanroom' kind of development in the AI age but I suspect it's not going to be such a walk in the park as some seem to think it will be. There are just too many vested interests. But: it would be nice to see someone do a release of say the Oracle source code as rewritten by AI through this progress, just to see how fast the IP hammer will come down on this kind of trick.

[jayd16]

So the argument is just "AI is magic and any kind of software can be rewritten for free"? Not really sure I buy it...

[martin-t]

Have you ever seen what obfuscation looks like when somebody puts the effort in?

Not to mention companies will try to mandate hardware decryption keys so the binary is encrypted and your AI never even gets to analyze the code which actually runs.

It's not sci-fi, it's a natural extension of DRM.

[lrvick]

Companies have been encrypting code to HSMs for decades. Never stopped humans from reverse engineering so it certainly will not stop AI aided by humans able to connect a Bus Pirate on the right board traces. Anything that executes on the CPU can be dumped with enough effort, and once dumped it can be decompiled.

[martin-t]

You are agreeing with me, you just don't know it yet.

1) The financial aspect: As you say, more and more advanced DRM requires more and more advanced tools. Even assuming advanced AI can guide any human to do the physical part, that still means you have to pay for the hardware. And the hardware has to be available (companies have been known to harass people into giving up perfectly moral and legal projects).

2) The legal aspect: Possession of burglary tools is illegal in some places. How about possession of hacking tools? Right now it's not a priority for company lobbying, what about when that's the only way to decompile? Even today, reverse engineering is a legal minefield. Did you know in some countries you can technically legally reverse engineer but under some conditions such as having disabilities necessitating it and only using the result for personal use?[0]

3) The TOS aspect: What makes you think AI will help you? If the company owning the AI says so, you're on your own.

---

You need to understand 2 things:

- Just because something is possible doesn't mean somebody is gonna do it. Effort, cost and risk play huge roles. And that assumes no active hostile interference.

- History is a constant struggle between groups with various goals and incentives. Some people just want to live a happy life, have fun and build things in their free time. Other people want to become billionaires, dream about private islands, desire to control other people's lives and so on. People are good at what they focus on. There's perhaps more of the first group but the second group is really good at using their money and connections to create more money and connections which they in turn use to progress towards their primary objectives, usually at the expense of other people. People died[1] over their right to unionize. This can happen again.

Somebody might believe historical people were dumb or uncivilized and it can't happen today because we've advanced so much. That's bullshit. People have had largely the same wetware for hundreds of thousands of years. The tools have evolved but their users have not.

[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whittle-a-webserver/ - "... aren't tools exemptions, they're use exemptions ... You have that right. Your mechanic does not have that right."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

[Muromec]

I spend a fun week during Christmas figuring out some really obfuscated bibary code with antidebugging anti pampering things in a cryptographic context. I didn’t use ghydra or ida or anything beyond gdb with deepseek chat in a browser. That low effort got me what I needed to get.

[martin-t]

Exactly.

AI proponents completely ignore the disparity of resources available to an individual and a corporation. If I and a company of 1000 people create the same product and compete for customers, the company's version will win. Every single time. Or maybe at least 1000:1 if you're an optimist.

They have access to more money for advertising, they have an already established network of existing customers, they have legal and marketing experts on payroll. Or just look at Microsoft, they don't even need advertising, they just install their product by default and nobody will even hear about mine.

Not to mention as you said, the training advances only goes from open source to closed source, not the other way around.

AI proponents who talk about "democratization" are nuts, it would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.

[Muromec]

>If I and a company of 1000 people create the same product and compete for customers, the company's version will win. Every single time.

As a person who works for a company with 25k people, I would disagree. You, a single person will often get to the basic product that a lot of people will want much faster than a company with 1k, 5k and 25k people.

Bigger companies are constrained by internal processes, piles of existing stuff, and inability to hire at the scale they need and larger required context. Also regulation and all that. Bigger companies are also really slow to adapt, so they would rather let you build the product and then buy out your company with your product and people who build it. They are at at a temporary disadvantage every time the landscape shifts.

[martin-t]

The point wasn't about the number of people, the point was a company which employs that number of people has enough money which can be converted to leverage against you.

Besides that, your whole arguments hinges on large companies being inflexible, inefficient and poorly run. Isn't that exactly the kind of problem AI promises to solve? Complete AI surveillance of every employee, tasks and instructions tailored to each individual and superhuman planning. Of course at that point, the only employees will be manual workers because actual AI will be much better and cheaper at everything than every human, except those things where it needs to interact with the physical world. Even contract negotiations with both employees and customers will be done with AI instead of humans, the human will only sign off on it for legal requirements just like today you technically enter a contract with a representative of the company who is not even there when you talk to a negotiator.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Large companies are often inflexible and inefficient as a matter of deliberate strategy. I've found myself in scenarios where we have a complete software artifact that a smaller company would launch and find successful, but we can't launch it, because we have to satisfy some expectation we've set or do a complex integration with some important other system of ours.

[adrianN]

The corporate moat is the army of lawyers they have. It doesn’t matter whether they win or not if you can’t afford endless litigation. Is the same for patents.

[Marha01]

Funny, their army of lawyers seems incapable of stopping me from easily downloading pirated software or coding an open alternative to their closed-source software with AI if I wanted to..

You cannot keep a purely legally-enforced moat in the face of advancing technology.

[Luker88]

I would caution against using this argument.

In the USA the DMCA can make it illegal to even own and use tools meant to bypass even the weakest of protection.

This law has already been used to ruin lives.

"They might catch the individual but not us all" is nice and fine until it is your turn, so check your legislation.

[lrvick]

The music industry has an army of lawyers too, and it did not make a damn bit of difference once bittorrent was popularized.

IP law means nothing once tens of millions of people are openly violating it.

The software industry is about to learn this lesson too.

[dwedge]

So is music free now? The record industry doesn't exist anymore, isn't ridiculously profitable? Artists are finally earning a fair share?

[lrvick]

Music is free, because music piracy is unenforceable so the law is irrelevant. Now, I personally buy most of my music on vinyl because I want to support artists, but absolutely nothing forces me to do that as all the music is available for free.

[Sharlin]

As far as I can see, the vast majority of people don’t pirate music these days (unlike 20 years ago). Most people wouldn’t even know where and how to pirate music. They just have Spotify or another streaming service.

[Applejinx]

In the sense of artists cannot expect to get any money for their work, yeah music's free. Becoming a meme or a celebrity on the grounds of personality is still fair game, to the extent that AI is not impersonating people effectively at scale yet.

Yet.

A whole bunch of people I watch on youtube (politics, analysts, a weatherman) are already seeing AI impersonation videos, sometimes misrepresenting their positions and identities. This will grow.

So, you can't create art because that's extruded at scale in such a way that it's just turning on the tap to fill a specified need, and you can't be a person because that can also be extruded at scale pretty soon, either to co-opt whatever you do that's distinct, or to contradict whatever you're trying to say, as you.

As far as being a person able to exist and function through exchanging anything you are or anything you do for recompense, to survive, I'm not sure that's in the cards. Which seems weird for a technology in the guise of aiding people.

[Marha01]

> So is music free now?

Uhm... yes? The cost of downloading pirated music is essentially zero. The only reason why people use services like Spotify is because it's extremely cheap while being a bit more convenient. But jack up the price and the masses will move to sail the sea again.

[dwedge]

The cost of stealing has always been essentially zero. Same argument can be made for streaming, and yet Netflix is neither cheap nor struggling for subscribers.

[Luker88]

> If something does not exist as MIT, an LLM will create it.

Nitpicking on the license here, but please don't use MIT, it has no patent grant protections.

And those are never covered in any AI-washing anyway.

There are equivalent licenses with patent grant protection, like 'Apache2+LLVM exception' or 'Mozilla Public License 2' and others...

[nonameiguess]

Ironically, I actually suspect the exact opposite. Linux has no real choice in this matter because most of the code is written by Google, Red Hat, Cisco, and Amazon at this point, and these big cos are all going to mandate their developers have to use AI coding agents. Refuse to accept these contributions and we're just going to end up with 20 Linuxes instead of one, and the original still under the control of Linus will be relegated to desktop usage and wither and die.

[jayd16]

This means that all copyleft is MIT but it doesn't change the closed source stuff... So once again it benefits corpo more than most.

[ako]

Generating software still token costs, generating something like ms-word will still cost a significant amount, takes a lot of human effort to prompt and validate. Having a proven solution still has value.

[lrvick]

You can already generate surprisingly complex software on an LLM on a raspberry pi now, including live voice assistance, all offline. Peoples hardware can self write software pretty readily now. The cost of tokens is a race to zero.

[ako]

That is not what i'm seeing. I've been coding intensively with claude code for the last 3 months: 200k lines of go, 1200+ commits, mostly using opus. I don't think i could have done this with a local LLM. Maybe on a M5 pro?

[lrvick]

Qwen 3.5 122b is competitive with Opus 4.6, and runs at 35t/s on a Strix Halo. It is my daily driver.

Unlike Opus I can run abliterated models with censorship removed so it can be used for security research and reverse engineering and whatever I want with privacy, offline.

It makes any hosted models feel like a kids toy.

[OtomotO]

So, how are you gonna prove I didn't write some code?

How am I gonna prove I did?

[adrian_b]

They do not have to prove anything.

They can just generate the same code with an AI assistant, and then it is you who cannot claim that their code infringes the copyright that you claim for the code that you have written with assistance.

So neither of the 2 parties that have used an AI assistant is able to prevent the other party to use the generated code.

I consider this as a rather good outcome and not as a disadvantage of using AI assistants. However, this may be construed as a problem by the stupid corporate lawyers who insist that any product of the company must use only software IP than is the property of the company.

These kind of lawyers are encountered in many companies and they are the main reason for the low software productivity that was typical in many places before the use of AI assistants.

I wonder how many of those lawyers have already understood that this new fashion of using AI is incompatible with their mandated policies, which have always been the main blocker against efficient software reuse.

[OtomotO]

I was talking more generally about the "You can't patent or copyright code that was generated with an LLM".

Who can prove that I didn't write the code myself? And if I did, how am I to prove it?

That goes in both directions.

It's not like there is a watermark in the code telling the whole wide world that this was AI generated or human made.

So I write code (with or without an AI assistant) and claim copyright... they generate the same code. I sue them.

How does any of us prove that we wrote the code by hand?

[martin-t]

I don't think modified by a human is enough. If you take licensed text (code or otherwise) and manually replace every word with a synonym, it does not remove the license. If you manually change every loop into a map/filter, it does not remove the license. I don't think any amount of mechanical transformation, regardless if done by a human or machine erases it.

There's a threshold where you modify it enough, it is no longer recognizable as being a modification of the original and you might get away with it, unless you confess what process you used to create it.

This is different to learning from the original and then building something equivalent from scratch using only your memory without constantly looking back and forth between your copy and the original.

This is how some companies do "clear room reimplementations" - one team looks at the original and writes a spec, another team which has never seen the original code implements an entirely standalone version.

And of course there are people who claim this can be automated now[0]. This one is satire (read the blog) but it is possible if the law is interpreted the way LLM companies work and there are reports the website works as advertised by people who were willing to spend money to test it.

[0]: https://malus.sh/

[lrvick]

You only need to feed the docs and tests to an LLM to get a "clean room" re-implementation that can then be relicensed.

[Muromec]

That wasn't tested legally.

[lrvick]

If they actually were decided to be infringements somehow, there are millions of different cases needed already, so it is already past the point of enforcement.

These sorts of things are almost never tested legally and it seems even less likely now.

[alfiedotwtf]

In what jurisdiction?!

It’s weird how people on HN state legal opinion as fact… e.g if someone in the Philippines vibecodes an app and a person in Equador vibecodes a 100% copy of the source, what now?

[p_l]

Ok, so a simplified summary of EU AI Act approach as of now:

Model outputs are not copyrightable at all, only human work. That means the prompt, and whatever modifications done to output by human, are copyrighted, but nothing else.

HOWEVER, that does not mean the output can not violate copyright. Output of the model falls under same "derivative work" rules as anything else, AI just can't add its own "authorship". So if you accidentally or not recover script for a movie with serial numbers filed off, then its derivative work, etc. Same with code.

[Luker88]

There was a study from the US copyright office that found a single jurisdiction where the output of an AI prompt is copyrightable: China.

Everywhere else in the world is in various shades of "No, unless a human modified it"

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

[Sharlin]

There’s this thing called the Berne Convention. Countries that cooperate on copyright are going to standardize their interpretations on questions like this sooner or later.

[VorpalWay]

> Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored.

As far as I know that has only been decided in US so far, which is far from the whole world.

[Luker88]

There was a study from the US copyright office that found a single jurisdiction where the output of an AI prompt is copyrightable: China.

Everything else is various shades of "No, unless a human modified it"

edit: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

[IsTom]

In Poland law is similar in this regard, so I'd assume at least some other countries do this as well.

[tancop]

if the code is legally public domain doesnt that make it gpl compatible? this would be a non issue for linux, the only thing that matters is its not stolen code that was originally under a different license thats more strict in a incompatible way