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by tapoxi 62 days ago
In the Monkey Selfie case - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... - courts decided that copyright requires a human author and a human merely setting the conditions for a copyrighted work to appear is not enough.

This reasonably means AI contributions where a human has guided the AI are not subject to copyright, and thus can't be supported by a project's license.
1 comments
dtech 62 days ago
That's quite a stretch, and untested in court.

At least a monkey is an unambiguous autonomous entity. A LLM is a - heck of a complicated - piece of software, and could very well be ruled a tool like any other

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redwall_hp 62 days ago
Tested all the way up to the Supreme Court, who declined to hear an appeal, so the precedent stands in the context of AI output.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de...

It's still early, but this is absolutely going to be precedent used in a software related case, and it's going to lead to fun times with SOX/PCI style compliance issues, where developers will have to attest that merges did not use AI so compliance can ensure repos don't pass a threshold where there's too much LLM code.

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tapoxi 62 days ago
I mean, aren't we all bragging about autonomous agents doing the coding for us? I don't see how that's remotely a stretch.

The legal question was "did a human author the work"?

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