[Arcuru]

Personally, I think that the human directing the agent owns the copyright for whatever is produced, but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP.

I'm concerned about the copyright 'washing' this enables though, especially in OSS, and I think the right thing for OSS devs to do is to try to publish resulting code with the strongest copyleft licensing that they are comfortable with - https://jackson.dev/post/moral-ai-licensing/

[nadermx]

Funny how the copyright industry was able to spin copyright infringment into the pejorative "stealing". If you still have the item, what was stolen?

Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act

[tensor]

I still find the idea that "learning" from code is "stealing" kind of ridiculous.

[array_key_first]

The "learning" isn't learning really. I mean it might be, but if you define learning to be a human endeavor than AI can't learn.

It's perfectly reasonable to say it's okay for humans to do something but not okay for a computer program to do the same thing. We don't have to equate AI to humans, that's a choice and usually a bad one.

[tensor]

It's also perfectly reasonable to say it's ok for a program or machine to do the same thing as a human. This has been the basis for the technological revolution since the dawn of technology.

[leereeves]

It's legal and perfectly reasonable for a human being to combine organic fuels with oxygen from the air to create energy and CO2. Any law restricting that would be the worst form of tyranny.

It would not be reasonable to allow machines to do that at unlimited scale without restrictions.

(Hopefully the fossil fuels industry won't draw inspiration from the legal arguments made by AI companies...)

[Eisenstein]

> It's legal and perfectly reasonable for a human being to combine organic fuels with oxygen from the air to create energy and CO2.

Is there any line past which it becomes unreasonable?

> It would not be reasonable to allow machines to do that at unlimited scale without restrictions.

If the machines were a replacement for a damaged respiratory system in a human would it reasonable?

What about if the machine were being used by a human to do something else that was important?

Where is the line where it becomes reasonable?

[aeon_ai]

If one defines 'flying' to be a bird's endeavor, then humans can't fly.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to catch a metal shuttle that chucks itself through the air on wings.

[greendestiny]

Sure as a word it can be broad, as a concept in our legal system that should be much more nuanced.

The relevant extension of your analogy is should birds be required to obey FAA rules? Or should plane factories be protected as nesting sites?

[nadermx]

Relevant: https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/swiss-company-builds-airport-...

[Dylan16807]

It's a relevant extension if you think the ability to learn from a work is a right people have that exempts them from the more general lockdown copyright would impose.

If you come at it from the view of copyright being a limited set of control over some areas but not others, then if copyright doesn't block human learning it shouldn't affect anything similar either, unless a specific rule is added to make those situations be handled differently.

[boh]

Yes I guess there's also no such thing as stealing in torrents since the computer "learns" the data and returns it in a transcoded fashion so it's technically not a reproduction. Yes LLMs can reproduce passages from copyrighted works verbatim but that's only because it "learned" it and it's just telling you what it "knows".

The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting.

[idle_zealot]

> The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting.

It's only exhausting if you think copyright ever reasonably settled the matter of ownership of knowledge and want to morally justify an incoherent set of outcomes that they personally favor. In practice it's primarily been a tool for the powerful party in any dispute to hammer others for disrupting their business model. I think that's pretty much the only way attempting to apply ownership semantics to knowledge or information can end up.

[balamatom]

Correct.

Knowledge consists of, roughly speaking, thoughts.

(a "justified true belief" - per https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/ - is a kind of thought)

The "thinking" part of a "thinking being" - that also consists of thoughts.

If your knowledges are someone's property, you are someone's property.

A society where all knowledge is proprietary, is a society of ubiquitous slavery.

Maybe multi-layered, maybe fractional, maybe with a smiley-face drawn on top.

Doesn't matter.

[spankalee]

Humans have been known to recite entire parts from plays from memory, live in front of audiences even.

[leni536]

And they are legally required to license the play to do that, if it's still in copyright.

[spankalee]

Only to perform it, not learn it.

[Dylan16807]

> Yes LLMs can reproduce passages from copyrighted works verbatim but that's only because it "learned" it and it's just telling you what it "knows".

Are you finding people that actually say this?

When it can quote something like that, it's a training error. A popular enough work gets quoted and copied by people online, and then it's not properly deduplicated. It's a very small fraction of works it can do that with, and the cleaner your data the less it happens.

I'll once again quote that stable diffusion launched with fewer weights than training images. It had some accidental memorizations, but there wasn't room for its core functionality to be memorization-based.

[Eisenstein]

This is a perfect example of 'begging the question'. Arriving at a conclusion from a fact assumed as true without evidence. Your reductio does not actually demonstrate that copyright applies to LLMs, because you did not demonstrate how transcoding is comparable to inference, just that LLMs can reproduce some passages from copyrighted works. You could also produce passages from copyrighted works by generating enough random sequences of words, but no one is arguing that is comparable to transcoding. That the people who do not share this conclusion are engaging in motivated reasoning is based only on your assumption and has no logical backing, and is therefore begging the question.

[pessimizer]

"Learning" for LLMs is just as goofy and propagandistic a metaphor as "stealing" for copyright. I find it predictive of your position that you'll accept one dumb metaphor for something that we didn't need a metaphor for, but not the other.

Are you for stealing and against learning?

We know exactly what is happening in both cases. We can talk about that, or we can use obfuscating euphemisms that make our preferred position seem obviously true.

[nkrisc]

I find it more ridiculous to equate the act of a human learning with for-profit AI training without recompense to the authors of the training material.

[greendestiny]

I think that it's absurd that we've jumped to the conclusion backpropagation in neural networks should be legally treated the same as human learning.

I mean I don't think think I could find a better description for following the derivatives of error in reproducing a set of works as creating a "derivative work".

[alok-g]

>> ... we've jumped to the conclusion backpropagation in neural networks should be legally treated the same as human learning.

I agree. However, the reverse is also likely true, i.e., it cannot currently be denied that learning in humans is different from learning in artificial neural networks from the point of view of production of works that mix ideas/memes from several works processed/read. Surely, as the article says, copyright law talks exclusively about humans, not machines, not animals.

[greendestiny]

I understand the article - the point about 'learning' is that if the model and its outputs are a derivative works then the copyright belongs to the human creators of the works it was trained on.

Edit*: Or perhaps put more pseudo legally that the created works infringe on the copyrights of the original human creators.

[alok-g]

The part I agree to is that copyright law calls out humans specifically as the potential owners of copyright. So what you suggest seems to be the only possibility out. Calling out humans could imply that when a human reads a thousand books and then writes something basis the same but which is not a substantial copy of anything explicitly read, that human owns the copyright to the text written. Whereas, if an artificial neural network does the same (hypothetically writing the same text), it would not.

The above does not follow from, imply or conclude anything about learning in artificial neural networks and humans being similar or dissimilar.

[pydry]

If you can set a copyright trap and an LLM reproduces it I think it's pretty clear cut that it's more than just "learning".

I have seen LLMs do all sorts of crap which was clearly reproduction of training material.

This is also why people are most impressed with how much better it is at reproducing boilerplate rather than, say, imaginative new ideas.

[jakeydus]

Remember last year (?) when one of the major AIs produced a bit of code that included Jeff Geerling's name in a comment?

[charonn0]

Is "learning" the correct term?

Or is it "plagiarism"?

[lo_zamoyski]

If there were the case, then imagine having to give it back!

[estimator7292]

Learning, probably not.

Copy/pasting at scale, yes

[vorticalbox]

It is learning though. It’s not just copying the code.

Code gets turned into tokens and then it learns the next most likely token.

The issue that I see most people talk about it the scale at which is learnt.

A human will learn from other people’s code but not from every persons code.

[cogman10]

The issue is that of copyright law WRT to derivative works. Machine transformations on original works does not create a new copyright for the person that directed the machine transformation. That's why you can't pirate a bunch of media by simply adding a red pixel to the righthand corner or by color shifting the video.

Copyright law is very clear that if a machine does it, the original copyright on the input is kept. This is why your distributed binaries are still copyrighted, because the machine transformed, very significantly, the source code into binary which maintains the copyright throughout.

It would be inconsistent for the courts to suddenly decide that "actually, this specific type of machine transformation is actually innovative."

I know this is generally really bad for the AI industry, so they just ignore it until a court tells them they can't anymore. And they might get away with it as I don't have faith that the courts will be consistent.

[red75prime]

Shredding is a machine transformation. Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored and the provenance can't be traced? Just an example that treating all machine transformations equally with no regard to the specifics doesn't make much sense.

And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression. Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have made it into the final weights.

[ell1e]

LLMs seem to be so devoid of intelligence, I think it's arguable if that's learning: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think... Typically, you would imply a level of understanding when you say learning. LLMs apparently can't do that, by design.

[blks]

A human is not a commercial product. Here we have commercial product that was created by using a lot of various copyrighted and protected IP, without licensing agreements, without paying, without even citing it.

[margalabargala]

Copy/pasting at scale is how tons of software has been written for a long time, or have we all forgotten the jokes people used to make about StackOverflow?

[MagicMoonlight]

If I “learned” your essay and handed it in, would you be happy with that?

[NewsaHackO]

Everybody has had a complete 180 in terms of copyright protections. Before, nobody cared about downloading music, movies, TV shows, or pirating games. Now, when the copyright law is affecting them, they are gungho about protecting these billion-dollar companies' copyrights.

[jeppester]

A more logical explanation would be that there are different opinions and those who complain are usually louder.

[NewsaHackO]

Yes, that's my point. They are different and contradictory opinions, which show hypocrisy.

[inexcf]

No it is not your point. You're just arguing about a strawman that holds both of those contradictory positions.

[NewsaHackO]

You are attempting to invoke strawman. So is your point that there is not a significant overlap between posters who think that AI companies should not be allowed to pirated use copyrighted material in their training corpus and posters who themselves pirated copyrighted material such as movies, music, games, etc.?

[MSFT_Edging]

It's all power.

The music and movie companies have power. They have the funds to bankrupt you with a small army of lawyers. You as an individual do not stand a chance against corporate lawyers. They can destroy your life over fairly minimal and non-violent offenses.

AI companies are backed by the very powerful. They can steal all they want and use the same army of lawyers to bankrupt any small rights holder. The big rights holders go to the same parties and allow it to happen.

Regardless of the actual take on copyright, both methods skullfuck the little guy without power.

People cry foul because, at least in the US, we claim to live in a free country based on equality, yet there is a very obvious caste system of the haves and the havenots.

It errodes the legitimacy of the system. Imagine if for years you see news reports of a mother getting a judgment against her where she owes 100s of thousands because she seeded a Brittany Spears song. Then you suddenly see the same laws that were leveraged to instill fear in you, tossed aside when the rich and powerful say it doesn't count anymore, you're going to cry foul!

It's not a hypocrisy of position on copyright, it's bearing witness to the illegitimacy of the laws they're bound by.

[AuthAuth]

Its not a 180. You can be against copyright but as long as copyright is still being enforced on you then you can think it should be enforced on AI companies.

I'd prefer no copyright but we live in a world where there is copyright so its unfair that only AI companies get to be immune.

[preisschild]

Its not about "billion-dollar companies' copyrights", but also about voluntary copyleft free software. If I license my code under GPL I don't want other persons/companies just whitewash that code through LLMs and use it in their proprietary code.

[NewsaHackO]

I agree with this, and I think that it is an open question whether or not training on copyrighted material is considered transformative or not. However, someone said that thumbnails of full photos are considered transformative enough to allow fair use, and LLM training is (in my opinion) clearly more transformative than converting a picture to a thumbnail. But we will see how it plays out.

[Neywiny]

I don't think it's unreasonable to consider it stolen potential profit, but agreed that's not how they spin it

[blks]

“Stolen” as in “profited on IP against terms and conditions of the license”.

[Aerroon]

Copyright isn't some natural state of being though, it's something that's granted to people by the government to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". If copyright hinders things then I think it's reasonable that exceptions would be made.

[hxtk]

This analysis yields very different results under utilitarianism vs rule utilitarianism.

Under the former, you could argue, "What I'm doing is a science or useful art, so if copyright exists to advance those things then taking a more permissive interpretation of copyright to allow my efforts to succeed is in the spirit of the law."

Under the latter, you could argue, "Works get published because as a rule, researchers and artists know they have lawful recourse through copyright if the work gets used without their consent. The absence of that rule incentivizes safeguarding works by treating them as secret and each disclosure as a matter of personal trust, so the existence of that rule promotes the sciences and useful arts."

[rectang]

Copyright laundering is an illusion.

If the LLM generates output that a court decides is sufficiently derivative, and especially (but not necessarily) if the LLM was trained on the source material being infringed, then whoever redistributes the derivative output is going to be liable for copyright infringement.

Creation of the LLM itself is transformative, but LLM output which infringes is not.

[2ndorderthought]

Is it true then that if someone stole an entire code base from a vibe coded app from a non permissively licensed project and that person claimed that it was derived from an LLM and was not stolen at all that the person who stole the code is not a thief because it came from the same place? Or are they a thief because someone else copyrighted it? How do vibe coders protect themselves not knowing who else has the same derivative code or who holds the copyright first? Or can't they?

[leptons]

The only thing a vibe coder should be able to copyright, is the prompt text they wrote. Not the output of the LLM, only the text they wrote to instruct the LLM what to do. And even that is pretty iffy, because most of it like "put a button on a page" is not copyright-able.

[KallDrexx]

Do you think that human directing the agent owns copyright for any legal reason?

The case Community for Creative Non Violence Vs Reid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio...) solidifies a supreme court opinion that someone contracting a work and directing an author does not grant authorship to the commissioner of the work, it grants authorship to the person actually doing the work.

The author can grant authorship and copyright to the commissioner with a contract, but the monkey picture (and others) have solidified that only humans can be granted copyright. Since LLMs aren't human they can't hold copyright, and if the LLM doesn't have legal copyright then they don't have legal rights to assign copyright to you.

[zarzavat]

It depends on what level of creative control you had over the code.

Code is protected by copyright as a literary work. The method is not protected by copyright, that would be the domain of patents. What's protected are the words.

If you say "Claude, build me a website about X" then you do not have any creative control over the literary work Claude is producing. You just told a machine to write it for you. Nor, like a compiler, is it derivative of any other work that you wrote.

If, on the other hand, you are working jointly with Claude to make specific changes to the code on a line-by-line basis, then you will have no problem claiming copyright over the code. Claude in this case is acting as a tool, but there's still a human making decisions about the code.

In the case where you wrote a bunch of markdown and then told Claude to generate the corresponding code but didn't have any involvement in writing the code itself, you could perhaps claim that the code is a derivative work of the markdown, a court would have to handle that case-by-case basis and evaluate how much control you exerted over the work.

[KallDrexx]

I don't think case law totally supports the idea that working on a line by line basis means you have "no problem claiming copyright".

There problem is the LLM is still making assumptions on that line of code and thus it's still the main author (based on existing case law and the copyright office's opinion currently).

The markdown case is definitely more like the case I cited where the supreme court decided that specficiations and back and forth do not mean it's a deritive work and thus the actual implementor is the author, not the spec writer.

[marcus_holmes]

Interesting, though, that ownership of the code can still be transferred to the employer. So it's in the public domain (because not human authored) but owned by the employer (because the human and/or LLM was employed by the employer)? I don't really understand how this works.

[p_l]

Copyright works on derivative rules - is the component of the work unmistakenly derived from another copyrighted work.

Under at least EU AI Act, any work done by AI is not granted copyright. But it does not mean copyright does not apply, it means the amount of work credited to AI is set at 0% (simplification). A human working off another's work unless it's perfect copy will have "credit" for changes that are judged creative/transformative, meaning a human plagiarizing something still can claim to have some degree of authorship. An AI won't.

In a sense, the copyright status of final work is a sort of "sum with dilution" were each work involved adds to claims, but AI's output is set at 0 - the prompt or further rework by human is not.

As for employer, details vary but generally "work for hire" rules and contracts do reassignment of material rights (in EU and some other places you can not reassign moral rights which are a different thing).

[KallDrexx]

When you write code by hand, you are the author. As part of your contract with your employer you grant copyright and authorship to your employer by default (as stated in the contract).

The LLM is not employed by you or your employer, because you can't enter contracts with non human or non human organizations.

When you license a non-LLM code generation service (like a page that creates a website for you), that company owns the copyright of the generated website because their deterministic system generated code by defined rules and mechanisms that were defined by the code generation system. Assuming no LLM as part of that, there is no code that is generated by the system outside of the rules that they defined (it's not filling in the blanks that you or the code generation system didn't explicitly define).

Since they own the copyright of the website, they can then assign the copyright and authorship to you because of your license agreement to them.

Since the LLM is filling in the blanks on its own in undefined ways, it is the author and not Anthropic/OpenAI/ETC. That means that even though you have a license agreement with Anthropic/OpenAI/etc.. to transfer copyright, they didn't have copyright/authorship, the LLM did. And since the LLM can't legally own copyright/authorship (since it isn't a human) then it can't grant it to you and you can't then grant it to your employer.

[marcus_holmes]

yeah this is what I understand - that it's the copyright ownership that is being transferred. But if there's no copyright to transfer, what does the company end up owning?

[KallDrexx]

Afaict the company doesn't own any of what was written by an LLM. In theory that means all the companies are opening themselves up to code being reused by third party and a lack of legal protection.

In reality I fear it's going to cause less copyright protections even for small developers.

[alok-g]

Note: IANAL

I think what this means is that the employee may not be the copyright owner for multiple reasons, which are possibly applicable simultaneously. It does not imply that the employer owns copyright over the work that is in public domain, which would be a contradiction.

[marcus_holmes]

yeah, that makes sense

[Animats]

> only humans can be granted copyright.

No, a copyright application can be filed with a corporation listed as the author. Watch for the copyright notice at the end of the next major movie you see.

[dredmorbius]

Under US copyright law, copyright protection subsists "in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression":

<https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102>.

It's not that corporations can't hold copyright. But a corporation cannot mechanically create "original works of authorship" by a purely mechanical process. That process is limited to human authors. "Works for hire" would be a common case of a human creator (author) resulting in a corporate assignment (ownership), see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire>.

Notably cases:

- The "monkey selfie" copyright case, in which photographer David Slater arranged for monkeys to take selfies. Copyright ownership denied by both the US Copyright Office (against Slater's claim) and (in a separate case arguing the monkey should hold copyright) by an appellate court: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...>, Naruto v. Slater, No. 16‑CV‑00063 (N.D. Cal. 2016).

- Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). Simple compilations are not copyrightable regardless of whether created by humans.

- THALER v. PERLMUTTER (2023). "[T]his case presents only the question of whether a work generated autonomously by a computer system is eligible for copyright. In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No." <https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-dis-col/1149169...>.

[chrisred]

However, until very recently the creative product must have been created by someone so there is an implicitly created copyright over the product in the first place. With AI output, that might not continue to be true, we don't really know how it'll work out yet.

In any case, the corporation did not create the product, people created it and their contractual relationship with the corporation defined how the ownership of that work was managed. So, I don't find it too unusual that this element of personhood is available to corporations.

[KallDrexx]

This isn't what the copyright means.

The employees and contractors are the authors, and because of the contract they sign they assign copyright to the corporation. Corporations, as a collection of humans are allowed to have authorship.

LLMs are not companies and they are not humans in any way shape or form, and thus cannot get copyright nor grant copyright to a third party.

[CWuestefeld]

but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP.

I honestly don't understand why the attitude that underlies this is so prevalent.

When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code it's seen.

The immediate retort to that is that the LLM is looking at code that wasn't its to read. But I don't think that's a valid objection. Pretty much by definition, everything I've learned from has a copyright on it, and other than my own code on my own time, that copyright is owned by someone else. Much of the code that's built up my understanding has been protected by NDA, or even defense-department classifications: it wasn't mine in any way. But it still informs how I do all my future coding.

By analogy: I'm also an artist, especially since my retirement. My approach to photography was influenced by Ansel Adams, and countless other artists whose works I've seen displayed in museums, or in publications and online. My current approach to painting was inspired by Bob Ross and others, and the teachers who have helped me develop. I've taken pieces of what I've seen in all their work, and all of that comes out in my photos and paintings, to varying degrees.

I've taken ideas from others in code and in art, and produced something (hopefully!) different by combining those bits with my own perspective. I don't think anyone has a claim on my product because of this relationship.

Likewise, I know that many of my successors have learned from my code (heck, I led teams, wrote one book about software development!). And I hope that someday my artwork has developed to the point where there's something in it that's worth someone else's attention to assimilate. I've never for a minute - even decades before the advent of LLMs - hoped or even imagined that my work would remain locked up with me, and that the ideas would follow me to the grave.

As they say, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. None of us would be able to achieve the tiniest fraction of what we have, without assimilating what has come before us. Through many layers of inheritance it's constantly being incorporated in subsequent works.

In a few decades at best, I'll be dead. It probably won't be very long after that when people even forget my name. But the idea that something I've done - my work in developing software systems, or in my photography and painting - will continue to have ripples through time, inspires me and gives me hope that I'll have some tiny shred of immortality beyond my personal demise.

[demorro]

Humans should have more legal privileges than machines, just as individuals should have more legal privileges than corporations. It's really as simple as that. I don't want to gripe around making up justifications, that's how the law should be and if it turns out not to be that, I'm going to be nettled.

I live in the UK, and most US law is based upon English common law, it's not some immutable code given to us from above. It's based upon assumptions and capabilities of the entities participating in the system at the time the law was codified. It can and should change to make more sense if those assumptions and capabilities shift massively.

[idle_zealot]

I get the individual/corporation distinction, but how is a machine another tier here? It's a tool, it can't have any rights at all. The wielder has rights, and curtailing their rights depending on what tool they're using to exercise them seems strange. Potentially justifiable, but it's a different axis from the nature of the actor.

[demorro]

Our positions are completely compatible. People are anthropomorphizing LLMs, saying that because humans train on protected works, then it is fine for LLMs to do the same.

If they have only the rights that their human creators have, then access to them cannot be sold, in the exact same way that I cannot sell you a database that I have collected filled with copyrighted material. The "humans do training too" argument only holds if you imbue LLMs with similar rights to humans.

I am allowed to sell myself (in a very limited capacity) to others for them to exploit my training, even if that training was on protected material, which is a privilege humans should have, but machines should not.

[p_l]

Thing is, LLMs level of compression of training set mean that effectively, under the same rules that say you cannot sell that database filled with copyright material, the LLM is fine to sell. Because you have to be able to meaningfully trace each claim to final output (weights). For example, for some older stable diffusion model, it was calculated that each individual work addition or removal resulted in about 1-2 bits of change, meaning the same rules would qualify it as not derivative work.

However, because it is an issue with (at least historical) goals of copyright law, the common pattern that is evolving is that AI is not granted copyright of any work it generates, making it a bit of poison pill for some of the egregious ideas of corporate abuse. Not sure if the weights will be considered copyrightable either.

[shagie]

Specifically in the area of copyright, there's a significant distinction between UK and US law.

The UK works under the "sweat of the brow" doctrine for copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

    Under a "sweat of the brow" doctrine, the creator of a work, even if it is completely unoriginal, is entitled to have that effort and expense protected; no one else may use such a work without permission, but must instead recreate the work by independent research or effort. The classic example is a telephone directory. In a "sweat of the brow" jurisdiction, such a directory may not be copied, but instead a competitor must independently collect the information to issue a competing directory. The same rule generally applies to databases and lists of facts.

In the US, it is a minimal threshold of human originality and Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Ru.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

The inclusion of "human" is important there. https://copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-auth... - the human authorship is mentioned several times.

    306 The Human Authorship Requirement

    The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being. The copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Because copyright law is limited to “original intellectual conceptions of the author,” the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). For representative examples of works that do not satisfy this requirement, see Section 313.2 below.

    313.2 Works That Lack Human Authorship

    As discussed in Section 306, the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.

    ...

    Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”

The question is, does Claude Code fall into that category of authorship without creative input or intervention from a human author?

The prompts may be copyrightable... but the output if you don't go in and fix it up and provide that minimal amount of human originality to it? That appears to still be an open question of law in the United States.

[missingcolours]

In many of those examples, there is payment to the creator of the works that others are learning from. Authors are paid for their books, when we listen to music on the radio the musician is paid royalties, etc. When you lead a team and mentor junior engineers you're being paid for your time.

The nature of the source material matters though. Training a model on open source software seems perfectly fair - it has explicitly been released to the public, and learning from the code has never been a contested use.

IMO the questions around coding models should be seen as less about LLMs and more as a subset of the conversation about large companies driving immense profits from the work of volunteers on open-source projects, i.e. it's more about open source than AI.

[jacquesm]

Scale and the ability to generate a livelihood of your creations and/or the ability to control how what you have created is used, for instance, to demand attribution.

[gspr]

> When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code it's seen.

You are presumably human. We have granted humans specific exemptions in copyright law. We have not granted that to LLMs. Why are we so eager to?

[RealityVoid]

Ok, so I use the LLM. I use the tool. Can I now apply the exemption to me?

Are you telling me that I can use the thing, but I can't use it if I process it through an LLM? It get slippery, fast.

[gspr]

What's special about LLMs in your argument? When I was an edgy teenager in the 90s, I'd argue that it's not piracy because the DivX representation of the movie isn't bit-for-bit identical to the Hollywood master or whatever. If your reasoning works for LLMs as the tools, surely it also works for video compression.

[habinero]

No, that's how copyright normally works.

If I write a story, I can put it online. That doesn't mean it's ok to take that story and publish it in an anthology.

[CWuestefeld]

I'm not sure where in our lawbooks there are laws that specifically target humans to the exclusion of human-operated tools.

There's also a TON of irony here. What an about face it is, for the community at large* to switch from "information wants to be free, we support copyleft and FOSS" to leaning so heavily on an incredibly conservative reading of IP law.

[gspr]

> I'm not sure where in our lawbooks there are laws that specifically target humans to the exclusion of human-operated tools.

If we take the point of view that LLMs are tools (I agree), then people need to be absolutely certain that these tools don't contain (compressed) representations of copyrighted works.

People seem not to want to do that. And they argue that the LLMs have "learned" or "been inspired" by the copyrighted works, which is OK for humans.

This is the problem. People can't even agree on which of two mutually exclusive defenses to appeal to! Are LLMs tools which we have to ensure aren't used to reproduce copyrighted work without permission, or are they entities that can be granted exemptions like humans can? It can't be both!

> There's also a TON of irony here. What an about face it is, for the community at large* to switch from "information wants to be free, we support copyleft and FOSS" to leaning so heavily on an incredibly conservative reading of IP law.

True. While IP-owning companies like Microsoft now say "it's online, so we can use it".

It's bizarre.

I'll tell you what: I'll drop my conservative stance in defense if FOSS when Windows and the latest Hollywood movie are "fair use" for consumption by whatever LLM I cook up.

[CWuestefeld]

If we take the point of view that LLMs are tools (I agree), then people need to be absolutely certain that these tools don't contain (compressed) representations of copyrighted works.

I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread that this is the opposite of how the real world works.

In actual fact, people who need software built hire a tool (e.g., a software developer like me) to build it for them. That tool - me or you - has inside it a tremendous library of copyrighted works represented. I've worked on enough different projects over the decades that the next CRUD function, or rule-driven data-entry tool, or whatever, that I build is going to draw very significantly from the last ones I built. And those last ones were copyrighted, with those rights held by my employer at the time, and maybe even protected by NDA or defense-style classifications.

Is your position that this is OK so long as it's stuff that I can keep in my squishy brain, but the moment that mechanism moves to silicon, it somehow becomes fundamentally different?

The other major argument I see in this thread is that for LLMs it's different because there's a third party who is aggregating the data, and selling me (or my employer) use of that tool. But this doesn't change the overall picture at all. It just adds one more layer of dereferencing into it. The addition of that middleman hasn't altered the moral landscape: how is hiring me, along with what's in my memory, different from hiring the combination of me plus a helper to supplement my memory? There's an aspect of scale, I suppose. With that helper I can achieve greater quantities, but it's not changing the story in a qualitative way.

[gspr]

> In actual fact, people who need software built hire a tool (e.g., a software developer like me) to build it for them. That tool - me or you - has inside it a tremendous library of copyrighted works represented.

Humans are distinct from tools, both ethically (to most people) and legally. You may not see it this way, but it is the majority opinion and the stance of the law in most jurisdictions. The rest of your paragraph falls apart without considering humans as tools.

(Incidentally: you can own tools. I don't think you want to open that door…)

> Is your position that this is OK so long as it's stuff that I can keep in my squishy brain, but the moment that mechanism moves to silicon, it somehow becomes fundamentally different?

Yes. We, humans, structured our laws because we consider ourselves and our squishy brains special.

This is, for example, why you don't get charged with murder for terminating a computer program. We, the humans, have decided that the right not to be terminated only applies to humans (and other animals, but then because we grant them that protection).

[lelanthran]

> I'm not sure where in our lawbooks there are laws that specifically target humans to the exclusion of human-operated tools.

It doesn't need to. Laws are for humans.

Laws don't give rights to chainsaws. Or lawnmowers. Or kitchen knives, hammers, screwdrivers, and spades.

You can't use any of those to commit a crime and then claim that the law specifically did not exclude those tools.

Why are you seemingly in favour of carving out an exemption for LLMs?

Laws are for humans.

Arguing that the law did not specifically address "intentionally killing a person by tickling them till they died" means that you found a loophole which can be used to kill people is...

well, it's in the "not even wrong" category...

[ako]

Because that allows us to create useful tools that we didn't have before. For me it feels like a carpenter going from a hand-saw to an electrical saw. Still requires the skills of a good carpenter, but faster and easier.

[gspr]

… so a bunch of people just decided that rights we granted to humans also apply to their tools? Without any discussion? This isn't how anything is supposed to work when it comes to common rules!

[RealityVoid]

The common rules are so because we agree on them. On principle, in this case, we do not agree what the rule should be here and it's in a way unprecedented. We'll soon converge to a societal agreement. I hope society abstaining itself from tools will not be the answer.

[gspr]

And the process by which we agree is lawmaking.

[p_l]

We did not grant human exemptions in copyright law.

We gave certain temporary monopoly on certain uses to humans under rules little understood by laymen even if their livelihood depends on it.

[gspr]

... and from that temporary monopoly humans have exemptions (critique, inspiration, etc.)

[p_l]

It's generally less an exemption and more a constraint on the monopoly, at least in spirit of the law

[atleastoptimal]

The attitude is derived from a general animus many have towards AI companies. They resent the efficacy of AI because it devalues individual expertise.

I can't imagine it really justifiable to say that training off data is the same as "stealing", when that same claim, that learned information that a person could retain and reproduce constitutes copyright infringement is the subject of many dystopian narratives, like this one, where once your brain is uploaded to the cloud you have to pay royalties based on every media product you remember.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

[RealityVoid]

This is the answer. People don't like having their livelihood threatened so they kick the thing that threatens it.

[mattmanser]

Part of how AI works is that it's just really complicated compression, you can get AI to write out Harry Potter novels word for word with the right prompting.

When it picks out a rare bit of code, it will be simply copying that code, illegally, and presenting it without attribution or any licenses which is in fact breaking the law but AI companies are too important for the law to apply to them.

There's been instances where models have spat out comments in code that mention original authors, etc., effectively outing itself as a copyright thief.

There's nothing anyone can do about it, but the suspicion is that the big companies have taken everyone's code on GitHub, without consent, and trained on it.

And now are spitting out big chunks of copyrighted code and presented it as somehow transformed even though all they've actually done is change a few variable names.

It is copyright theft, but because programmers are little people, not Disney, we don't have any recourse.

[CWuestefeld]

And now are spitting out big chunks of copyrighted code and presented it as somehow transformed even though all they've actually done is change a few variable names.

It's pretty likely that I've done the same thing. I mean, I've written enough CRUD functions in my life, for example, that in all likelihood I'm regurgitating stuff that's a copy, for all practical purposes, of stuff I've done before as work-for-hire for my employer. I'm not stealing intentionally or consciously, but it seems quite likely that it's happening. And that's probably true for many of you, at least that have been in the industry for a while.

[winstonwinston]

> There's nothing anyone can do about it, but the suspicion is that the big companies have taken everyone's code on GitHub, without consent, and trained on it.

I asked agent X what is the source of training data it generated code from, it couldn’t say. Then I asked why the code implementation is exactly the same as the output of agent Y. It said they were trained on the same ‘high-quality library’, and still couldn’t say which one.

So I guess that’s fine because everyone is doing it.

[Dylan16807]

You asked a machine that makes things up when it doesn't know the answer a question that it has no way of knowing the answer to. I don't know why you bothered to relay its response.

[winstonwinston]

It's a software, not a machine. The comment is relevant to the suspicion that THE software is using (distributing) some OSS code without attribution.

[atleastoptimal]

Anthropic was sued successfully for training on books, the law still applies to them

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-...

When I write fizzbuzz do I owe royalties to the inventor of fizzbuzz? Is my brain copyright thieving because I can write out the song lyrics from memory?

[veber-alex]

They got sued for downloading pirated books and not for using them for training. Huge difference.

[sobjornstad]

Indeed, the court actually explicitly held that Anthropic had the right to train their AIs on books, so long as they paid for them.

[blks]

I think if you write fizzbuzz and then sell it, without attribution, and it goes against the original fizzbuzz license, then you’re infringing.

[rspeele]

For another human being to look at my open source code, learn from it, get inspired by it, appreciate what I did, and let it influence their own creativity would bring me joy. That's why I open sourced it in the first place.

Few people ever actually read open source code, but I'd like to think on the rare occasions they do, they share a connection with the author. I know when I read somebody else's code, for me to understand it I have to be thinking about the problem the same way they were when they wrote it. I feel empathy with them and can sometimes picture the struggle, backtracking, and eureka moments they went through to come up with their solution.

Somehow I don't get the same warm fuzzy feelings about a machine powered by investor money ingesting my work automatically, in milliseconds, and coldly compressing it down to a few nudges on a few weights out of trillions of parameters. All so the machine can produce outputs on-demand for lazy users who will never know of me or appreciate my little contribution, and ultimately for the financial benefit of some billionaires who see me as an obsolete waste of space.

I guess I'm just irrational that way.

[all2]

We're moving into the 'industrial age of software'. You exact issue, of bespoke, well thought out and well-crafted code is one that craftsmen felt at the beginning of the industrial age. Now, parts are designed and churned out by machines that no one sees or cares about (generally speaking). This is where we are going with software, and production at a truly industrial scale has its place.

And so does well-crafted bespoke software.

The engineers who built the foundation for the industrial expansion of our forefathers went through the same exact thing we're going through now. They look at what existed, and use it to inform their efforts. This is what LLMs do.

I'm not attempting to moralize here, just comment on the parallels. Do I agree that a craftman's work is consumed by the juggernauts and no second thought is given? No. I think its a shame. But I also think the output will never match the artisans that practice now. By the very nature of the machines we employ, we cannot match the skill or thought that goes into bespoke code.

[rspeele]

It is not even about quality. In fact with an LLM following my orders I can create higher quality code than I ever did before. I always was operating within a budget whether it was defined by the # of hours my customers were willing to pay for, or the # of hours I was personally willing to invest in a side project. This budget manifested in the form of cut features, limited test coverage, limited documentation, and so on. So given the same budget or even a slightly reduced budget I can actually make higher quality software with slop superpowers.

If I spend 2 hours designing the domain model, 1 hour slopping out a rough implementation, and 5 hours polishing it with a combo of handwritten and vibed refactorings, I will get a better result than if I spent 8 hours writing everything by hand.

So my point is not that vibe software is lower quality, as my experience has shown the opposite. It is simply that the spirit of sharing my work was done with the idea that I was sharing it with others who toiled in the same craft, not sharing for consumption by machine. Not that I ever contributed anything very important to the open source world, that anybody depended on. Just personal projects I thought were neat or educational.

In hindsight I would probably still have open sourced what I did, because I think it's valuable to have on record that I competently programmed stuff before AI even existed, like pre-atomic steel. But I don't know if I will open source any personal code going forward.

====

To put it more succinctly: if somebody "ripped off" my open source code in 2018, I wasn't mad about that. Even if they didn't bother to attribute me, well, at least they saw my stuff, had a human brain cell light up appreciating it, and thought it was worth stealing. I'm flattered. But with LLMs my work can be reappropriated without a single human ever directly knowing or caring about it.

[rocmcd]

Well put. I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment.

Maybe this is me just being angry at the new world that's being created, but the beauty of the open source ecosystem was humans giving away things they found useful in the hope that other humans could find them useful too. Having a machine take all of that and regurgitate it somewhere else without that connection (for profit, no less) feels like a betrayal of that open source ethos.

Now in the back of my mind I worry that everything I open source will be scooped up by corporations to make them more rich and more powerful, so I end up not publishing anything (not that it was of any value). I suspect I'm not alone in feeling that way.

[blks]

You’re confusing yourself with a commercial product. You’re not a product that was created by other human beings based on someone else’s IP.

[CWuestefeld]

You’re not a product that was created by other human beings based on someone else’s IP.

It turns out that's false. We know that genes are patentable; remember back during the Human Genome Project, when there was such a rush to patent them? So genes are IP. (This seems bizarre to me, since they're patenting something that was found just sitting there, but this is what the system says right now.)

Well, two other humans (aka mom and dad) did create me, based on those patentable genes (and most likely including some genes that were, in fact, patented).

I'm not sure what to conclude from all of that, but I do think that it invalidates your argument.

[projektfu]

It's a little more complicated, and I would argue that the court got it wrong, but you cannot patent a gene as it exists and rests in nature. You can patent the cDNA (reverse-transcribed mRNA) genetic code after intron removal, which they argue is not a natural thing, but I think they misunderstood the science, really the triviality of the "invention".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_Molecular_Path....

[jmyeet]

You can think that's how it should be. But that's not necessarily how it is. I'm reminded of the famous monkey selfie copyright dispute [1]. A photographer set up a camera and gave it to a monkey but after a legal dispute, courts decided nobody owned the copyright.

I can totally see this applying here as well.

Now this doesn't resolve the issue of AIs being trained on copyrighted works it had no rights to. The counterargument is that this is a derivative or transformative work but I don't believe that's settled law at all.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

[varispeed]

I find idea that the code could be copyrightable as weak. There are only so many ways to write a for loop. Similarly you can't copyright schematics (apart from exact visual representation as form of art). Code is just a schematic.

[gspr]

Let me get this straight: Since there are only so many ways to write a for loop, you doubt that for loops are copyrightable. From this you conclude that code, in general isn't copyrightable?

That's like saying "there's only so many ways to greet your neighbor, so any text that simply greets your neighbor isn't copyrightable – and therefore no text is copyrightable".

[alok-g]

Note: IANAL

Copyrights already preclude short phrases for the same reason -- there are only so many ways in which short phrases could be produced. The moment a work becomes larger (large enough; AFAIK, the threshold is not precisely defined), the reasoning you applied fails to apply.

The Google-Oracle lawsuit did not decide whether APIs (when large in number) are copyrightable or not.

[ako]

I've created my own DSL, and instruct Claude Code how to generate code for this DSL using skills.

Since this is a new language, and not documented on the web nor on Github, Claude's ability is not based off of stolen IP. At best it's trained on other language concepts, just like we can train ourselves on code on GitHub.

Maybe a good reason to create a new programming language?

[alok-g]

Interesting, but I still do not think this is as easy. The AI model is still trained on some existing works, and it is generating code in the new DSL or programming language still based some higher level ideas and expressions it has consumed during training. You have added just one more level of indirection. The output cannot anymore be verbatim copy of some existing work or non-short snippets, however, the output may still carry "expression" that are substantially similar to something pre-existing.

Note: IANAL. The above is just from my current understanding.

[jongjong]

This interpretation makes sense. I think even the 'fair use' clause in the US doesn't protect LLMs. One argument I've heard often is that LLMs synthesize their training set to produce novel output in the same way as a human would... That may be the case, but legally an LLM isn't a human. You can't look at the output of an LLM and say that it's 'fair use' with respect to its training set; it hasn't been established that AI has the same 'fair use' right as a human does; it's already pushing it that companies have this right (let alone an AI agent); anyway, that's just one problem... Also, this is ignoring the fact that the researchers who compiled the training set COPIED the original copyrighted data in order to produce that training set. They either copied the entire work into the training set or they fed the entire work directly into the LLM; in either case; at some point, the entire work was copied verbatim into the LLM's input layer before it was ingested by the AI. The researchers copied the copyrighted content without permission.

Also, when it comes to code, the case is even more damning because the vast majority of the code which LLMs are trained on was not only copyright but subject to an MIT license (at best) and even the MIT license, which is the most permissive license in existence, still says clearly:

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software"

The word 'person' is used very intentionally here.

I think there should be several kinds of AI taxes which should be distributed to all copyright holders. There should be a tax to go to writers (and book authors), a tax to go to open source developers and a tax for the general population to distribute as UBI to account for small-form content like comments and photography...

People invested a lot of time building their entire careers around the assumption of copyright protection; so for it to be violated on such a scale would be a massive betrayal.

[dredmorbius]

That's not what's been established to date in US caselaw:

THALER v. PERLMUTTER (2023). "[T]his case presents only the question of whether a work generated autonomously by a computer system is eligible for copyright. In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No."

<https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-dis-col/1149169...>.

[amarant]

I could possibly see an argument for the owner being whoever paid for the tokens used, but honestly I think the argument for that is weaker than what you're suggesting; I'm merely playing devil's advocate here.

I don't think there's even a valid argument for any other ownership model, or at least none that I can think of.

[jmaw]

I see the argument for whoever paid for the tokens. Or in the case of a free AI usage, the person who sent the prompt (or whoever they are acting on behalf of, i.e. the company they are working for at the time).

The primary issue being that it's all built on stolen data in the first place.

[pc86]

Even taking the least generous interpretation of what LLMs do and saying they're just "copy/pasting others' code" it's still not stealing because the original still exists and presumably still makes money. The original has to be gone for theft to have occurred.

In order to have a sane conversation about this we have to all agree not to lie.

[cess11]

The LLM is just a database. It's like saying 'I own the copyright to what comes out of an API because I crafted the query' or 'I own the copyright to the responses I get from the bots on the Starship Titanic because I crafted the message they respond to'.

[jacquesm]

No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not on the work product.

[keithba]

That’s now how it works. The human using the tool (like claude code, etc) owns the copyright of the code generated.

[jacquesm]

No, you are wrong about this.

See:

https://technophilosoph.com/en/2025/02/07/ai-prompts-and-out...

If you have a more recent citation referring to case law that states the opposite then that would be great but afaik this article reflects the current state of affairs.

The human using the tool creates a prompt, there is then an automatic transformation of the prompt into code. Such automatic transformation is generally accepted as not to create a new work (after all, anybody else inputting the same prompt would have a reasonable expectation of generating the same output modulo some noise due to versioning and possibly other local context).

Claud code and in general AI generated code does not at present create a new work. But the prompt, that part which you input may be sufficiently creative to warrant copyright protection.

[keithba]

In the US, the copyright office (as the article you link to says), has declined to define “meaningful” contribution. If you want to argue that the user doesn’t own it for incredibly trivial prompts, I won’t argue (though I consider that to be non-useful code).

Every developer I’ve seen use these tools has have engaged in a meaningful contribution: specific directions across multiple prompts, often (though not always) editing the code afterwards, manually running the code and promoting for changes, etc.

Until the courts, legislators, or the copyright office define something otherwise, I’m highly confident of my assertion. (Mostly because of the insane number of hours I’ve spent with counsel on this. And, as a disclaimer, since I am biased: I worked on Copilot and Google’s various AI assisted coding products as an SVP and VP.)

[jacquesm]

If my business depended on a legal fiction to be true and I had invested a whole pile of effort + money into it being so then I would argue at every opportunity that 'of course it is legal'. But that's just a version of fake-it-until-you-make-it and in practice not all of those bets pay off.

The fact that meaningful contribution has not been defined is a strong signal that things are not nearly as clear cut as you make them out to be. Until there is a ruling that clearly establishes that the person that generated the prompt owns the copyright on the code I think it is misleading to suggest that this is already the case, your lawyers are not the lawyers of the parties that will end up hurt if it ends up not being so.

For contrast: we have a very clear idea on what things are copyrighted and in general these things do not rest on a foundation of IP appropriated from others outside of the license terms. The fact that the infringement is fine grained and effectively harms the rights of 1000s or more individuals doesn't change the heart of the matter, whoever wrote the code: it wasn't you.

Given your bias I'm not surprised that this would be your argument though, effectively you have created a copyright laundromat using code that you were nominally the steward of and not the owner but whether it stands long term or not is not up to your lawyers.

[alchemism]

Prove I did not write my code if I do not tell you which tools I used. =}

[keithba]

Obviously, we aren’t going to agree on this at all. I hope you have a good day.

[alok-g]

If that were true, a developer may own copyright over the source code, but nothing on the compiled binaries, and I could download practically all software available as compiled binaries and use for free.

[jacquesm]

Indeed a developer owns copyright over the source code and on the compiled binaries, because there is no expansion happening here but just a translation from one format into another, the kind of thing that has been ruled copyrightable since copyright exists. The same goes for translations from one human language into another, and anybody with knowledge of more than one language will be happy to acknowledge that translating is hard work. Even so, the translator does not hold copyright on the result, at best they can say they have created a derived work and it is the original author that continues to hold copyright.

Compilation and translation happen in a generic manner and does not rely on a mountain of other IP, it is really just a transformative tool that happens to do something useful, someone constructed it to be a very precise translation to the point that any mistakes in it are called bugs and we fix them to ensure the process stays deterministic. Translators try hard to 'get it right' too: to affect the intentions of the original author as little as possible.

When you use a model loaded up with noise or that you have trained exclusively on code that you actually wrote I think a strong case could be made that you own the copyright on that work product. But when you train that model on other people's work, especially without their consent or use a model that has been trained in that way you lose your right to call the output of that model yours.

You did not write it, and the transformative process requires terabytes of other people's IP and only a little bit by you.

As soon as you can prove that your contribution substantially outweighs the amount of IP contributed in total you would have a much stronger case.

[alok-g]

>> No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not on the work product.

I think I may have misunderstood your original comment above. It seems intending to say:

No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not necessarily on the work product. The human may partially have copyright over the work product as well, "how much" being dependent on how much new creative expression from the human was involved vs that from others.

[p_l]

That is in fact correct.

Both the compiler (in absence of inclusion of copyrighted libraries) and the LLM are considered to not add creative work and thus do not change copyright status of the works they transform.

You can consider the training set of the LLM or other AI model to be 3rd party libraries and the level of copyright from them applying to final output to be how much can be directly considered derivative, just as reading copyrighted code and being inspired by it does not pass that copyright to your work unless it's obviously derivative

[alok-g]

>> You can consider the training set of the LLM or other AI model to be 3rd party libraries ...

I like this comparison -- training set as '3rd party libraries'. Except, of course, that the authors behind the training set may not have actually granted permission to use, whereas the 3rd party libraries usually have some permission by way of license.

[yason]

What is interesting is that I used to write a program and get a binary executable back from the compiler and I'd have copyright on the source and on the binary. Now I write a prompt and get a binary executable back from Claude and I have copyright on the prompt but depending on my creativity I might be able to have copyright on parts of the output binary. The questions remain: how much, which parts and how the hell could anyone ever tell. This really puts the color of the bits through a vat of dying solution.

[alok-g]

+1

Adding two subtle points:

>> Indeed a developer owns copyright over the source code and on the compiled binaries, because there is no expansion happening here but just a translation from one format into another ... does not rely on a mountain of other IP

... and, the license agreement of the compiler and libraries used / linked to practically always explicitly waive copyrights over the said non-mountain of IP.

>> As soon as you can prove that your contribution substantially outweighs the amount of IP contributed in total you would have a much stronger case.

... a much stronger case that you have a partial copyright over the work, which is now likely a derivative work. You still may not have a case that you own the copyright exclusively (or as the original article says, that your employer does).

[lelanthran]

> If that were true, a developer may own copyright over the source code, but nothing on the compiled binaries, and I could download practically all software available as compiled binaries and use for free.

If the compiled binaries (output) were produced by running the input (source code) over every program written, then sure.

But that's not what's happening with compilers, is it? The output of a prompt is dependent on copyrighted work of others every single time it is run.

The output of a compiler is not dependent on the copyright output of every other program.

[alok-g]

I think your comments are originating in how I may have taken jacquesm's comment too literally, as I just wrote here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944938

However:

1. The "every"ies in your comment are not to be taken literally either. :-)

>> If the compiled binaries (output) were produced by running the input (source code) over every program written, then sure.

2. More importantly, the above seems cyclically dependent on whether output from generative AI is deemed to be in public domain or not, which I consider is an open-ended issue as of now. It is not so 'sure' as yet. :-)

[kridsdale1]

So I’m responsible for pushing the giant boulder at the top of the hill.

The humans at the bottom who were crushed should blame the boulder, which happened to be moving.

[jacquesm]

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

[Aerroon]

He's making a point about responsibility/liability.

If you only get copyright for the prompt you make, but not the output, then it's like being responsible only for the prompt, but not the output.

Ie he's only responsible for pushing the boulder up the hill. The fact that it rolled down from the hill and crushed someone's house "isn't his fault" (he doesn't get copyright on it).

[jacquesm]

Well, you are responsible for the consequences. Liability is simply a different thing than copyright.

[Aerroon]

The copyright office says that you don't get copyright because you're not considered the author:

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/

>The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output.

If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it?

[generic92034]

That is not how responsibility works anywhere. If you are stealing a gun and murder someone with that gun, you are still responsible, even if it is not your gun.

[saadn92]

I agree with this sentiment, because the person directing the agent can still direct it in a way where it'll produce a better or worse output than another person directing it.

[amelius]

I wonder what OSS licenses would have looked like if we saw all of this coming.