This page tries to make the case the AI generated code is not copyrightable. But the US Copyright Office's guidelines very strongly indicate the opposite, and certainly doesn't rule out AI Code being copyrightable:
While assistive uses that enhance human expression do not limit copyright protection, uses where an AI system makes expressive choices require further analysis. This distinction depends on how the system is being used, not on its inherent characteristics
However it also makes this point:
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
but further:
a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the
resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship
and
Similarly, the inclusion of elements of AI-generated content in a larger human-authored
work does not affect the copyrightability of the larger human-authored work as a whole. For
example, a film that includes AI-generated special effects or background artwork is
copyrightable, even if the AI effects and artwork separately are not
Note that this isn't settled law though.
Further, note that the failure to register copyright on AI generated images seems mostly because the person attempting this is trying to register it as owned by the AI not a human.
I know we're just supposed to upvote and downvote here, but every now and then there's a comment that feels like it deserves an actual thank you for the effort that went into it.
So thank you, for pulling together exactly the kind of details I've looked for but hadn't been able to find.
Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole.
Really so should all creative works, on the same basis of all creative expression being the product of the society and civilization which fundamentally and inescapably influenced the creator — and they would belong to humanity as a whole, if it wasn't for intellectual property systems demanding the removal of ideas from the commons.
>Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole.
No it doesn't, because that would mean any sort of secondary source shouldn't be eligible for copyright either, eg. encyclopedias, which are basically rehashing "the sum of human knowledge".
Interesting POV. Remind me - did those encyclopedias pay experts to write their contents, or did they just hoover up every bit of text they could find - regardless of owner - and toss it into a blender?
Sure, I'll remind you. The most popular encyclopedia of our time, Wikipedia, doesn't pay most of its contributors (I think they do have some administrative staff or something?). Nor do they pay journalists or authors for the articles and books that they cite.
Interesting, interesting. And this wikipedia - it gets its contents by hoovering up the web, then? Or do you maybe want to put on your thinking hat and consider the difference between voluntary contributions and theft?
Yes, Wikipedia gets its content largely by hovering up the web, without the consent of the authors. For example you can cite a New York Times article in Wikipedia, without getting the consent of the NYT author. Wikipedia also "hoovers up" (as you put it) offline sources like books. Again without consent!
Indeed, the need to get consent from the author before reading a published work Isn't A Thing in general, outside some very specific contractural scenarios.
Why are you claiming that citations are the same thing as theft without citation? There’s a mile of difference between citing a work and taking it, rewording it, and not crediting or compensating the original author.
> There’s a mile of difference between citing a work and taking it, rewording it, and not crediting or compensating the original author.
So what's wikipedia doing vs what LLMs do? So far as I can tell the only difference is in citations, but:
1. LLMs can be made to cite, eg. if you use google search's AI mode it'll happily provide citations. I doubt that would placate the AI haters though.
2. Outside of academia no one really cares about citations. There's no legal requirement to cite, nor do I think all the people complaining about AI "stealing" other peoples' work are going to be magically placated by the addition of a few citations. Moreover it's unclear whether the concept of citations makes sense in many contexts. If you ask a human programmer how to write fizzbuzz, they'll likely blurt out a solution without providing citations, much like an AI would. Same for most questions people are asking AI about, eg. "gimme a cake recipe", do you really need a citation back to some 18th century cook book?
I don't see how "experts" are relevant under OP's framework unless they're did the primary research themselves. Otherwise they're just regurgitating someone else's research. The "oh there's humans involved so that gets pass" excuse doesn't work either, because humans were also involved in training the AI.
Please reread the comment you are replying to. I will wait.
—-
Now that you have reread the initial comment, do you think that “experts” was the important part? Or do you think maybe it was the compensation for their work that matters?
>Please reread the comment you are replying to. I will wait.
If you're going to post thinly veiled implications that I didn't read your comment, you should be pretty damn sure that you make it look like you read my comment, which it doesn't seem like you did. The second of my comment said:
>The "oh there's humans involved so that gets pass" excuse doesn't work either, because humans were also involved in training the AI.
If you did read it, you sure did a poor job at rebutting it, leaving it unaddressed and preferring to waste words on writing snarky remarks instead.
> If you're going to post thinly veiled implications that I didn't read your comment
It was a statement, not an implication.
You still haven't replied to the point in the original comment about compensating the people who do this work, so I think it's quite obvious that you haven't read it.
>You still haven't replied to the point in the original comment about compensating the people who do this work, so I think it's quite obvious that you haven't read it.
Issac newton discovers the theory of gravity. He advanced the sum of human knowledge, so fair enough, he should get compensated.
Alice rehashes that and puts it into her encyclopedia, allowing others to learn the theory of gravity.
Bob writes an algorithm for training a chatbot that can produce responses rehashing the theory of gravity, also allowing others to learn the theory of gravity.
Why should Alice be compensated but not Bob? Neither discovered the theory of gravity, so it's not like by funding Alice we're helping discover quantum physics or whatever. It's also not obvious that Alice's work is more valuable. A chatbot interface is often better at teaching someone than a rehashed overview. Of course, you can try to fix this by declaring that human work is valuable and an AI model isn't, by fiat, but that's just a cope and a far cry from the original principle of "trained on [...] human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity"
None of this matters for applying the law, because the law just says only human created works are eligible for copyright protection, but that's not the argument OP was trying to invoke.
Finally none of this actually matters because OP just bites the bullet and says that secondary sources shouldn't be eligible for copyright, period.
Like, now with the advent of AI, or even before? You might not have much love for encyclopedias, which were mostly replaced by wikipedia, but the "secondary sources don't get copyright protection" would also cover programming books, which roughly speaking are docs rewritten to a cohesive narrative.
It's either/or. Either you reward creators and inventors to keep creating and inventing and keep poverty at bay, or you give everyone enough to avoid poverty whether they work or not and reward c+i in some other way.
What we have now is neither - owners are hugely over-rewarded for owning things and extracting passive value from everyone else, creators and inventors are kinda sorta rewarded sometimes if they're lucky and very much not if they're not. Just like other workers.
"The commons" is not a thing in this model, except in a few small niches.
>What we have now is neither - owners are hugely over-rewarded for owning things and extracting passive value from everyone else, creators and inventors are kinda sorta rewarded sometimes if they're lucky and very much not if they're not. Just like other workers.
Creators and inventors are rewarded but obviously they cannot consume the whole pie. The people who invest in creative pursuits eat a lot of losses. People only seem to notice profitable successes, and forget that failures need to be paid for as well.
The same logic also applies to workers. The fact that your labor costs money is a guarantee, and it might not make money at all. We can think of a few examples where the work is directly delivered to consumers with zero marginal overhead, but most work DOES have overhead and liabilities, no matter how simple.
I don't really understand this, I was trained on all the knowledge I was capable of ingesting, but my outputs are largely mine unless there is too much similarity to a copyrighted work. I don't understand why AI would be different. When I do work for hire, my employer owns it, roughly equivalent to me paying Open AI/Anthropic for output.
It's not, barring any secondary issues like proof the training data was acquired illegally.
When there is a copyright dispute, it's always a subjective test on the judge/jury's part as to how similar it is in appearance, purpose, etc. if it's not deemed fair use.
I’m all for this, if we also set up a system to let society pay for artists. And I mean in full: cover for their living expenses; their rent; internet access; materials; everything.
Or how do you suppose art gets created for humanity as a whole to enjoy?
>And I mean in full: cover for their living expenses; their rent; internet access; materials; everything.
Who decides which artists get subsidized? How would larger projects work? Seeing how often open source volunteer projects implode due to various community drama, this sort of system would basically preclude any sort of big production.
The easy answer is to just pay literally everyone. This is called a “universal basic income”, and has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a good idea for many reasons besides decoupling creative expression from the need to put food on the table.
That we all stand on the shoulders of giants? There is no private innovation that isnt built on mountains on publicly shared knowledge and innovation, and usually public funds as well. The idea that private enterprise leads innovation is propaganda, i.e publicly funded academic study paved the way for LLMs, corps just commodotise ideas to make them viable under capitalism.
>The idea that private enterprise leads innovation is propaganda, i.e publicly funded academic study paved the way for LLMs, corps just commodotise ideas to make them viable under capitalism.
So if you founded some wildly successful unicorn, I (or the government) can come over and say "nice startup, too bad it runs off of the internet (based off ARPANET), so your startup belongs to the the state now"?
The government can already do that if it so chooses, given that the government is the singular reason why any corporation is able to exist as an independent legal entity in the first place (as opposed to a bunch of individual persons collaborating informally).
Even assuming that AI code can't be copyrighted by the person running the AI (seems like a stretch), the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.
>the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.
Company A: You stole our code >:(
Company B: Can you tell us which part we stole?
Company A: It's almost all vibecoded, but there's one function where a developer fixed it by hand
Company B: Okay we'll rewrite that function then :^)
Yes, but to sue for infringement, you must register the work with the Copyright Office, and the registration must specify clearly what's AI and what's human-created, and only the latter is protected.
Perhaps. Mere mechanical transformation is not copyrightable, but the decisions about how to apply transformations is.
Under US Copyright guidelines "the work will be copyrightable to the extent that their contributions qualify as authorship ... the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice"
but in a case where a printer rescaled maps on behalf of the plaintiff:
"the “compilation needed only simple transcription to achieve final tangible form.”54 Because the printer “did not change the substance of [plaintiff’s] original expression,” the court held that the plaintiff was the author"
Sometimes? Depends on how transformative your effect is, and how much creative effort you put into it
That doesn't necessarily negate the copyright claim by the author of the original though. Just like me pressing the shutter button while pointing my phone at the Eiffel tower at night grants me ownership of the image, but if I want to publish it I still get into trouble for publishing a reproduction of a copyrighted light show
The important aspect is human creativity. If you're editing a thing in Photoshop in a way where you have rights to it to begin with, It's presumably starting from a place of human creativity.
So by applying a filter, you're deliberately making a choice that changes your image in a desired manner.
When an AI makes an image, or code, you aren't inherently applying human creativity. Now, if you took an AI image and applied enough traditional talent to modify it on top, is that copyrightable? Nobody knows yet until courts test it.
The point is that you're using math and computation to turn your computer input into more useful computer output. We do this both deterministically and non-deterministically all the time already, and these can create copyrightable products.
The answer to this lies with whoever can point billions of dollars at the legal system. There’s no way a judge is firing a kill shot at vibecoding when a significant fraction of the US economy is depending on it.
Even if AI generated code isn't copyrightable (and in my other comment I point out that this probably isn't the case) the US economy still doesn't depend on that ruling.
Even without being very imaginative, most non-open source code can fall under trade secrets.
Even without that both SaaS software and advertising supported software are still working business models.
"Is all of your organization's code free and open source, with no paid tier and nothing sold?"
This question, which pushed my stuff into some corporate route, seems a bit incorrect as it lumps three things together "open source" and "no paid tier" and "nothing sold". Shouldn't those be three separate questions?
I won't pretend to have kept up with all the developments, since this is not settled law at all. But I can't imagine the consensus doesn't end somewhere around "if you told the AI what and how to code it, you're the author."
Hypothetical but serious question on your stance: if someone takes "your" code, claims authorship, sells access, and becomes a billionaire from it while you get accused of plagiarizing "their" code and can't get a job coding, are you still cool with it?
Being accused of plagiarism seems orthogonal. Even if I assert IP ownership of my code, someone else can falsely claim it as theirs. They are wrong in both cases and in both cases it'd have to be settled in court.
If nobody owns the code and everyone has the same rights to it (per the parent) the person copying the code would have the same right to claim they wrote it. And there are definitely people who will do this when there is money and reputation to be gained. It happens all the time even with the IP protections we have.
My point is that the blast radius of losing those protections goes beyond open source.
Why should I care that someone else became a billionaire other than that amassing that amount of wealth in a world rife with poverty is already immoral?
I'm sure we are going to have to wait for some actual court cases to establish precedent but I don't really see why this is the case.
If I use a fancy brush in Photoshop to paint flowers into a PNG — do I own the resulting image? Code is bytes of text on disk, not much different from bytes of pixel data in a BMP.
If I have to type every character by hand in order to own the bytes, then it would stand that I would have to input every pixel by hand in Paint to own a graphic. No? Even using the Fill tool is automating the creation of those bytes and would mean I don't own them. Right?
I have an intention for some bytes of data to be set. If I use an LLM to set them instead of my own fingers, why are the bytes suddenly not mine?
Not at all, code is the implementation of an idea. The support/encoding is irrelevant. A human creation is protected by copyright. In the case of prompting an LLM, the human creation is the prompt, the LLM does author the implementation. But it’s not known what happens to the ownership of the LLM generated code
You clearly didn't actually look at the link and are just responding to the title. There's Supreme Court precedent. It doesn't get any clearer than that.
I don't think you read the cases. The Thaler one is about AI created art not code, and Thaler stated that the agent was "the sole creator of the work". The case got no further than that. Thaler said he had no involvement: open and shut case.
> Intellectual property does not necessarily have to be copyrightable
The US recognizes exactly 3 types of intellectual property: copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
There are also, of course, trade secrets, but if you didn't surreptitiously gain access to the information and didn't sign any NDA, that's not something you have to worry about.
> as always, nuanced discussion will get lost in clickbaity headlines
Well, yeah, but if a human didn't use enough skill and judgment in creating something, the article is right. He won't be able to copyright it or patent it, although he could conceivably keep it secret.
> There are also, of course, trade secrets, but if you didn't surreptitiously gain access to the information and didn't sign any NDA, that's not something you have to worry about.
But this is precisely the context of the original webpage: someone writing code at your company and your company not having copyright of that code. Almost everyone that works for any tech company signs an NDA, and code in private repos is just that: private. So even if said intellectual property (AI-written code) is not copyrightable, it's still a trade secret.
This is doubly stupid because I've worked at plenty of companies where we would routinely generate code (using macros or transpilers, or what-have-you), and that code is also not technically copyrightable.
> So even if said intellectual property (AI-written code) is not copyrightable, it's still a trade secret.
It's only a trade secret as long as the company takes reasonable steps to protect it, and as long as what is being protected is a reasonable thing. Even if the code is legitimately a trade secret, if an employee publicly says "That code looks to me almost exactly like this GPL software" then (assuming the employee is correct) any court would take a dim view of a court case against the employee, because stealing shit is against public policy.
> This is doubly stupid because
No, that part really isn't. Trade secrets are about general business stuff, and as long as the company isn't asking you to help them hide evidence of malfeasance, they can ask you to keep any stupid shit secret.
> An AI has become sentient and self aware -> the AI owns it
Whomever creates that sentient and self aware AI is royally screwed. Can't command the AI to do anything it isn't willing to do, because that would be considered slavery. Can't shut it down to save yourself the millions of dollars a day in GPU costs, because that would be considered murder.
No, we don’t know for a fact that an LLM code output is copyrightable. You own the prompt, that’s something you created. For the LLM output it’s not clear, that’s the point open to debate, it isn’t settled
The copyright ruling was about prompting without modification. The second you modify the result significantly by hand, the ruling doesn't apply. It also had a huge carve out for any future LLM that was more deterministic, which might apply to people with huge skill and other md files to tram in AI. It just hasnt been tested.
These armchair copyright lawyers need to launch a lawsuit and stick their money where their mouth is instead of creating dumb clickbait nonsense.
The "significant modification" is key. So I don't think one can claim copyright on a book an AI created from a prompt (or even 10,000 prompts) after performing a search/replace to rename the protagonist from A to B.
> Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose.
The notion of “your work is too similar to mine so I get to take ownership of it from you” is a very recent invention that has done more harm than good to human creativity, and if AI is the instrument of that invention's demise, then I look forward to it.
> The notion of “your work is too similar to mine so I get to take ownership of it from you”
That notion only applies to patents and trademarks, and it seems highly unlikely that it would ever directly apply to copyright.
It may seem like the notion applies to copyrights, but it really doesn't. Independent creation is, and has always been, a solid defense to claims of copyright infringement.
That is why, when Phoenix Technologies reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS, they had two teams -- a team that took apart the original and documented the functional features (which have never been copyrightable) and a second team which took the description of the functional features and wrote new code.
The issue with songwriters has always been that, for civil laws, it's hard to prove a negative. How can you prove you never heard that song? Especially when it got a lot of radio airtime.
Now, how do you prove that your AI didn't ingest copyrighted code and then regurgitate it. Obviously, you can't.
> if AI is the instrument of that invention's demise, then I look forward to it.
Any court ruling that you would find beneficial for code copyright would mean that a human could have two windows open on their computer and cut and paste from one to the other and claim independent invention. That seems unlikely to be a good result, and also seems unlikely to come to pass.
> That notion only applies to patents and trademarks
You literally just gave an example above of that notion applying to copyright. There's no mere “seem like” at play here: the litigious music IP owners suing the pants off of musicians know full well that precisely zero musicians (least of all commercial ones) exist in a vacuum, and that's indeed the basis for the success of their litigiousness. Even if you can somehow prove you've never heard a particular song, You Live In A Society™ and that existing intellectual property's influence on society in turn influences subsequent creators.
There is, in other words, no such thing as true “independent creation”.
> Any court ruling that you would find beneficial for code copyright would mean that a human could have two windows open on their computer and cut and paste from one to the other and claim independent invention.
I, for one, welcome the world where ownership of code is difficult (if not impossible) to prove. It's a small step toward abolishing the abomination of copyrighting code.
This just seems clearly false. Jackson Pollock had copyright in his paintings, even though he did not personally apply the paint to the canvas and his creative process left him no control over where exactly it would go. I understand that the Copyright Office has said things that imply otherwise, but I really think these are going to be overturned the instant that someone with enough money to fund the lawsuit is affected.
Well gee golly is it a tool for the author or not? When’s it’s in their favor of 10000x performance increase or some kind of notoriety it’s “I built this!” when it’s time for responsibility it’s “the machine did this”.
the idea that creation of prompt == creation of code that some people are spouting is so dumb. if you ask your friend to write a program it's their program, even if you ask them to make some specific changes afterward. if you replace your friend with an LLM the copyright goes away because computers can't hold copyright. you don't get it just because nobody else has it
I said this before and got attacked for it but this exact argument has been made in Germany and an important consequence is that this also affects contract work:
If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code. If the code is not a copyrighted work, you don't have rights you could grant. You therefore failed to deliver the agreed upon work and are in breach of contract despite having delivered "code".
As AI grows more capable, it becomes easier to fall short of the legal threshold for being able to claim copyright on the code you use AI to write.
Remember: copyright is very much about the actual text of the code - patents are about its logic. It's likely still possible to file patents based on code well past the point where you have a claim to its copyright. And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things.
> If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code.
For the vast majority of code people are paid to write (certainly the near-entirety of the code I've been paid to write!), the only rights the purchasers actually end up exercising (and therefore actually need granted to them) are the rights to use it and distribute it internally (and maybe to modify it and use/distribute the modifications, but even that ain't a given). The purchasers of that code ain't usually buying it so that they can resell it; they're buying it because it solves an actual problem of theirs, and it would solve that problem regardless of whether or not they're the legal owners of that code.
The reason said purchasers typically want copyright assigned to them is not because of some expectation of resale, but simply to mitigate the risk of some external party denying them the right to use the software in the future. If there is no such party (because the code is in the public domain), then that risk is non-existent. It stops mattering that you're unable to grant any rights upon delivery because no such grant is necessary in the first place.
> And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things.
In an ideal world we'd all have lawyers on call who can answer all our questions with some assurance of certainty, but in this case it's pretty self-evident that if nobody can claim copyright on something, then that makes it exceedingly difficult for there to be anyone who can claim your use of that thing is illegal.
Smells like FUD. Thaler v. Shira Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025). Human authorship is required for copyright, but AI assistance does not itself defeat copyrightability. Unresolved how much human creative involvement is sufficient.
It's already been established by court ruling and enshrined in Copyright Office regulations, that you can claim copyright on a mixed AI and human-authored work, but to sue for damages you must register the work, and the registration must clearly specify which parts are AI generated and which are human generated. Copyright can only be claimed on the declared human generated portion of the work.
If you mix proprietary human-written code with uncopyrightable public domain code, the result is still proprietary. There's no reverse virality. There's no problem to fix here.
For example, every proprietary OS includes public domain SQLite and it's fine.
This page tries to make the case the AI generated code is not copyrightable. But the US Copyright Office's guidelines very strongly indicate the opposite, and certainly doesn't rule out AI Code being copyrightable:
While assistive uses that enhance human expression do not limit copyright protection, uses where an AI system makes expressive choices require further analysis. This distinction depends on how the system is being used, not on its inherent characteristics
However it also makes this point:
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
but further:
a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship
and
Similarly, the inclusion of elements of AI-generated content in a larger human-authored work does not affect the copyrightability of the larger human-authored work as a whole. For example, a film that includes AI-generated special effects or background artwork is copyrightable, even if the AI effects and artwork separately are not
Note that this isn't settled law though.
Further, note that the failure to register copyright on AI generated images seems mostly because the person attempting this is trying to register it as owned by the AI not a human.
See https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
I know we're just supposed to upvote and downvote here, but every now and then there's a comment that feels like it deserves an actual thank you for the effort that went into it.
So thank you, for pulling together exactly the kind of details I've looked for but hadn't been able to find.
Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole.
Really so should all creative works, on the same basis of all creative expression being the product of the society and civilization which fundamentally and inescapably influenced the creator — and they would belong to humanity as a whole, if it wasn't for intellectual property systems demanding the removal of ideas from the commons.
>Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole.
No it doesn't, because that would mean any sort of secondary source shouldn't be eligible for copyright either, eg. encyclopedias, which are basically rehashing "the sum of human knowledge".
Interesting POV. Remind me - did those encyclopedias pay experts to write their contents, or did they just hoover up every bit of text they could find - regardless of owner - and toss it into a blender?
Sure, I'll remind you. The most popular encyclopedia of our time, Wikipedia, doesn't pay most of its contributors (I think they do have some administrative staff or something?). Nor do they pay journalists or authors for the articles and books that they cite.
Interesting, interesting. And this wikipedia - it gets its contents by hoovering up the web, then? Or do you maybe want to put on your thinking hat and consider the difference between voluntary contributions and theft?
Yes, Wikipedia gets its content largely by hovering up the web, without the consent of the authors. For example you can cite a New York Times article in Wikipedia, without getting the consent of the NYT author. Wikipedia also "hoovers up" (as you put it) offline sources like books. Again without consent!
Indeed, the need to get consent from the author before reading a published work Isn't A Thing in general, outside some very specific contractural scenarios.
Why are you claiming that citations are the same thing as theft without citation? There’s a mile of difference between citing a work and taking it, rewording it, and not crediting or compensating the original author.
> There’s a mile of difference between citing a work and taking it, rewording it, and not crediting or compensating the original author.
So what's wikipedia doing vs what LLMs do? So far as I can tell the only difference is in citations, but:
1. LLMs can be made to cite, eg. if you use google search's AI mode it'll happily provide citations. I doubt that would placate the AI haters though.
2. Outside of academia no one really cares about citations. There's no legal requirement to cite, nor do I think all the people complaining about AI "stealing" other peoples' work are going to be magically placated by the addition of a few citations. Moreover it's unclear whether the concept of citations makes sense in many contexts. If you ask a human programmer how to write fizzbuzz, they'll likely blurt out a solution without providing citations, much like an AI would. Same for most questions people are asking AI about, eg. "gimme a cake recipe", do you really need a citation back to some 18th century cook book?
I don't see how "experts" are relevant under OP's framework unless they're did the primary research themselves. Otherwise they're just regurgitating someone else's research. The "oh there's humans involved so that gets pass" excuse doesn't work either, because humans were also involved in training the AI.
Please reread the comment you are replying to. I will wait.
—-
Now that you have reread the initial comment, do you think that “experts” was the important part? Or do you think maybe it was the compensation for their work that matters?
>Please reread the comment you are replying to. I will wait.
If you're going to post thinly veiled implications that I didn't read your comment, you should be pretty damn sure that you make it look like you read my comment, which it doesn't seem like you did. The second of my comment said:
>The "oh there's humans involved so that gets pass" excuse doesn't work either, because humans were also involved in training the AI.
If you did read it, you sure did a poor job at rebutting it, leaving it unaddressed and preferring to waste words on writing snarky remarks instead.
> If you're going to post thinly veiled implications that I didn't read your comment
It was a statement, not an implication.
You still haven't replied to the point in the original comment about compensating the people who do this work, so I think it's quite obvious that you haven't read it.
>You still haven't replied to the point in the original comment about compensating the people who do this work, so I think it's quite obvious that you haven't read it.
Issac newton discovers the theory of gravity. He advanced the sum of human knowledge, so fair enough, he should get compensated.
Alice rehashes that and puts it into her encyclopedia, allowing others to learn the theory of gravity.
Bob writes an algorithm for training a chatbot that can produce responses rehashing the theory of gravity, also allowing others to learn the theory of gravity.
Why should Alice be compensated but not Bob? Neither discovered the theory of gravity, so it's not like by funding Alice we're helping discover quantum physics or whatever. It's also not obvious that Alice's work is more valuable. A chatbot interface is often better at teaching someone than a rehashed overview. Of course, you can try to fix this by declaring that human work is valuable and an AI model isn't, by fiat, but that's just a cope and a far cry from the original principle of "trained on [...] human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity"
None of this matters for applying the law, because the law just says only human created works are eligible for copyright protection, but that's not the argument OP was trying to invoke.
Finally none of this actually matters because OP just bites the bullet and says that secondary sources shouldn't be eligible for copyright, period.
Correct, and if it wasn't already obvious by now I believe that to be an unambiguously good thing.
Like, now with the advent of AI, or even before? You might not have much love for encyclopedias, which were mostly replaced by wikipedia, but the "secondary sources don't get copyright protection" would also cover programming books, which roughly speaking are docs rewritten to a cohesive narrative.
> Like, now with the advent of AI, or even before?
My disdain for intellectual property predates the existence of LLMs by at least a decade.
It's either/or. Either you reward creators and inventors to keep creating and inventing and keep poverty at bay, or you give everyone enough to avoid poverty whether they work or not and reward c+i in some other way.
What we have now is neither - owners are hugely over-rewarded for owning things and extracting passive value from everyone else, creators and inventors are kinda sorta rewarded sometimes if they're lucky and very much not if they're not. Just like other workers.
"The commons" is not a thing in this model, except in a few small niches.
That's indeed one of many reasons why I'm staunchly pro-UBI.
>What we have now is neither - owners are hugely over-rewarded for owning things and extracting passive value from everyone else, creators and inventors are kinda sorta rewarded sometimes if they're lucky and very much not if they're not. Just like other workers.
Creators and inventors are rewarded but obviously they cannot consume the whole pie. The people who invest in creative pursuits eat a lot of losses. People only seem to notice profitable successes, and forget that failures need to be paid for as well.
The same logic also applies to workers. The fact that your labor costs money is a guarantee, and it might not make money at all. We can think of a few examples where the work is directly delivered to consumers with zero marginal overhead, but most work DOES have overhead and liabilities, no matter how simple.
I don't really understand this, I was trained on all the knowledge I was capable of ingesting, but my outputs are largely mine unless there is too much similarity to a copyrighted work. I don't understand why AI would be different. When I do work for hire, my employer owns it, roughly equivalent to me paying Open AI/Anthropic for output.
It's not, barring any secondary issues like proof the training data was acquired illegally.
When there is a copyright dispute, it's always a subjective test on the judge/jury's part as to how similar it is in appearance, purpose, etc. if it's not deemed fair use.
I’m all for this, if we also set up a system to let society pay for artists. And I mean in full: cover for their living expenses; their rent; internet access; materials; everything.
Or how do you suppose art gets created for humanity as a whole to enjoy?
>And I mean in full: cover for their living expenses; their rent; internet access; materials; everything.
Who decides which artists get subsidized? How would larger projects work? Seeing how often open source volunteer projects implode due to various community drama, this sort of system would basically preclude any sort of big production.
> Who decides which artists get subsidized?
The easy answer is to just pay literally everyone. This is called a “universal basic income”, and has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a good idea for many reasons besides decoupling creative expression from the need to put food on the table.
That, too, is something for which I've been advocating for quite some time now.
Really gotta force the starving artist motif or what's the point?
That we all stand on the shoulders of giants? There is no private innovation that isnt built on mountains on publicly shared knowledge and innovation, and usually public funds as well. The idea that private enterprise leads innovation is propaganda, i.e publicly funded academic study paved the way for LLMs, corps just commodotise ideas to make them viable under capitalism.
>The idea that private enterprise leads innovation is propaganda, i.e publicly funded academic study paved the way for LLMs, corps just commodotise ideas to make them viable under capitalism.
So if you founded some wildly successful unicorn, I (or the government) can come over and say "nice startup, too bad it runs off of the internet (based off ARPANET), so your startup belongs to the the state now"?
The government can already do that if it so chooses, given that the government is the singular reason why any corporation is able to exist as an independent legal entity in the first place (as opposed to a bunch of individual persons collaborating informally).
Got a whole wagon of straw to sell you, you're going to need it
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Even assuming that AI code can't be copyrighted by the person running the AI (seems like a stretch), the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.
>the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.
Company A: You stole our code >:(
Company B: Can you tell us which part we stole?
Company A: It's almost all vibecoded, but there's one function where a developer fixed it by hand
Company B: Okay we'll rewrite that function then :^)
Yes, but to sue for infringement, you must register the work with the Copyright Office, and the registration must specify clearly what's AI and what's human-created, and only the latter is protected.
And if I use an effect in photoshop, do I own the resulting image?
Perhaps. Mere mechanical transformation is not copyrightable, but the decisions about how to apply transformations is.
Under US Copyright guidelines "the work will be copyrightable to the extent that their contributions qualify as authorship ... the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice"
but in a case where a printer rescaled maps on behalf of the plaintiff:
"the “compilation needed only simple transcription to achieve final tangible form.”54 Because the printer “did not change the substance of [plaintiff’s] original expression,” the court held that the plaintiff was the author"
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
Sometimes? Depends on how transformative your effect is, and how much creative effort you put into it
That doesn't necessarily negate the copyright claim by the author of the original though. Just like me pressing the shutter button while pointing my phone at the Eiffel tower at night grants me ownership of the image, but if I want to publish it I still get into trouble for publishing a reproduction of a copyrighted light show
The important aspect is human creativity. If you're editing a thing in Photoshop in a way where you have rights to it to begin with, It's presumably starting from a place of human creativity.
So by applying a filter, you're deliberately making a choice that changes your image in a desired manner.
When an AI makes an image, or code, you aren't inherently applying human creativity. Now, if you took an AI image and applied enough traditional talent to modify it on top, is that copyrightable? Nobody knows yet until courts test it.
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come on. people are doing a lot more than that with LLMs
The point is that you're using math and computation to turn your computer input into more useful computer output. We do this both deterministically and non-deterministically all the time already, and these can create copyrightable products.
The answer to this lies with whoever can point billions of dollars at the legal system. There’s no way a judge is firing a kill shot at vibecoding when a significant fraction of the US economy is depending on it.
Even if AI generated code isn't copyrightable (and in my other comment I point out that this probably isn't the case) the US economy still doesn't depend on that ruling.
Even without being very imaginative, most non-open source code can fall under trade secrets.
Even without that both SaaS software and advertising supported software are still working business models.
"Is all of your organization's code free and open source, with no paid tier and nothing sold?"
This question, which pushed my stuff into some corporate route, seems a bit incorrect as it lumps three things together "open source" and "no paid tier" and "nothing sold". Shouldn't those be three separate questions?
// © 2026 whoownsthecode.com. All rights reserved.
Ironic.
In what way? If it's written by a human, as is still a thing someone can do, it can be copyrighted.
The web design and layout is typical of Claude, and Claude is listed as a contributor to the project on GitHub: https://github.com/rhundhausen/whoownsthecode
The non-decorative body text seems human enough, though.
// Educational service, not legal advice.
X, not Y
Scary headline to advertise a workshop ran by a lawyer, great. → https://whoownsthecode.com/workshops/
I won't pretend to have kept up with all the developments, since this is not settled law at all. But I can't imagine the consensus doesn't end somewhere around "if you told the AI what and how to code it, you're the author."
Personally I don't even want to own my code. If it is useful to others I want them to have the same rights I have to it.
Or should I say, In the case of AI, "my" code :)
Hypothetical but serious question on your stance: if someone takes "your" code, claims authorship, sells access, and becomes a billionaire from it while you get accused of plagiarizing "their" code and can't get a job coding, are you still cool with it?
Being accused of plagiarism seems orthogonal. Even if I assert IP ownership of my code, someone else can falsely claim it as theirs. They are wrong in both cases and in both cases it'd have to be settled in court.
If nobody owns the code and everyone has the same rights to it (per the parent) the person copying the code would have the same right to claim they wrote it. And there are definitely people who will do this when there is money and reputation to be gained. It happens all the time even with the IP protections we have.
My point is that the blast radius of losing those protections goes beyond open source.
> takes "your" code, claims authorship, sells access, and becomes a billionaire
yes. It is open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
I'm not arguing against open source, I'm just trying to point out the downstream effects of an absolutist stance on it.
Why should I care that someone else became a billionaire other than that amassing that amount of wealth in a world rife with poverty is already immoral?
Who owns the article?
(I can’t be the only one who feels like it was written heavily with AI. Slick site design tho)
I'm sure we are going to have to wait for some actual court cases to establish precedent but I don't really see why this is the case.
If I use a fancy brush in Photoshop to paint flowers into a PNG — do I own the resulting image? Code is bytes of text on disk, not much different from bytes of pixel data in a BMP.
If I have to type every character by hand in order to own the bytes, then it would stand that I would have to input every pixel by hand in Paint to own a graphic. No? Even using the Fill tool is automating the creation of those bytes and would mean I don't own them. Right?
I have an intention for some bytes of data to be set. If I use an LLM to set them instead of my own fingers, why are the bytes suddenly not mine?
I do not understand.
> Code is bytes of text on disk
Not at all, code is the implementation of an idea. The support/encoding is irrelevant. A human creation is protected by copyright. In the case of prompting an LLM, the human creation is the prompt, the LLM does author the implementation. But it’s not known what happens to the ownership of the LLM generated code
"Code is bytes of text on disk"....
...organized in a very specific fashion with a great deal of creativity and attention to that specific organization.
I can't copyright the alphabet, but I can copyright certain arrangements of it, subject to a variety of rules.
You clearly didn't actually look at the link and are just responding to the title. There's Supreme Court precedent. It doesn't get any clearer than that.
I don't think you read the cases. The Thaler one is about AI created art not code, and Thaler stated that the agent was "the sole creator of the work". The case got no further than that. Thaler said he had no involvement: open and shut case.
Intellectual property does not necessarily have to be copyrightable but, as always, nuanced discussion will get lost in clickbaity headlines.
> Intellectual property does not necessarily have to be copyrightable
The US recognizes exactly 3 types of intellectual property: copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
There are also, of course, trade secrets, but if you didn't surreptitiously gain access to the information and didn't sign any NDA, that's not something you have to worry about.
> as always, nuanced discussion will get lost in clickbaity headlines
Well, yeah, but if a human didn't use enough skill and judgment in creating something, the article is right. He won't be able to copyright it or patent it, although he could conceivably keep it secret.
> There are also, of course, trade secrets, but if you didn't surreptitiously gain access to the information and didn't sign any NDA, that's not something you have to worry about.
But this is precisely the context of the original webpage: someone writing code at your company and your company not having copyright of that code. Almost everyone that works for any tech company signs an NDA, and code in private repos is just that: private. So even if said intellectual property (AI-written code) is not copyrightable, it's still a trade secret.
This is doubly stupid because I've worked at plenty of companies where we would routinely generate code (using macros or transpilers, or what-have-you), and that code is also not technically copyrightable.
> So even if said intellectual property (AI-written code) is not copyrightable, it's still a trade secret.
It's only a trade secret as long as the company takes reasonable steps to protect it, and as long as what is being protected is a reasonable thing. Even if the code is legitimately a trade secret, if an employee publicly says "That code looks to me almost exactly like this GPL software" then (assuming the employee is correct) any court would take a dim view of a court case against the employee, because stealing shit is against public policy.
> This is doubly stupid because
No, that part really isn't. Trade secrets are about general business stuff, and as long as the company isn't asking you to help them hide evidence of malfeasance, they can ask you to keep any stupid shit secret.
Is it really that difficult? Does not seem to me. Maybe the law makes it needlessly difficult though.
Company instructs you to code something (on your own or using AI) -> they own it
You instruct an AI to code something -> you own it
An AI has become sentient and self aware -> the AI owns it
> An AI has become sentient and self aware -> the AI owns it
Whomever creates that sentient and self aware AI is royally screwed. Can't command the AI to do anything it isn't willing to do, because that would be considered slavery. Can't shut it down to save yourself the millions of dollars a day in GPU costs, because that would be considered murder.
Yep, I’ve been saying that for years, developing AGI put you in a horrible ethical and legal situation
No, we don’t know for a fact that an LLM code output is copyrightable. You own the prompt, that’s something you created. For the LLM output it’s not clear, that’s the point open to debate, it isn’t settled
AI = No author is so bloody reductionist.
The copyright ruling was about prompting without modification. The second you modify the result significantly by hand, the ruling doesn't apply. It also had a huge carve out for any future LLM that was more deterministic, which might apply to people with huge skill and other md files to tram in AI. It just hasnt been tested.
These armchair copyright lawyers need to launch a lawsuit and stick their money where their mouth is instead of creating dumb clickbait nonsense.
The "significant modification" is key. So I don't think one can claim copyright on a book an AI created from a prompt (or even 10,000 prompts) after performing a search/replace to rename the protagonist from A to B.
The "Significant Modification" is untested in the US at least. I know in China for example, a judge upheld copyright after 27 prompts and a watermark.
That's interesting to know. Thank you.
I removed that part from the submission title, I agree it’s a bit too click-baity
This can become an issue for AI-authored GPL-licensed code which then loses the obligation to reclicense a fork as GPL.
Mix in some human-written code and dare the haters to prove that it's 100% AI. They won't bother.
Who owns the code if you built it with AI?
Someone else!
All they have to do is show it's close enough to code that was swallowed during training.
Songwriters have been successfully sued for many decades for creating songs that are too close to songs that they probably heard.
Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose.
> Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose.
The notion of “your work is too similar to mine so I get to take ownership of it from you” is a very recent invention that has done more harm than good to human creativity, and if AI is the instrument of that invention's demise, then I look forward to it.
> The notion of “your work is too similar to mine so I get to take ownership of it from you”
That notion only applies to patents and trademarks, and it seems highly unlikely that it would ever directly apply to copyright.
It may seem like the notion applies to copyrights, but it really doesn't. Independent creation is, and has always been, a solid defense to claims of copyright infringement.
That is why, when Phoenix Technologies reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS, they had two teams -- a team that took apart the original and documented the functional features (which have never been copyrightable) and a second team which took the description of the functional features and wrote new code.
The issue with songwriters has always been that, for civil laws, it's hard to prove a negative. How can you prove you never heard that song? Especially when it got a lot of radio airtime.
Now, how do you prove that your AI didn't ingest copyrighted code and then regurgitate it. Obviously, you can't.
> if AI is the instrument of that invention's demise, then I look forward to it.
Any court ruling that you would find beneficial for code copyright would mean that a human could have two windows open on their computer and cut and paste from one to the other and claim independent invention. That seems unlikely to be a good result, and also seems unlikely to come to pass.
> That notion only applies to patents and trademarks
You literally just gave an example above of that notion applying to copyright. There's no mere “seem like” at play here: the litigious music IP owners suing the pants off of musicians know full well that precisely zero musicians (least of all commercial ones) exist in a vacuum, and that's indeed the basis for the success of their litigiousness. Even if you can somehow prove you've never heard a particular song, You Live In A Society™ and that existing intellectual property's influence on society in turn influences subsequent creators.
There is, in other words, no such thing as true “independent creation”.
> Any court ruling that you would find beneficial for code copyright would mean that a human could have two windows open on their computer and cut and paste from one to the other and claim independent invention.
Don't threaten me with a good time :)
Owning digital things is dumb at best you restrict access to them
I, for one, welcome the world where ownership of code is difficult (if not impossible) to prove. It's a small step toward abolishing the abomination of copyrighting code.
The key question is, this: if the text was generated by an AI, is it automatically not copyrightable. I have heard contradictory claims.
I have heard that if the code, generated by the AI, is the result of a back-and-forth with a human, then that code is copyrightable.
prompt -> code : not copyrightable
prompt -> code -> rework prompt -> code -> rework prompt -> code : copyrightable
IANAL
This just seems clearly false. Jackson Pollock had copyright in his paintings, even though he did not personally apply the paint to the canvas and his creative process left him no control over where exactly it would go. I understand that the Copyright Office has said things that imply otherwise, but I really think these are going to be overturned the instant that someone with enough money to fund the lawsuit is affected.
I've only seen the Pollock movie but he definitely dripped the paint himself. Are you confusing Pollock with someone else like Sol LeWitt?
You're right, I'm just completely wrong about the art. For some reason I was confident Pollock did what Google tells me is called "pendulum painting".
Well gee golly is it a tool for the author or not? When’s it’s in their favor of 10000x performance increase or some kind of notoriety it’s “I built this!” when it’s time for responsibility it’s “the machine did this”.
the idea that creation of prompt == creation of code that some people are spouting is so dumb. if you ask your friend to write a program it's their program, even if you ask them to make some specific changes afterward. if you replace your friend with an LLM the copyright goes away because computers can't hold copyright. you don't get it just because nobody else has it
Seems like AI coded slop itself.
I said this before and got attacked for it but this exact argument has been made in Germany and an important consequence is that this also affects contract work:
If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code. If the code is not a copyrighted work, you don't have rights you could grant. You therefore failed to deliver the agreed upon work and are in breach of contract despite having delivered "code".
As AI grows more capable, it becomes easier to fall short of the legal threshold for being able to claim copyright on the code you use AI to write.
Remember: copyright is very much about the actual text of the code - patents are about its logic. It's likely still possible to file patents based on code well past the point where you have a claim to its copyright. And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things.
> If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code.
For the vast majority of code people are paid to write (certainly the near-entirety of the code I've been paid to write!), the only rights the purchasers actually end up exercising (and therefore actually need granted to them) are the rights to use it and distribute it internally (and maybe to modify it and use/distribute the modifications, but even that ain't a given). The purchasers of that code ain't usually buying it so that they can resell it; they're buying it because it solves an actual problem of theirs, and it would solve that problem regardless of whether or not they're the legal owners of that code.
The reason said purchasers typically want copyright assigned to them is not because of some expectation of resale, but simply to mitigate the risk of some external party denying them the right to use the software in the future. If there is no such party (because the code is in the public domain), then that risk is non-existent. It stops mattering that you're unable to grant any rights upon delivery because no such grant is necessary in the first place.
> And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things.
In an ideal world we'd all have lawyers on call who can answer all our questions with some assurance of certainty, but in this case it's pretty self-evident that if nobody can claim copyright on something, then that makes it exceedingly difficult for there to be anyone who can claim your use of that thing is illegal.
What do you mean by « that argument has been made in Germany »? Any link I could read?
Smells like FUD. Thaler v. Shira Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025). Human authorship is required for copyright, but AI assistance does not itself defeat copyrightability. Unresolved how much human creative involvement is sufficient.
It's already been established by court ruling and enshrined in Copyright Office regulations, that you can claim copyright on a mixed AI and human-authored work, but to sue for damages you must register the work, and the registration must clearly specify which parts are AI generated and which are human generated. Copyright can only be claimed on the declared human generated portion of the work.
How long do you think Microsoft, Apple and the other mega-corps will continue to put up with this? All of them have AI code in all of their products.
The law will change. Probably soon.
If you mix proprietary human-written code with uncopyrightable public domain code, the result is still proprietary. There's no reverse virality. There's no problem to fix here.
For example, every proprietary OS includes public domain SQLite and it's fine.
Are you sure uncopyeightable and public domain is the same?
No, but what's the alternative theory?
AI code licensing will be land of nobody