Comment by SirMadam
5 months ago
If SCOTUS is saying that AI works, even those co-authored by humans, are not eligible for copyright/patenting;
Doesn't that mean any code-base that uses AI generated code does not have an implicit copyright holder? And thus even the human constructor does not have the right to apply any license [closed/open] onto it whatsoever?
> If SCOTUS is saying that AI works, even those co-authored by humans, are not eligible for copyright/patenting;
They aren't.
The copyright office isn't either.
Everybody is very explictly saying that if you use say Sora to generate an image and you apply for a copyright with "Sora" as the author it'll be denied.
Same as if you apply for a copyright with "My Dog" as the author.
Authors must be humans and if you do not fill the author field out with a human it's denied. This has nothing to do with the tool used to create the art work.
While I would like to believe you, doesn't this legal document linked by the article show that, in at least one of the cases, the author WAS trying to apply with himself, "Mr. Allen", as the author? And not the AI?
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byprrqkqxpe/...
Allen's case has not reached the Supreme Court. The Copyright Office said he could have copyright of what he authored. But he refused to disclaim what Midjourney generated.
> Doesn't that mean any code-base that uses AI generated code does not have an implicit copyright holder? And thus even the human constructor does not have the right to apply any license [closed/open] onto it whatsoever?
besides copyright, source code also can be protected as a trade secret.
For a company with any decent number of people with access to the code base, extremely difficult to maintain that type of protection.
I mean trade secret as a legal protection: code is declared as trade secret. Then if employee leaks it, and other company uses it, it can be sued.
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Given how the models were trained for coding, every single code base that uses any code generated by an LLM should be required to be open sourced, or at least source available.
I'm not saying there is currently a legal president to enforce this, I'm saying ethically it make sense.
I pretty much agree with you in principle, but I'm also positive this will never happen.
Definitely not.
Apparently copyright and licences only matter until a mega corporation stands to loose billions thanks to their blatant theft. Then nobody cares. But you're suppose to feel bad for pirating the latest season of Stranger Things.
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This would only apply if the codebase were 100% vibe coded. If there is human input - as there is in code, with the role of the software engineer, then it falls into another category for the sake of copyright arguments. And the way it works is copyright is granted automatically and only revoked/denied through litigation.
There's going to be a spectrum here, but for some of these new pilot projects like vinext where the claim is primary AI authorship I would expect the resulting works not to be copyrighted.
What does that mean? I don't know. They are claiming copyright over vinext and licensing it under MIT, a copyright-based license. So the license and the copyright both get swept away in the flood there and what's left is a formerly-copyrighted software duplicated as a work [in the public domain?] [that nobody can legally use?] [that the author can legally use but not legally license?]
Choose your own adventure, now with copyright law!
That's the position I came to based on these rulings, or lack thereof. I think of all the reasons open source shouldn't accept AI created code is that it can't be protected, and that has the potential to threaten the whole project.
OpenClaw, for instance has an MIT license [0], but, per the creators own words, they didn't even review the code. OpenClaw isn't MIT licensed, the MIT license relies on copyright, and because there was not even human review of the majority of the code, no substantial human input, that code base can't be copyrighted.
No need to steal AI code, it doesn't belong to anyone.
[0] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw?tab=MIT-1-ov-file#readm...
Hopefully.