Comment by graemep

2 months ago

Where is there any legal precedent for that?

In some jurisdictions (e.g. the UK) the law is already clear that you own the copyright. In the US it is almost certain that you will be the author. The reports of cases saying otherwise I have been misreported - the courts found the AI could not own the copyright.

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graemep

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panny  2 months ago

>Where is there any legal precedent for that?

Thaler v. Perlmutter: The D.C. Circuit Court affirmed in March 2025 that the Copyright Act requires works to be authored "in the first instance by a human being," a ruling the Supreme Court left intact by declining to hear the case in 2026.

And in the US constitution,

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...

Authors and inventors, courts have ruled, means people. Only people. A monkey taking a selfie with your camera doesn't mean you own a copyright. An AI generating code with your computer is likewise, devoid of any copyright protection.

  • graemep  2 months ago

    The Thaler ruling addresses a different point.

    The ruling says that the LLM cannot be the author. It does not say that the human being using the LLM cannot be the author. The ruling was very clear that it did not address whether a human being was the copyright holder because Thaler waived that argument.

    the position with a monkey using your camera is similar, and you may or may not hold the copyright depending on what you did - was it pure accident or did you set things up. Opinions on the well known case are mixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

    Where wildlife photographers deliberately set up a shot to be triggered automatically (e.g. by a bird flying through the focus) they do hold the copyright.

    • panny  2 months ago

      Guidance on AI is unambiguous.

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

      AI generated code has no copyright. And if it DID somehow have copyright, it wouldn't be yours. It would belong to the code it was "trained" on. The code it algorithmically copied. You're trying to have your cake, and eat it too. You could maybe claim your prompts are copyrighted, but that's not what leaked. The AI generated code leaked.

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Sharlin  2 months ago

It's beyond obvious that a LLM cannot have copyright, any more than a cat or a rock can. The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law. As far as I can see, it depends on the extent of the user's creative effort in controlling the LLM's output.

  • graemep  2 months ago

    It may be obvious to you, but it has lead to at least one protracted court case in the US: Thaler v. Perlmutter.

    > The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law.

    Its is going to vary with copyright law. In the UK the question of computer generated works is addressed by copyright law and the answer is "the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken"

    Its also not a simple case of LLM generated vs human authored. How much work did the human do? What creative input was there? How detailed were the prompts?

    In jurisdictions where there are doubts about the question, I think code is a tricky one. If the argument that prompts are just instructions to generate code, therefore the code is not covered by copyright, then you could also argue that code is instructions to a compiler to generate code and the resulting binary is not covered by copyright.

    • galaxyLogic  2 months ago

      The binary should be considered "derived work". Only the original copyright owner has the exclusive right to create or authorize derivative works. Means you are not allowed to compile code unless you have the license to do so. Right?

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