Comment by zgeor

2 months ago

Genuine question: why can they only claim DMCA if the code is written by humans? Does DMCA specify the method of production?

6 comments

zgeor

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rainsil  2 months ago

According to the US Copyright Office, fully AI-generated works aren’t eligible for copyright because they don’t have human authors. They’re in the public domain by default.

See: https://library.osu.edu/site/copyright/2026/02/06/artificial...

  • pc86  2 months ago

    What constitutes "fully AI-generated" when you're in an edit loop between an agent and a human?

    • justinclift  2 months ago

      It seems like it's an active area of legal thought (IANAL though).

      Recent relevant discussion about this in the chardet repo between the chardet maintainer who relicensed the chardet code and Richard Fontana, a well regarded lawyer US IP lawyer who's worked for Red Hat (now IBM) for decades:

      https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/334#issuecomment-4...

      My take away from the conversation there is that being in an edit loop, where the files are AI generated through your control rather than directly editing the files yourself, means the files are then "AI authored" for copyright protection purposes rather than yourself.

      But I double stress, I'm not a lawyer so may have misunderstood things radically.

    • Eisenstein  2 months ago

      I think that may not be answerable until a case concerning it has been heard and ruled on. A lawyer may have a better answer for you, but if I had to bet then I'd put $100 on it being something like 'it depends'.

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