Comment by spacechild1

I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the concepts of copyright and licensing.

> but so is most code in general.

That's definitely not true. All the code I write has my copyright, unless I waive that right to some other entity. If there was no copyright, there would no licensing. How else could you license your code, if you were not the copyright holder?

Have you never seen "Copyright (c) <Authors> 2025" in source code files?

The very fact that your code has your copyright is also the reason for things like CLAs.

> For example, you can buy several movies on DVD and those DVDs will still be your property even though you don't have copyright

That's because artistic works are distributed under a license. Just like software. Licenses have terms under which circumstances a work can be used, modified and (re)distributed. In the case of DVDs, you are generally not allowed to make your own copies and then sell them. In the case of software, that's why you have the various software licenses (proprietory or open-source).

> Similarly, just because the code is AI-generated/not copyrightable, doesn't mean others can just steal it.

You can't set licensing terms for something that is not copyrightable.