Comment by jhbadger
1 day ago
This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from public domain sources.
The article addresses this explicitly:
> Works predominantly generated by AI without meaningful human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection
Note the word "predominantly", and the discussion that follows in the article about what the courts and the copyright office said.
Skimming over the article, it's a lot about what the copyright office said and very little about what courts said. But the opinion of the copyright office doesn't have any legal force. Regulations passed by the copyright office would be binding, but their opinions are just opinions. We will have to wait until relevant court cases reach a conclusion. And so far running litigation isn't even about that question, it's about infringing the rights of works that are in the training data
No such assumption is made in the article.
Nor does it give a single answer.
Mere prompting is still not enough for copyright, and the problem is unsolved on how much contribution a human needs to make to the generated code.
In the case for generated images copyright has been assigned only to the human-modified parts.
Even worse, it will be slightly different in other nations.
The only one that accepts copyright for the unchanged output of a prompt is China.
Here's a question I have: if the AI generated image is of a character of which you own the IP, don't you have protections based on the character regardless of who gets copyright protections from authorship of the image?
Yeah if you have a copyright on the character, the AI generated image doesn’t change that. It doesn’t give you more of less protection than you already had.
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I'm sure it's not quite that simple. Only parts the parts of those knock-off works that aren't public domain could be copyrightable. If you only own the copyright to ten lines in a 10k line codebase, then it's probably fair use for someone else to just to take the whole thing.
Plus what if Anna Karenina was GPL?
Anna Karenina is public domain, assuming you’re talking about the original? If you translate it then maybe you could release it under GPL, but bit odd?
I think you missed the "what if". It was just a point about how the constructed scenario might be different to the real scenario. Most AIs are not trained only on public-domain work.
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You use humans to edit AI code? When you level up you are just using AI to write, AI to review, AI to edit, AI to test. Not a lot of steps left for meat bags.
You're forgetting that you need coffee/tea/mate to fuel the button pushers. The Jetsons predicted this decades ago.
AI for review is terrible, and by no fault of their own. It's our job to specify and document intention, domain and the right problems to solve, and that is just hard to do. No getting around it. That's job security for us meat bags.
AI to write - code is buggy and not what I asked for
AI to review - shallow minutia and bikeshedding
AI to edit - wrote duplicated functions that already existed
AI to test - special casing and disabling code to pass the narrow tests it wrote
AI report - "Everything looks good, ship it!"
Ok what about all the Anthropic’s engineers who say they don’t write code at all and it’s 100% AI-generated?
> This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged.
How much code do you need to change in order for it to be original? One line? 10%? More than 50%?
That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.
> That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.
Yeah but that’s what the legal system ostensibly does. Splitting fine hairs over whether a derived work is “transformative” is something lawyers and judges have been arguing and deciding for centuries. Just because it’s hard to define a bright red line, doesn’t mean the decision is arbitrary. Courts will mull over whether a dotted quarter note on the fourth bar of a melody constitutes an independent work all day long. It seems absurd, but deciding blurry lines are what courts are built to handle.
EDIT: I changed my argument completely.
That makes no sense because what if you refactor your code ad infinitum using AI? You spin up a working implementation, then read through the code, catalog the changes like interface, docs, code quality and patterns and delegate to the AI to write what you would.
It's 100% AI code and it's 100% human code. That distinction is what's counterproductive.
Because at the end of the day, someone has to own the code, so some lines have to be drawn no matter how arbitrary they seem.
If you modify the work, that creates a derived work from whatever copyright the original works has, not a new work that is fully copyrightable.
As the article says in the Tl;DR at the top the code may be contaminated by open source licenses
> Agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate code that may be uncopyrightable, owned by your employer, or contaminated by open source licenses you cannot see
> This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't.
That's not how copyright works. The modified version is derivative. You can't just take the Linux kernel, make some changes, and slap a new license on it.
Wrong. This territory was heavily covered in music before this code concept - it has to be “transformative” in the eyes of the law. Even going in and cleaning up code or adding 10-25% new code won’t pass this threshold. Don't bother arguing with me on this, just accept reality and deal with it.
My copy of "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" is explicitly listed as being copyrighted by Ben H. Winters in 2009 despite the majority of the words being Austen's, though. Perhaps music has different rules compared to text. I suspect Winters and his publisher have investigated the legality of this more than either of us have.
Jane Austen died long enough ago that her works are in the public domain, so Winters did not need a license to use it. That does not mean that he gained rights to her work: if he tried to sue someone for use of anything which appeared in the original, he would lose in court because it’s easy to show that copies made before he was born had the same text. This also how they prevent people trying to extend copyright by making minor changes to an existing work: the new copyright only covers the additions.
There’s a very accessible summary of the United States rules here:
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf