Comment by senaevren
1 day ago
Meta's confidence almost certainly rests on the employment contracts and IP assignment clauses, not on a legal theory that AI output is inherently copyrightable. The enterprise agreement with Anthropic assigns outputs to the licensee. The employment contract assigns work product to Meta. Those two documents together give Meta a defensible ownership position regardless of the authorship question. The interesting gap is for developers using personal accounts or consumer plans on side projects, where neither of those documents exists.
I don't understand how a company can have IP copyright rights on code that is inherently uncopyrightable (in the unlikely event scotus rules that way).
Worst case, meta will sue the programmer who produced infringing code.
I mean if the code is not copyrighteable that does not mean anything; it's just public domain code except that meta will just use good old security by obscurity to protect it. If somehow a meta programmer vibes code, say, VVVVVV, and Terry Cavanagh recognizes it on his facebook feed and sues meta, and wins, all that will happen is that meta will take down the copy of VVVVVV, will fire and sue the engineer that vibe coded it and call it a day.