Comment by Animats

19 hours ago

Does that make the code uncopyrightable? Non-human authorship?

If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright.

And of course dumb messages that aren't true won't affect copyright.

The real question is why Anthropic was able to use DMCA takedown requests "in good faith" against the Claude leaks when their own CTO claimed it is a 100% slopcoded codebase, and they themselves argue that all LLM generated code is transformed enough to not be copyrightable. Which they have to state without being able to turn back because they violated millions of book and software licenses during training.

Make it make sense.

  • You can lie.

    You can get away with lying.

    You can lie to judges.

    You can get away with lying to judges.

    You can profit from getting away with lying to judges.

    A judge isn't involved, anyway. The leaker would have to take you to court and then prove that your request was in bad faith and that they didn't infringe copyright.

    Competent programmers understand how to tell the computer what needs to happen. Really good programmers understand how the computer executed the code, and take advantage of it - they know about speculative execution and cache prefetching. Competent lawyers know what the law says. Really good lawyers understand how the law is executed, and take advantage of it - they know when it won't be enforced.

The courts have determined that, yes, and that is the position of the Copyright Office. And the Supreme Court has rejected appeal, so that's the standing precedent.

Realistically, look forward to SOX style audits and having to maintain evidence of how much of a code base has human authorship vs machine generation. Or reject slop.

I can't wait for:

* The first company to do perjury for litigating over a nonexistent copyright for machine generated code.

* The first company to get nailed to the wall for reverse engineering and replicating high profile copyrighted code, like Windows.

  • Having a tool involved isn't the same as being entirely generated by a tool

    For example, without any AI, if I generate a lookup table for the sine function in my code, that table may not be copyrightable because it was machine-generated, but it doesn't somehow make the rest of the code not copyrightable either

    "Co-authored by" doesn't imply it was entirely machine-generated