Comment by graemep
6 days ago
> copyright doesn't suddenly get declared as being of the model owner
That does not seem to be likely. The article you link indicates it is the prompter and provider of any other inputs (in the case discussed the photographer who took the photo the LLM modified) who might have claims.
> The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain.
My understanding is that sufficient human input makes it copyright. This is not greatly different from German law.
In both cases something that is vibe coded in the strict sense of having only vague prompts will not be covered by copyright, something with real human input will.
That leads to a problem with "mostly" there. Does it mean mostly vibe coded, or mostly AI written? AI written under close guidance is covered by copyright so should be fine.
This does make it important to keep prompt history and record human edits of generated code as that is what will prove sufficient human input.
Also, its not just German law that matters to users. For many users law in their jurisdiction is what matters.
German copyright works a bit different from US copyright, as it requires a "personal intellectual creation", but there have already been multiple court cases that decided AI generated content is not protected by German copyright as it doesn't meet this requirement. You can find the original (German) verdict here as it goes into some more legal details on this: https://www.gesetze-bayern.de/Content/Document/Y-300-Z-BECKR...
So from an open source perspective I don't see any legal risk here as the worst that could happen is that there is no legal protection of the code, which would only give users more and not less rights. Also not sure what they mean by "unclear" copyright status. At least from what I can tell it seems pretty clear that there is generally no copyright on AI output.
> German copyright works a bit different from US copyright, as it requires a "personal intellectual creation"
Can you explain how it is different from US law? It sounds closer to US law than to, for example, British law.
> You can find the original (German) verdict
I cannot read German. So you are saying Bird & Bird's explanation of the ruling is wrong? Or is it contradicted by other cases?
> Can you explain how it is different from US law? It sounds closer to US law than to, for example, British law.
Yes, there are some similarities. The "personal intellectual creation" requirement I think is also similarly used in the US where only genuine intellectual creations by the author count as works. Typing "generate an image of a flower" doesn't clear that bar. If you however write very detailed long description of the image then it could clear that hurdle. The verdict says that the personal creative input needs to dominate the result if you sue someone over it, it is on you to proof that your prompt meet this hurdle, which "vibecoders" are not going to meet I believe.
However, in Germany copyright always belongs to the creator (a natural person), while in the US it can also be held by a company. In practice, this means you can't sell your copyright, only license it, although even an exclusive license has limits. So an AI provider never holds copyright over generated output either way: it either belongs to the creator or the output has none. German copyright law aims to protect the creator while US copyright law focuses more on economic aspects.
So the result is that either the author has the copyright (so just like any other code) or there is no copyright. Either way I don't see what issue uploading it to Codeberg could cause for them as it should be fine either way.
> You can find the original (German) verdict
I tried to explain the argument from the verdict in more detail above, otherwise number 18-22 are the relevant part. See here for the translation of those: https://claude.ai/share/4d52fb18-a375-4ce7-9d7f-35e3d52971aa The Bird & Bird article seems to pretty much say the same from what I can tell, just in more detail.