Comment by graemep
6 days ago
> 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.