Comment by wild_egg
16 days ago
I'm sure we are going to have to wait for some actual court cases to establish precedent but I don't really see why this is the case.
If I use a fancy brush in Photoshop to paint flowers into a PNG — do I own the resulting image? Code is bytes of text on disk, not much different from bytes of pixel data in a BMP.
If I have to type every character by hand in order to own the bytes, then it would stand that I would have to input every pixel by hand in Paint to own a graphic. No? Even using the Fill tool is automating the creation of those bytes and would mean I don't own them. Right?
I have an intention for some bytes of data to be set. If I use an LLM to set them instead of my own fingers, why are the bytes suddenly not mine?
I do not understand.
> Code is bytes of text on disk
Not at all, code is the implementation of an idea. The support/encoding is irrelevant. A human creation is protected by copyright. In the case of prompting an LLM, the human creation is the prompt, the LLM does author the implementation. But it’s not known what happens to the ownership of the LLM generated code
That is not at all how copyright works. If the encoding is irrelevant then virtually all code on GitHub is violating copyright as there are vanishingly small numbers of actually novel ideas.
You’re mixing up concepts. Copyright covers human creations, not ideas. The novelty aspect isn’t too relevant. If you write an article with ideas that aren’t novel it is still considered something you created and will be covered by copyright. You have ownership of your creation.
"Code is bytes of text on disk"....
...organized in a very specific fashion with a great deal of creativity and attention to that specific organization.
I can't copyright the alphabet, but I can copyright certain arrangements of it, subject to a variety of rules.
You’re thinking of a patent, not copyright. And no, it’s very unlikely that you can patent that concept…
You clearly didn't actually look at the link and are just responding to the title. There's Supreme Court precedent. It doesn't get any clearer than that.
As the sibling comment said, the existing precedent is for an entirely different scenario. If a human claims no involvement then it's fair to say they have no ownership. But if I meticulously guide an LLM to implement precisely the code I want to be written, that's an entirely different thing which has not been tested in court.
A similar concept: if I type the code via a brain-computer interface, does the interface get ownership because it is inferring my intent? If I type it via an LLM, why is that less legitimately my creation?
It's fine if I vibecode something and never look at or claim ownership of the code, but if I am actively involved in all of the code but it is written to disk by new tools instead of old tools, why is it suddenly not mine?
I don't think you read the cases. The Thaler one is about AI created art not code, and Thaler stated that the agent was "the sole creator of the work". The case got no further than that. Thaler said he had no involvement: open and shut case.