Comment by jujube3
16 days ago
Even assuming that AI code can't be copyrighted by the person running the AI (seems like a stretch), the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.
>the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.
Company A: You stole our code >:(
Company B: Can you tell us which part we stole?
Company A: It's almost all vibecoded, but there's one function where a developer fixed it by hand
Company B: Okay we'll rewrite that function then :^)
Company A: You stole our code >:(
Company B: Can you tell us which part we stole?
Company A: You can safely assume that nearly every PR had human input, unless you have a way to prove otherwise.
In any case we can prove that you illegally downloaded the source code from our servers, a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.
Yes, but to sue for infringement, you must register the work with the Copyright Office, and the registration must specify clearly what's AI and what's human-created, and only the latter is protected.
As far as I know, if humans are having a discussion about the structure of the code and deliberately making changes (such as in github or on a forum) that represents human creativity. If you hit a button and then make literally no changes to the output then that might be different.