Comment by trickypr
14 days ago
I think there is an easy test: if you didn’t write it, it’s not yours.
If we go back 10 years and your friend says “I have an idea for an app, here it is,” and you build it, you own the copyright because you wrote it.
You give an idea to the pile of math calculated of the stolen work of humanity, the math owns it (which it can’t, so no one owns it).
No matter how detailed of a conversation you have with a friend, I don’t think they have justification to claim copyright over code written by you.
That's how you want it to be, but that's not how it is.
Actually, in Germany, copyright remains with the author and their heirs until seventy years after the author's death; it cannot be sold or given away, even if someone paid them doing it. Instead, there is "Verwertungsrecht" or "Nutzungsrecht" ("License", "Usage right"). In the USA, copyright can be sold completely to another legal entity.
Then how it is needs to change.
What if an artist programs a programs a carving robot to create a sculpture? How is that meaningfully different?
Based on your logic that should not qualify, but it currently clearly does: https://quayola.com/selected-unfinished-sculptures/
I think the copyright should go to the tool creator in that case, if the tool is acting as an extension of the creator.
But if the tool is created from collective human creation, the copyright should belong to all humanity, not the person who triggered the tool.
If you trained an LLM entirely on your own input, I think you should own the output, but that is not the case for any widely-used llm.