so 3 courts + US Copyright Office say you cannot copyright nor patent anything made primarily with LLMs because automata aren't human.

[leslieburns@esq.social]

@sharlatan @elduvelle @drahardja I spent years in law school and personal study on top of that to learn about copyright law. It cannot be explained on social media. But, fundamentally, in the US, something must be an expression of *human* creativity to be copyrightable. The tools may be whatever, but at its core it must be human expression.

And transformation has nothing to do with that. The term transformation is from the fair use doctrine, and has been perverted by anti-copyright folk.

[bolomkxxviii@mastodon.social]

@blogdiva
Who the heck would want Microslop code???

[maypop_neocities@wetdry.world]

@BoloMKXXVIII @blogdiva so much stuff still only works on microslop windows. if windows was open source it would be so fucking cool actually because then there could be an actually good version of it for people to use.

[abmurrow@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva I'm ignorant in the language here. Does "decline to make a ruling" mean they don't want to step on anyone's toes, or they don't think there's a case?

Could this rear its head again later?

[blogdiva@mastodon.social]

IANAL and haven't check directly with the SCOTUS archives, but my understanding is that it can be both. could be clarified if any of the justices included a comment in the decision (sometimes they stickem in the footnotes, which is why it’s always good to follow up with the OP)

@abmurrow

[blogdiva@mastodon.social]

i have to read the decision closely, but as it has been reported anything created with automata (aka AIslop) has no creative value.

to SCOTUS, only humans have creativity. this is why animals cant get copyrights either. as defined by law, creativity is intrinsic to being human.

in the case of AIslop, they're treating it as just a tool.

imagine Microslop claiming copyright on your work cuz you used MSW or MSO?

hence the decision.

@sunguramy

[blogdiva@mastodon.social]

@geolaw not necessarily. am almost certain a paper just came out about how to reverse engineer a whole Gemini summary, to track down the sources plagiarized

[wyatt_h_knott@vermont.masto.host]

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @blogdiva It does... kinda. Go on youtube and search for an album that doesn't actually exist by an artist... it happened to me with james brown. I searched james brown full album and it happily gave me a james brown album with all the track names you would expect, a cover pic of james brown, and all the james brown songs, exact lyrics and music, just... not. It was super fucking creepy. Amazing how just changing his voice to an AI generated voice completely ruined it.

[blogdiva@mastodon.social]

❝ any real software product would be a mix of human-designed and AI generated parts, so it would presumably still have copyright protection ❞

no, not necessarily.

IANAL but my impression is that they're extrapolating from measures used for determining plagiarism cases; along with case law involving FLOSS, the most famous the decades of Unix vs Linux battles.

again, this isn't my bread and butter but the techbros involved should know better. the proprietary claimants famously lost.

@not2b

[jamie@zomglol.wtf]

@blogdiva Finally some good news!

[nicovel0@mastodon.social]

@Wyatt_H_Knott @GhostOnTheHalfShell @blogdiva if nothing else this is just so fucking disrespectful to the artists

[utf_7@mastodon.social]

@blogdiva the bad news are: just because they loose copyright or patenent (which they even don't have in europe by definition), it does not mean that suddenly the source code appears to public

[donelias@mastodon.cr]

@blogdiva

They said: Microsoft loves Open source

[fluffykittycat@furry.engineer]

@not2b @blogdiva the question is, how much human coding is required to make vibe code copyrightable? A single line? Meaningful modification to function? High level architecture with vibe coded boilerplate only?

[tkissing@mastodon.social]

@not2b @blogdiva Nobody is tracking which line of code is generated by AI vs written by a human. So any changes made since a company adopted AI as a coding tool are at least at risk here.

[elduvelle@neuromatch.social]

@DrSaucy that doesn't explain what you didn't like in my answer, but ok

[marjolica@social.linux.pizza]

@SpaceLifeForm @blogdiva well since these days MS seems to be updating the Windows codebase using vibe coding then none of it is copyright anyway.

[javerous@social.sourcemac.com]

@blogdiva @baldur It's hard to make the distinction here

> The US federal circuit court similarly determined that AI systems can’t patent inventions because they aren’t human, which the US Patent Office reaffirmed in 2024 with new guidance, stating that while AI systems can’t be listed as inventors on a patent, people can still use AI-powered tools to develop them.

I wonder how judges are going to judge that… (I guess it's a bit the Ship of Theseus problem ?)

[javerous@social.sourcemac.com]

@blogdiva @baldur (i.e. what proportion of the "invention" or the "art" needs to be from a human being to be considered an human creation vs. an AI “creation”)

[baldur@toot.cafe]

@javerous @blogdiva Considering the judges only come into it when there's a legal issue—something that leads to a challenge in court—they don't need to answer this question in the abstract but tackle it based on the evidence brought before them by the lawyers arguing the case.

So, things like emails, process documentation, marketing, etc. They don't need to address it as a philosophical question