If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US.
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FWIW I'm not a lawyer and I'm not recommending that you do this.
Even if companies have no legal standing on copyright, their legal team will try it. It *will* cost you money.But man, oh man, I'm gonna have popcorn ready for when someone inevitably pulls this move.
@jamie the corporations own the Supreme Court of the US who will cheerfully make up new law out of whatever Clarence Thomas shat that morning.
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie And Microsoft executives keep bragging about how much Windows code is being written by AIs?
Count me as one person NOT AT ALL interested in Windows, regardless of any copyright status.
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie
That doesn't sound quite right. The code "AI" generates are stolen from other people, presumably they still have their copyright.Also, even if we pretend that it is actually generated by a machine, so is the output of a compiler. Is Microsoft Office in the public domain, because the executable was generated by a compiler?
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie
Microslop, allegedly, vibe coded up to 30% of the Windows 11 codebase using genAI. Theoretically anyone working for Microslop with access to the codebase can upload the whole codebase without recourse? -
@jamie the corporations own the Supreme Court of the US who will cheerfully make up new law out of whatever Clarence Thomas shat that morning.
@emma Oh yeah, shit's gonna get weird for a while and I think a lot of legislation going in during this administration as well as recent SCOTUS cases will need to be revisited. Ideally after also instituting laws around conflicts of interest with government officials that don't carve out exceptions for, oh I dunno, members of Congress, for example.
Basically, I want the different branches of the government to fight each other again rather than the different parties.
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@jamie
That doesn't sound quite right. The code "AI" generates are stolen from other people, presumably they still have their copyright.Also, even if we pretend that it is actually generated by a machine, so is the output of a compiler. Is Microsoft Office in the public domain, because the executable was generated by a compiler?
@leeloo Last I heard, the holders of the copyrights on the material that the LLMs are trained on are being told to get fucked.
The class action lawsuit that Anthropic lost was decided not because they trained their models on stolen copyrighted material, but because they stored copies of that material to keep training their models on. My understanding is that it was the storage specifically that violated copyright and that, if they'd deleted that data they'd have been legally clear.
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@jamie
Microslop, allegedly, vibe coded up to 30% of the Windows 11 codebase using genAI. Theoretically anyone working for Microslop with access to the codebase can upload the whole codebase without recourse?@macronaut Possibly. The next two posts in the thread have a little more detail on my understanding of the current state of affairs there.
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie @aeva I suspect that courts would not be favorable to this reading, and would buy the (bullshit, IMO) argument that sufficient human interaction with the code "heals" the copyrightability of the result, and more importantly that they would not press the applicant to show much work when it comes to "sufficient" (that is, I suspect many judges would accept "I edited the code at all" as meeting the sufficiency criterion)
but we're only going to find out if and when it's tested. The Copyright Office is doing the best they can do and making it clear that they won't let "AI" waste their time with copyright registrations (which are not required to legally protect a work, they're just paperwork really)
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@leeloo Last I heard, the holders of the copyrights on the material that the LLMs are trained on are being told to get fucked.
The class action lawsuit that Anthropic lost was decided not because they trained their models on stolen copyrighted material, but because they stored copies of that material to keep training their models on. My understanding is that it was the storage specifically that violated copyright and that, if they'd deleted that data they'd have been legally clear.
@jamie
Well, someone still needs to decide at some point whether to abolish copyright or start enforcing it again, and at that point it could become a huge problem for anyone who has incorporated stolen code into their code base. -
@jamie @aeva I suspect that courts would not be favorable to this reading, and would buy the (bullshit, IMO) argument that sufficient human interaction with the code "heals" the copyrightability of the result, and more importantly that they would not press the applicant to show much work when it comes to "sufficient" (that is, I suspect many judges would accept "I edited the code at all" as meeting the sufficiency criterion)
but we're only going to find out if and when it's tested. The Copyright Office is doing the best they can do and making it clear that they won't let "AI" waste their time with copyright registrations (which are not required to legally protect a work, they're just paperwork really)
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie I wonder if that’ll kill the use of “AI” at work
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@xgranade @jamie @aeva I think it's a much stronger case for the example rejected registrations that they show on the next page, which are exclusively about copyrightability of images.
It's largely legally untested AFAICT but based on how eagerly US courts have swallowed up the fair-use arguments of the vendors of these models, I don't have a lot of faith they would play hard-ball with a litigant who has code that has been established to have been generated, but who argues sufficiency from a "trust me, bro" perspective. (IANAL either, of course)
I would *love* to be wrong about that though, and I'm glad that the Copyright Office has drawn a clear line in the sand on the general matter (and wish more people in tech had read either the publications themselves, or this CRS summary of same)
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie@zomglol.wtf and how do you know if something is AI?
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@xgranade @jamie @aeva I think it's a much stronger case for the example rejected registrations that they show on the next page, which are exclusively about copyrightability of images.
It's largely legally untested AFAICT but based on how eagerly US courts have swallowed up the fair-use arguments of the vendors of these models, I don't have a lot of faith they would play hard-ball with a litigant who has code that has been established to have been generated, but who argues sufficiency from a "trust me, bro" perspective. (IANAL either, of course)
I would *love* to be wrong about that though, and I'm glad that the Copyright Office has drawn a clear line in the sand on the general matter (and wish more people in tech had read either the publications themselves, or this CRS summary of same)
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@emma Oh yeah, shit's gonna get weird for a while and I think a lot of legislation going in during this administration as well as recent SCOTUS cases will need to be revisited. Ideally after also instituting laws around conflicts of interest with government officials that don't carve out exceptions for, oh I dunno, members of Congress, for example.
Basically, I want the different branches of the government to fight each other again rather than the different parties.
@jamie the US needs a new constitution, but the right wingers, the religious gooners, and the billionaires should have no say in it.
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie china is the main producer of models with open weights, open source ai, china is pushing the evolution of ai forward - what's next? probably 10x compute for smb sector
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie in the US, outside of the US exist, and when i don't like AI, until other country rules AI code is not copyrightable ... it remain copyrightable on the whole world BUT US.
so not it does not automatically become public domain
(And again i'm against AI).
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FWIW I'm not a lawyer and I'm not recommending that you do this.
Even if companies have no legal standing on copyright, their legal team will try it. It *will* cost you money.But man, oh man, I'm gonna have popcorn ready for when someone inevitably pulls this move.
@jamie I *am* an IP lawyer and I (along with many others) have been saying it for a while, that if the position the “AI” co’s are taking with respect to the legality of scraping “publicly available” materials were true (that all “publicly available” materials are “public domain” free to be used as raw materials without consent required), then copyright ceases to exist and all their own materials will be free for everyone else to use the very first time they’re leaked. That’ll be fun for the co.
