> I see a lot of people claiming that AI is producing code they've written verbatim, but sometimes I wonder if everyone just writes certain things the same way

> I see a lot of people claiming that AI is producing code they've written verbatim, but sometimes I wonder if everyone just writes certain things the same way. For the above rangeCheck function, there isn't much opportunity for the individual programmer to be creative. This point is absolutely going to come up in any lawsuits; because the law does sometimes examine how much creativity there is available in a field before making a determination (Oracle v Google comes to mind). If you can show that there are very, very few reasonable ways to accomplish a goal, and said goal is otherwise not patented or prohibited, it's either not copyrightable or Fair Use, take your pick. This even applies under the interoperability section of the DMCA and similar laws for huge projects. Assuming that ReactOS, for example, is actually completely clean-room; that would be protected despite having the same API names and, likely, a lot of similar code implementing most of the most basic APIs.