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First, this case is a nothing burger. It only recognizes the obvious fact that you can't list the "name" of some program in the list of inventors for a patent.
by tsimionescu 3y ago
First, this case is a nothing burger. It only recognizes the obvious fact that you can't list the "name" of some program in the list of inventors for a patent.
Secondly, most code is typically protected by copyright, not patents. And copyright is actually not awardable for automatically generated code, except if the code is a derivative of an otherwise copyright able work. So compiled machine code is protected even though it was generated by a computer program, because it is a derivative of the human-written source code.
However, if you write a program which generates all C programs of 10 lines or shorter, you would not be able to claim copyright for those programs (though someone else who manually wrote one of them would still be able to have copyright over their version - provenance is important in copyright law).
Now, I don't think this has been tested in court yet, but it's very likely that code produced by ChatGPT or Copilot would be considered a derivative of the prompt provided, and thus would be protected by copyright just as much as a compiled binary.
- klausa 3y ago>Now, I don't think this has been tested in court yet, but it's very likely that code produced by ChatGPT or Copilot would be considered a derivative of the prompt provided, and thus would be protected by copyright just as much as a compiled binary. That would be very surprising to me; given that we have already few rulings that images produced by AI are not copyrightable. Is the argument here that code is more "substantial" as an input than just a "make me a pretty image" prompt, and therefore would qualify for different rules?
- tsimionescu 3y agoI would see two arguments. One is, yes, if the prompt is complex enough I think that changes the ruling. Secondly, the fact that output is the same kind of media as the input I would think is relevant. An image carries vastly more information than a text response, so it's much more arguable that the output is substantially the contribution of the AI, not based so much on the input.