8 ms·

> So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little to no investment in the first p

> So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial IP law - let's say, patents: it just becomes and input parameter that the AI needs to work around the patents like any other constraints. I think it still does: IIRC, the current legal situation is AI-output does not qualify for IP protections (at least not without substantial later human modification). IP protections are solely reserved for human work. And I'm fine with that: if a person put in the work, they should have protections so their stuff can't be ripped off for free by all the wealthy major corporations that find some use for it. Otherwise: who cares about the LLMs.

robmccoll 8mo ago
I think you have a rather idealized model of IP in mind. In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time.
- palmotea 8mo ago
  > In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time. Then fix that instead of blowing it up. Because IP law is also literally the only thing that protects the little guy's work in many cases. Arguments like yours are kinda unfathomably incomplete to me, almost like they're the remnants of some propaganda campaign. It's constructed to appeal to the defense of the little guy, but the actual effect would be to disempower him and further empower the wealthy major corporations with "big enough warchest[s]." I mean, one thing I think the RIAA would love is to stop paying royalties to every artist ever. And the only thing they'd be worried about is an even bigger fish (like Amazon, Apple, or Spotify) no longer paying royalties to them. But as you said, they have a big enough war chest that they probably could force a deal somehow. All the artists without a war chest? Left out in the cold.
  - _aavaa_ 8mo ago
    Blowing up IP would sink the RIAA. They would no longer have legal grounds to go after file sharing, and I’m confident that given the same legal footing that file sharing would win any day of the week.
  - esrauch 8mo ago
    It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy. It definitely does some of both, and we have no obvious measure or counterfactual to know otherwise. You also have to take into account not just if optimal reform or optimal dismantle is better, but the realistic likelihood of each, and the risk of the bad outcomes from each. Protect even more conceptual product ideas seems pretty strongly like it will result in more of a tool for big guys only, it's patents on crack and patents are already nearly exclusively "big guy crushes small guy" tool, versus copyright is at least debatably mixed.
    - palmotea 8mo ago
      > It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy. It's super obvious, unless your perspective basically stems from someone who was mad they couldn't BitTorrent a ton of movies. I mean, FFS, copyright is the literal foundation for open source licenses like the GPL. My sense is a lot of the radically anti-IP fervor ultimately stems from people who were outraged they could be sued for seeding an MP3 (though it's accreted other complaints to justify that initial impulse, and it's likely some where indoctrinated from secondary argumentation somewhat obscured from the core impulse). That's not to say that there are not actors who abuse IP or there aren't meaningful reforms that could be done, but the "burn it all down" impulse is not thought through.
      - esrauch 8mo ago
        It is ad hominem that people who see it different are just pretty criminals. Yes it is a genius move that copy left used copyright to achieve their goal. But the name is literally reflecting the judo going on in that case. Copyleft licenses also does have a lot benefits to big companies as well too so it's not strictly a David vs Goliath victory. I don't think it's a commonly held belief that copyright benefits small YouTube creators more than it hurts them as a concrete example, they seem to live in constant fear of being destroyed in an asymmetrical system where copyright can take away they livelihood at any moment while not doing anything to meaningfully protect it.
jbergqvist 8mo ago
Does this matter in practice though? By modifying some of the generated code and not taking a solution produced by an LLM end-to-end but borrowing heavily from it, can't a human claim full ownership of the IP even though in reality the LLM did most of the relevant work?
- reverius42 8mo ago
  I think as long as the human puts in substantial and transformational effort, they can claim to be the copyright holder of the entire work, yes.
  - eru 8mo ago
    Compare taking snapshots with a camera. Because some photographer somewhere can claim to have put in a lot of effort, we all get IP protection for photographs by default.
    - reverius42 8mo ago
      Not if they weren't taken by a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
      - eru 8mo ago
        Yes, I didn't include the monkey in my 'we'.
    - shagie 8mo ago
      In the US it isn't the sweat of the brow, but rather a minimal threshold of human creativity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Criteria_for_copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
      - 8mo ago
nkmnz 8mo ago
> AI-output does not qualify for IP protections I beg to differ. AI-output did not entitle the person creating the prompt for IP protections, so far – but my objection is not directed towards the "so far", but towards your omission of "the person creating the prompt", because if an AI outputs copyrighted material from the training data, that material is still copyrighted. AI is not a magical copyright removal machine.
- reverius42 8mo ago
  The U.S. Supreme Court just declined to hear a case, thus upholding a lower court precedent that LLM output are not copyrightable: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-declines-hear-dispute-over-copyrights-ai-generated-material-2026-03-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de... What this means in practice is that (currently), all output of an LLM is legally considered to not be copyrightable (to the extent that it's an original work). If it happens to regurgitate an existing copyrighted work, though, is that infringement? I'm not sure we have a legal precedent on that question yet.
  - jazzyjackson 8mo ago
    There’s several large settlements that say Anthropomorphic/OAI didn’t want to have legal precedent. In general if it’s not outright regurgitated it would be derivative.
    - reverius42 8mo ago
      The out of court settlements that avoid precedent don't mean anything in a broader legal context. Legally speaking, right now in the USA, output of LLMs is not copyrighted and cannot be copyrighted (without substantial transformation by a human). I don't think this means the same thing as whether or not LLM output can infringe on someone else's copyright though (that does pose an interesting question -- can something non-copyrightable in general infringe on something copyrighted?).
      - 8mo ago
rlpb 8mo ago
What if a person puts in the work, but the work was worthless or can be trivially reproduced without effort? See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
- eru 8mo ago
  You mean like when I take a photo?
  - chrischen 8mo ago
    A photo is easy to take but hard to reproduce.
    - eru 8mo ago
      As is randomly splattering paint on a canvas, even with no artistic vision or skill.

robmccoll 8mo ago

I think you have a rather idealized model of IP in mind. In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time.

palmotea 8mo ago
> In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time. Then fix that instead of blowing it up. Because IP law is also literally the only thing that protects the little guy's work in many cases. Arguments like yours are kinda unfathomably incomplete to me, almost like they're the remnants of some propaganda campaign. It's constructed to appeal to the defense of the little guy, but the actual effect would be to disempower him and further empower the wealthy major corporations with "big enough warchest[s]." I mean, one thing I think the RIAA would love is to stop paying royalties to every artist ever. And the only thing they'd be worried about is an even bigger fish (like Amazon, Apple, or Spotify) no longer paying royalties to them. But as you said, they have a big enough war chest that they probably could force a deal somehow. All the artists without a war chest? Left out in the cold.
- _aavaa_ 8mo ago
  Blowing up IP would sink the RIAA. They would no longer have legal grounds to go after file sharing, and I’m confident that given the same legal footing that file sharing would win any day of the week.
- esrauch 8mo ago
  It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy. It definitely does some of both, and we have no obvious measure or counterfactual to know otherwise. You also have to take into account not just if optimal reform or optimal dismantle is better, but the realistic likelihood of each, and the risk of the bad outcomes from each. Protect even more conceptual product ideas seems pretty strongly like it will result in more of a tool for big guys only, it's patents on crack and patents are already nearly exclusively "big guy crushes small guy" tool, versus copyright is at least debatably mixed.
  - palmotea 8mo ago
    > It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy. It's super obvious, unless your perspective basically stems from someone who was mad they couldn't BitTorrent a ton of movies. I mean, FFS, copyright is the literal foundation for open source licenses like the GPL. My sense is a lot of the radically anti-IP fervor ultimately stems from people who were outraged they could be sued for seeding an MP3 (though it's accreted other complaints to justify that initial impulse, and it's likely some where indoctrinated from secondary argumentation somewhat obscured from the core impulse). That's not to say that there are not actors who abuse IP or there aren't meaningful reforms that could be done, but the "burn it all down" impulse is not thought through.
    - esrauch 8mo ago
      It is ad hominem that people who see it different are just pretty criminals. Yes it is a genius move that copy left used copyright to achieve their goal. But the name is literally reflecting the judo going on in that case. Copyleft licenses also does have a lot benefits to big companies as well too so it's not strictly a David vs Goliath victory. I don't think it's a commonly held belief that copyright benefits small YouTube creators more than it hurts them as a concrete example, they seem to live in constant fear of being destroyed in an asymmetrical system where copyright can take away they livelihood at any moment while not doing anything to meaningfully protect it.

jbergqvist 8mo ago

Does this matter in practice though? By modifying some of the generated code and not taking a solution produced by an LLM end-to-end but borrowing heavily from it, can't a human claim full ownership of the IP even though in reality the LLM did most of the relevant work?

reverius42 8mo ago
I think as long as the human puts in substantial and transformational effort, they can claim to be the copyright holder of the entire work, yes.
- eru 8mo ago
  Compare taking snapshots with a camera. Because some photographer somewhere can claim to have put in a lot of effort, we all get IP protection for photographs by default.
  - reverius42 8mo ago
    Not if they weren't taken by a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
    - eru 8mo ago
      Yes, I didn't include the monkey in my 'we'.
  - shagie 8mo ago
    In the US it isn't the sweat of the brow, but rather a minimal threshold of human creativity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Criteria_for_copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
    - 8mo ago

nkmnz 8mo ago

> AI-output does not qualify for IP protections I beg to differ. AI-output did not entitle the person creating the prompt for IP protections, so far – but my objection is not directed towards the "so far", but towards your omission of "the person creating the prompt", because if an AI outputs copyrighted material from the training data, that material is still copyrighted. AI is not a magical copyright removal machine.

reverius42 8mo ago
The U.S. Supreme Court just declined to hear a case, thus upholding a lower court precedent that LLM output are not copyrightable: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-declines-hear-dispute-over-copyrights-ai-generated-material-2026-03-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de... What this means in practice is that (currently), all output of an LLM is legally considered to not be copyrightable (to the extent that it's an original work). If it happens to regurgitate an existing copyrighted work, though, is that infringement? I'm not sure we have a legal precedent on that question yet.
- jazzyjackson 8mo ago
  There’s several large settlements that say Anthropomorphic/OAI didn’t want to have legal precedent. In general if it’s not outright regurgitated it would be derivative.
  - reverius42 8mo ago
    The out of court settlements that avoid precedent don't mean anything in a broader legal context. Legally speaking, right now in the USA, output of LLMs is not copyrighted and cannot be copyrighted (without substantial transformation by a human). I don't think this means the same thing as whether or not LLM output can infringe on someone else's copyright though (that does pose an interesting question -- can something non-copyrightable in general infringe on something copyrighted?).
    - 8mo ago

rlpb 8mo ago

What if a person puts in the work, but the work was worthless or can be trivially reproduced without effort? See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

eru 8mo ago
You mean like when I take a photo?
- chrischen 8mo ago
  A photo is easy to take but hard to reproduce.
  - eru 8mo ago
    As is randomly splattering paint on a canvas, even with no artistic vision or skill.