4 ms·
In the Monkey Selfie case - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... - cour
by tapoxi 6mo ago
In the Monkey Selfie case - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... - courts decided that copyright requires a human author and a human merely setting the conditions for a copyrighted work to appear is not enough.
This reasonably means AI contributions where a human has guided the AI are not subject to copyright, and thus can't be supported by a project's license.
- dtech 6mo agoThat's quite a stretch, and untested in court. At least a monkey is an unambiguous autonomous entity. A LLM is a - heck of a complicated - piece of software, and could very well be ruled a tool like any other
- tapoxi 6mo agoI mean, aren't we all bragging about autonomous agents doing the coding for us? I don't see how that's remotely a stretch. The legal question was "did a human author the work"?
- redwall_hp 6mo agoTested all the way up to the Supreme Court, who declined to hear an appeal, so the precedent stands in the context of AI output. 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... It's still early, but this is absolutely going to be precedent used in a software related case, and it's going to lead to fun times with SOX/PCI style compliance issues, where developers will have to attest that merges did not use AI so compliance can ensure repos don't pass a threshold where there's too much LLM code.