3 ms·

courts assert LLM can't HOLD copyright, as in it is not an entity that can own something and go to court over such ownership nothing is said about you the user

courts assert LLM can't HOLD copyright, as in it is not an entity that can own something and go to court over such ownership nothing is said about you the user holding copyright over result of tool use

marginalia_nu 2mo ago
That is to the extent of my understanding, not correct. At least in the EU, "Given this framework, it follows that purely AI-generated outputs—those created automatically by an AI system without substantial human intervention—are not eligible for copyright protection in the EU. Such outputs are considered to fall into the public domain, making them freely available for anyone to use, reproduce, or adapt without seeking permission or providing attribution. The legal and commercial implications of this are significant. For creators and companies investing in AI systems that generate music, art, or text, there is no proprietary right over the final output unless a human has contributed in a way that meets the “intellectual creation” standard." https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/774095/IUST_STU(2025)774095_EN.pdf#page=95 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/7740... The courts are AFAICT still undecided in the US regarding this.
- somenameforme 2mo ago
  The last I read it's the exact same in the US. It requires 'substantial human intervention' which is going to be quite open to interpretation. The monkey selfie [1] issue is relevant. Setting up the gear to enable monkeys to take selfies was ruled ineligible for copyright: "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
  - microtherion 2mo ago
    Maybe the human profession of the future is some sort of “Shabbos Dev”, providing enough human intervention in the coding to make the code copyrightable.
mgulick 2mo ago
The GPL relies on copyright ownership for its effectiveness, and copyright ownership of LLM output is a legal gray area right now. "...prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output." [https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10...] If code generated by LLMs turns out to be effectively public domain, that could seriously water down the legal standing of copyleft licenses. Fortunately there is still enough human-authored code that long-standing projects as a whole are not at risk of losing all copyright control, but as more LLM-generated code is incorporated, and human authored code is deleted, the copyright slowly gets washed away. Having said that, I suspect the big AI companies have enough lobbying power to influence the legal system and lawmaking in the future.
- doug_durham 2mo ago
  What is the purpose of copyleft when there are tools that can generate equivalent code? Copyleft keeps software free by using copyright to protect the effort of human creators. If tools can create the code is it is in the public domain then it has accomplished the same thing. Code is not under the control of large corporations.
- ls612 2mo ago
  The thing that makes this argument ring hollow to me is that all of the tech giants have the same interest in their code being protected by copyright, and afaik no big tech giants haven’t adopted coding agents en masse. Presumably they have very expensive lawyers who they asked about this before paying 9 or 10 figures to OAI or Ant for tokens.
  - Antibabelic 2mo ago
    Most of their code is locked behind closed doors.
alerighi 2mo ago
Let's say that Anthropic trains their models on their internal (private) codebase. Let's say that a contributor using Claude generates a piece of code (long enough to account for copyright) that is identical to the internal closed source Anthropic ones and that code is merged into GCC. Anthropic can as well sue GCC for copyright violations and ask millions of compensation, try to explain to a judge that it's the LLM that copied the copyrighted code and you did not do it on purpose. That to me is the reason not to accept LLM generated code, at least till the legal copyright aspects are better regulated, because for now it exposes to too much risks.

marginalia_nu 2mo ago

That is to the extent of my understanding, not correct. At least in the EU, "Given this framework, it follows that purely AI-generated outputs—those created automatically by an AI system without substantial human intervention—are not eligible for copyright protection in the EU. Such outputs are considered to fall into the public domain, making them freely available for anyone to use, reproduce, or adapt without seeking permission or providing attribution. The legal and commercial implications of this are significant. For creators and companies investing in AI systems that generate music, art, or text, there is no proprietary right over the final output unless a human has contributed in a way that meets the “intellectual creation” standard." https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/774095/IUST_STU(2025)774095_EN.pdf#page=95 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/7740... The courts are AFAICT still undecided in the US regarding this.

somenameforme 2mo ago
The last I read it's the exact same in the US. It requires 'substantial human intervention' which is going to be quite open to interpretation. The monkey selfie [1] issue is relevant. Setting up the gear to enable monkeys to take selfies was ruled ineligible for copyright: "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
- microtherion 2mo ago
  Maybe the human profession of the future is some sort of “Shabbos Dev”, providing enough human intervention in the coding to make the code copyrightable.

mgulick 2mo ago

The GPL relies on copyright ownership for its effectiveness, and copyright ownership of LLM output is a legal gray area right now. "...prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output." [https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10...] If code generated by LLMs turns out to be effectively public domain, that could seriously water down the legal standing of copyleft licenses. Fortunately there is still enough human-authored code that long-standing projects as a whole are not at risk of losing all copyright control, but as more LLM-generated code is incorporated, and human authored code is deleted, the copyright slowly gets washed away. Having said that, I suspect the big AI companies have enough lobbying power to influence the legal system and lawmaking in the future.

doug_durham 2mo ago
What is the purpose of copyleft when there are tools that can generate equivalent code? Copyleft keeps software free by using copyright to protect the effort of human creators. If tools can create the code is it is in the public domain then it has accomplished the same thing. Code is not under the control of large corporations.
ls612 2mo ago
The thing that makes this argument ring hollow to me is that all of the tech giants have the same interest in their code being protected by copyright, and afaik no big tech giants haven’t adopted coding agents en masse. Presumably they have very expensive lawyers who they asked about this before paying 9 or 10 figures to OAI or Ant for tokens.
- Antibabelic 2mo ago
  Most of their code is locked behind closed doors.

alerighi 2mo ago

Let's say that Anthropic trains their models on their internal (private) codebase. Let's say that a contributor using Claude generates a piece of code (long enough to account for copyright) that is identical to the internal closed source Anthropic ones and that code is merged into GCC. Anthropic can as well sue GCC for copyright violations and ask millions of compensation, try to explain to a judge that it's the LLM that copied the copyrighted code and you did not do it on purpose. That to me is the reason not to accept LLM generated code, at least till the legal copyright aspects are better regulated, because for now it exposes to too much risks.