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Comment by inetsee | Hacker News Reader

The Copyright Office has decreed that AI generated content cannot be Copyrighted. If these books have a copyright listing then they are a violation of the rules. I doubt if the "author" is at risk for legal repurcussions, beyond not being able to sue for copyright violation.

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There is nuance in the statement that you're referring to. Works created by an AI are not copyrightable, but works created by humans who use AI tools are copyrightable.

Non-humans do not have copy rights from the things they create. However, humans have copy rights even when they use tools.

I have yet to see a legal argument that says the output of ChatGPT is free from derivative works claims. So you can't assert ownership of the output, but that doesn't mean someone else can't assert rights on the grounds of derivative works.

It is one of the reasons I don't see Copilot going anywhere. Any company that uses it can't assert ownership over their own IP, and if Copilot accidently reproduces a chunk of training data verbatim then someone else can.

I doubt many codebases are 100% generated by Copilot with no human input, and it’s not like having some Copilot snippets in your code is going to invalidate the copyright on the whole thing… I think that’s like being worried that writing parts of a book in a public domain font is going to invalidate the copyright on it

The copying verbatim thing is valid though, although they have mitigations against that

The "author" can't sue for copying? That's probably pretty safe; who is going to want to copy one of these books?

Imagine suing because someone ripped off your crappy ai-generated book: The court awards the plaintiff damages of 1 cent.

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