Ask HN: Is all vibe-code in the public domain? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is all vibe-code in the public domain?

4 pointsKon-Peki2 comments

This document [1] from the US Copyright Office is making the rounds where I work, along with the claim that full-on vibe-coding isn't eligible to be copyrighted in the US. And if that is the case, is it even possible to assign a license to it? Ergo, is it in the public domain?

Note that in this document the copyright office addresses the case of image generation, where a person were to throw prompt after prompt at the model until they get something they like, and then possibly add some more prompting to make some adjustments to get the final image. And they plainly state that this is not copyrightable in the US. Isn't this damning to vibe-coding?

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf

not able to be copyrighted does imply public domain. the thing is though, nothing is ever 100% vibe coded as far as I can tell, so the connecting stuff and corrections that get manually done end up being protectable elements. I suspect over time we'll get a bunch of contradictory case law and it'll be decades before we really have an answer.

The discussion we were having is the extent to which the Feist test that is mentioned in the PDF applies. Especially considering pages 24-27 in the PDF.

It makes it seem that AI coding assistants are totally fine and the whole work is copyrightable as long as the human is bringing the code pieces in, deciding where they fit, etc. But if you are making "small" edits to a work that is primarily AI-generated then you are likely out of luck. I guess it really depends on how much you have to edit the AI work.

A few days ago on HN there was talk about vibe-coding in the current YC cohort in which they were saying "don't bother debugging, throw it all away and have the AI regenerate!" I can't help but think that this is incredibly risky. One disgruntled ex-employee blows the whistle and your startup might be toast.

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