Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

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Only the authored parts can be copyrighted, and only humans can author [0].

"For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user."

"In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that 'the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.'"

"Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection. In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are 'independent of' and do 'not affect' the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself."

IMO this is pretty common sense. No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it.

[0]: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-40

> IMO this is pretty common sense. No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it.

Actually this is very much how people think for code.

Consider the following consequence. Say I work for a company. Every time I generate some code with Claude, I keep a copy of said code. Once the full code is tested and released, I throw away any code that was not working well. Now I leave the company and approach their competitor. I provide all of the working code generated by Claude to the competitor. Per the new ruling, this should be perfectly legal, as this generated code is not copyrightable and thus doesn't belong to anyone.

No software company thinks this, not Oracle, not Google, not Meta, no one. See: the guy they sued for taking things to Uber.

The person I replied to said "No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it.". My point was that people absolutely do think and believe strongly they are authoring code when they are generating it with AI - and thus they are claiming ownership rights over it.

(the person you originally replied to is also me, tl;dr: I think engineers don't think they're authoring, but companies do)

The core feature of generative AI is the human isn't the author of the output. Authoring something and generating something with generative AI aren't equivalent processes; you know this because if you try and get a person who's fully on board w/ generative AI to not use it, they will argue the old process isn't the same as the new process and they don't want to go back. The actual output is irrelevant; authorship is a process.

But, to your point, I think you're right: companies super think their engineers have the rights to the output they assign to them. If it wasn't clear before it's clear now: engineers shouldn't be passing off generated output as authored output. They have to have the right to assign the totality of their output to their employer (same as using MIT code or whatever), so that it ultimately belongs to them or they have a valid license to use it. If they break that agreement, they break their contract with the company.

(oops, I didn't check the usernames properly, sorry about that)

I still don't think this is fully accurate.

The view I'm noticing is that people consider that they have a right to the programs they produce, regardless of whether they are writing them by hand or by prompting an LLM in the right ways to produce that output. And this remains true both for work produced as an employee/company owner, and for code contributed to an OSS project.

Also, as an employee, the relationship is very different. I am hired to produce solutions to problems my company wants resolved. This may imply writing code, finding OSS code, finding commercial code that we can acquire, or generating code. As part of my contract, I relinquish any rights I may have to any of this code to the company, and of course I commit to not use any code without a valid license. However, if some of the code I produce for the company is not copyrightable at all, that is not in any way in breach of my contract - as long as the company is aware of how the code is produced and I'm not trying to deceive them, of course.

In practice, at least in my company, there has been a legal analysis and the company has vetted a certain suite of AI tools for use for code generation. Using any other AI tools is not allowed, and would be a breach of contract, but using the approved ones is 100% allowed. And I can guarantee you that our lawyers would assert copyright to any of the code generated in this way if I was to try to publish it or anything of the kind.

Every contract I've seen has some clause where the employee affirms they have the right to assign the rights to their output (code, etc) to the company.

I'm not really convinced; I think if I vibe code an app, and you vibe code an app that's very, very similar, and we're both AI believers, we probably both go "yup, AI is amazing; copyright is useless." You know this because people are actively trying to essentially un-GPL things with vibe coding. That's not authoring, that's laundering, and people only barely argue about it. See: this chardet situation, where the guy was like "I'm intimately familiar with the codebase, I guided the LLM, and I used GPL code (tests and API definitions, which are all under copyright) to ensure the new implementation behaved very similarly to the old one." Anything in the new codebase is either GPL'd or LLM generated, which according to the copyright office, isn't copyrightable. If he's right, nothing prevents me from doing the exact same thing to make a new public domain chardet. It's facially absurd.

So if I want to publish a project under some license and I put a comment in an AI generated file (never mind what I put in the comment), how do you go about proving which portion of that file is not protected under copyright?

If the AI code isn't copyrightable, I don't have any obligations to acknowledge it.

You're looking at this as the infringer rather than the owner. How do you as a copyright owner prove you meaningfully arranged the work when you want to enforce your copyright?

I was looking at it from the perspective of an owner who simply wants to discourage use outside of some particular license.

There's close enough to zero enforcement of infringement, it's all self policing or violation.

Copyright office says this has to be done case-by-case. My guess is they'd ask to see prompts and evidence of authorship.

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