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Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

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mcherm·

The post claims (tongue-in-cheek, of course) that their customer owns the resulting code.

But that's not true!

According to binding precedent, works created by an AI are not protected by copyright. NO ONE OWNS THEM!!!

I think maybe this is a good thing, but honestly, it's hard to tell.

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This is a misreading of the law. Court cases say that AI cannot own copyright, not that AI output cannot be copyrighted.

No, according to everything I've read before, the parent post was correct and you're not. This article clearly says "art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law":

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-co...

Reading the linked Court of Appeals document in that post, the question is posted in the opening: "Can a non-human machine be an author under the Copyright Act of 1976?", which it then answers as no. It doesn't mention elsewhere that i can see that this means the output of the tool itself is not copyrightable. I would not trust the Reuters interpretation without a direct reference to a court document.

Could the prompt used to generate the art be considered human input, or is it that a human must to make some contribution to the art for it to be copyrightable?

The prompt itself is copyrightable but not the art/code generated from it.

If you’re referring to Thaler v. Perlmutter, that is not binding precedent nationwide, only in courts under the D.C. Circuit. And it only applies to “pure” AI-generated works; it did not address AI-assisted works, which seem very likely to be copyrightable.

Though here, the purpose is still served.

If I want to clone some GPL clone into a MIT license, if it ends up in the public domain because it can't be copyrighted, what do I care? I've still got the code I want without the GPL.

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