For me that would be the single biggest reason. People who vibe code don't legally own the copyright to the output (to the best of my hobbyist-non-lawyer knowledge), so they cannot themselves provide permission for others to be able to legally copy.
In the US at least, the PTO has not said this. They have said that artwork is not copyrightable if it was substantially "generated" with little human input. They have not said anything about software or other creative works. And certainly nothing about software that has been carefully "vibe engineered" with lots of human input, direction, and review.
It seems unlikely to me that the PTO would declare that a software project that heavily utilized an AI-based advanced autocomplete would make it not copyrightable.
Now, if you just one shot the most advanced Tetris algorithm of all time and post it on the web without any scrutiny or review, and no input, then it's probably not going to be copyrightable.
Why would they have different rules for one potentially copyrightable material versus another?
What the PTO (courts, actually) have not said is how much and what kinds of work a human must perform to transform a machine-generated work into a copyrightable work. It could be that this would be domain specific (i.e. different rules for software and art). But totally different rules entirely for software and art? Seems unlikely to me.
There is a longstanding distinction between expression (copyrightable) and facts and ideas (not copyrightable). Nor is this merely used as a binary category: the degree to which a work rests on facts and ideas, versus expression, is very much taken into account when considering the question of infringement.
Classic cases involve works like maps and biographies, versus works of pure fiction. You can surely see how the expression of the former is constrained in ways in which the latter is not.
The algorithm to reverse a binary tree is not subject to copyright. Nor is a court likely to accept the use of "left" and "right" as variable names as evidence of infringement.
They would treat the cases differently because the cases are different.
My opinion has always been that copyright law is an awkward fit for software, and remains so. That said, the iteration and edit cycle which is normal to agent-driven software development, has a rather different character than the more normal 'workflow' for art, which is: "drawing of Asuka eating an elote in front of the Chinese Theater" then picking the one the user likes the most.
There's also the realpolitik to be considered: courts are simply unlikely to shut down the use of LLMs in software development, that horse has left the barn. There's always some margin between 'can' and 'will'.
I agree that the copyright office has not said this either -- they have just said that you need to be a human to register a copyright.
If something is not covered by copyright law then others do not need permission to copy it. However, you cannot impose conditions on copying it either (not even minimal conditions like the 2 clause BSD license).
However you can enforce licenses in jurisdictions where even pure vibe-coded LLM output is covered by copyright. So you might find yourself in a position where, for example, you can enforce the GPL on your vibe-coded software on someone in the UK, but not someone in the US.
If a photographer can own a point and click snap of a painting then I expect we'll land somewhere where LLM outputs are or can become owned by the tool weilder with at most some minimum effort.
There's no reasonable belief that or similar scenarios cannot happen and does not happen.
That's my problem with Linus's announcement regarding AI in the kernel -since the announcement I'm counting the days until we see SCO II Electric Boogaloo.
There's a lot of people with deep pockets and a deeper hatred of FOSS, and AI gives them the backdoor to take FOSS out -legally, on the grounds of province.
(I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and this is only my speculation from a layperson's point of view)
That's not how copyright works. If you use a pirated copy of photoshop the resulting image is not illegal.
It's not as simple as your reductive analogy. It's for a court to decide.
How many youtube videos have gone dark over bogus copyright claims over the years? And you think people will overlook what's in AI -when there's over a trillion dollars on the table?
You seem to think one needs to have copyright to publish something but that's not true. If you don't infringe on anyone else's copyright there's no problem. And others can of course copy themselves.
The only problem is if someone else had copyright to the output.