But we're not headed in that direction are we.
I too have trained on the massive corpus of open source code. Should everything I code also be open source? Or only if I leverage an artificial neural network as a prosthesis to enhance the capabilities of my natural neural network?
What I agree with the post is specific licenses require us some specific requirements like release the code if it's a derivation of prior work!
What matters are things like where the data comes from, how similar the output is to the input, how close the result is to existing (copyrighted) work, and so on.
Simply using copyrighted work, even all copyrighted work, to train a model doesn’t, by itself, trigger any legal consequences. In that respect at least, the comment you called “child like” was correct.
You're also unlikely to output what you trained on verbatim.
Humans get rights. Tools don't. Are you claiming that you're not a human, but only a tool?
Thaler v. Perlmutter (again simplified) showed 100% AI output can't be given any copyright.
The directions the current cases are going are very much opposed to that idea and I wouldn't expect things to change in the opposite direction.
Agentic code development is human steering, thus copyrightable under the same grounds per the language used by the US Copyright Office.
Open source code is copyrighted, otherwise we would be talking about public domain.
When you edit something in the public domain to enrich it, that derived work then becomes copyrightable again.
[1] https://journals.law.harvard.edu/jsel/2025/03/u-s-copyright-...
[2] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/invoke-snags-first-ai-imag...
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Edit: open source software itself has only been lightly tested in court. But that isn't even my point here.
The US Copyright Office has assigned copyright to works that leveraged AI. The USCO stated,
> “[we] decided to register a copyright claim in [the] work because we find that it contains a sufficient amount of human original authorship in the selection, arrangement, and coordination of the AI-generated material that may be regarded as copyrightable.”
Copyright office activity is orthogonal to litigation and the court system.
If a work receives a copyright, the courts will treat it differently if it becomes the subject of litigation.
Even open source license claims have not been fully litigated. We don't have to wait on the court to make certain assumptions.
It would be a surprising result for the courts to overturn the USCO. The courts routinely side with the USCO.
What the USCO is saying is a temperature check on how this will play out.
The first major precedent was in 2023 with Zarya of the Dawn comic book, where the US Copyright Office rules the midjourney-generated images were not protected, but the human-written text was.
The active front is Allen v. Perlmutter.
If you think about the distinction between those, it is often so considered that both are covered by copyrights, despite technical definitions of copyrights never covering mere technical resources, such as some computer programming things and instruction documents.
Only contents of artistic values are supposed to be covered by copyright laws.
IMO, what AI revealed is that most copyrighted software and documents are in fact not covered by copyright laws as per the naive model of it among common folks as well as legal text, as opposed to what precedents say. Code is not copyrightable.
I don't necessarily support that stance from practical standpoint, and I'd rather like everything be licensed under AGPLv3++ than entire concept of code copyright fall apart overnight, but this feels like the writings on the wall to me.
“A Single Piece of American Cheese sits between those contrasting poles: the initial image was created entirely by the AI program based on a brief text prompt, then the user repeatedly selected elements of the image and used additional prompts to add/alter elements.”
Agentic development is steadily reducing the necessity for human involvement in the final output.
Github also has to follow the law in any country where it allows usage of its services. Not all countries can enforce that but anywhere it operates or has enough paying customers can
And, the DTSA has only two reqs:
derive independent economic value from not being generally known or readily ascertainable by others, and the "owner" takes reasonable measures to maintain their secrecy (e.g., coke secret sauce).
since trade secret law does not prevent independent development or lawful reverse engineering, there are still opportunities. also, if a someone independently devs the same functionality, trade secret generally does not give them original dev ownership of that functionality. so, win.
Artcraft will be a good test case if Adobe goes after Brandon Thomas.
Much to be developed.
(and, this is why we keep extensive commit and development records outside of our genAI - ie provenance tracking)
If you're curious, here's my newest open source which helps build Rust web services along with Axum: https://github.com/publicprojects-io/axa and you can see the LICENSE.md file.
Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way. They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.
But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)
OTOH as models get better at RE it may become moot.
No copyright doesn't mean you can't keep your source code a tightly kept business secret. You can even combine it with NDAs and contracts to re-institute something akin to copyright.
The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.
The real value ends up being found in software where there is a person behind it continuously refining it into something others will look at and say “Someone clearly paid attention to this.” Models can’t (yet) reproduce that because they can’t/don’t go interacting with users or asking bigger picture questions.
Whether someone is producing that software with a model or not doesn’t change much about the ownership picture to me: it’s the person that owns the project, and the LLM is a tool.
Once again, it all comes down to it being a tool and how it’s used, and there are no useful blanket statements that can be made about it (or how the tool’s output should be classified, legally or otherwise)
I have my suspicions that the AI companies have been using reverse engineering to gain more training data.
Ethics don't really concern these companies so...
When you have essentially infinite compute and are constantly looking for more training data. To me the next logical step is to start reversing compiled programs.
It could also explain why these AI models are so good at it too...
How do you copyright stolen material?
In fact I'd argue that free software and open source is economically dead and unsustainable because of AI generated code and almost no one wants to pay for their tools because an AI can generate the missing feature for them close to $0.
Maintaining it is another thing, but assuming that the cost of tokens get cheaper, why wait for open source developers to maintain it when a frontier AI model can do it for far cheaper and quicker?
I am just saying what the average manager turned vibe coder would say who will refuse to donate or pay for established open source projects that they use for free.
Unless the license holder has a lot of money for litigation, it is unenforceable.
You're free to take that bet, we'll see.
My point is, if you don't have a lot of money to start litigating against the violations, the opportunists don't care and will continue to trample all over your "free and open source" software.
It not enforceable without a lot of money and the opportunists know that.
> You're free to take that bet, we'll see.
There is nothing to bet here. Truth Social is a clone of Mastodon (AGPLv3) and all they did was disclose the vanilla source code and not the modifications which that is required by the license. [0]
The same happened with Revolt (AGPLv3) and Andrew Tate's platform [1] and they never released any of the source code at all, nor could the developer enforce anything. [1]
[0] https://help.truthsocial.com/legal/open-source/
[1] https://insrt.uk/post/andrew-tate-stealing-software-revolt/
Yes, it was trained on free software. Why does that mean my privacy should be invaded now if I distribute binaries I made?
First of all, nobody must force OpenSource. Period. Second, such exterme views spawn extreme views in the opposite side.
Discussion is good, but this article is too draconian to be practical.
- e.g. People use tax loopholes because certain areas are not enforced. The ever-true trend is to never use "immoral" loophoes but people still do.
The article claims the strict enforcement of making AI gen code as open-source, which is exterme AF.
nobody must force OpenSource
If LLMs weren't trained on AGPL/GPL/LGPL code, it'd be different. But they are.
Say you read those codes yourself and built same thing yourself but different code base. That's what AI is doing. Do you still enforce that open sourceness to those?
No, GPL and copyleft licenses very much do and should force OpenSource by its nature. If someone uses GPL or AGPL and doesn't open source, they should be forced to Open Source.
IMO it'd be better if the weights themselves were considered public domain.
The opposite side had exrtreme views for at least 4 decades. They publish stuff, cram it into your face with advertisement and demand purchasing a license for consuming it. And if you don't buy they want you to pay thousands of dollars or go to jail. That's as extreme as it goes. Eff them. Reverse engineer, clone and open source everything. There shouldn't be a single proprietary piece of published software left in use.
Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
My manners begin to fail, so I’ll stop here.
Doesn't mean it did either. (99% of the time it didn't tho. Nobody reaches to a vibe code machine because they care or want to dedicate effort.)
Furthermore, copyright protects only the expression, not the idea - reimplementing the same idea with "different words" has always been permitted under copyright law (patents may protect the idea, though).
Of course, the fact that it would lack copyright protection it doesn't implythat you have to do something with the code for management of your kid's schedules, just that if someone else somehow legally gets hold of it, the law won't prevent them from making and distributing copies or derived work.
You are the one "stealing" the time and effort of thousands of people who have written free and open source software. If the ratio really is so huge, then just cut out the small part that does all of the stealing.
> So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
Open source licensing is only relevant when distributing the software, if you just use it privately it has no effect. You are not forced to make it public.
It doesn't need to be open-sourced: if it's legal to take an LLM that was trained on every other product in existence and use that LLM to produce clones of all those products, then it's legal to do the same to your product to.
So, go ahead and release. There'll be an open-source clone in no time if the product is any good at all.
In fact, if there are no clones, take that as direct feedback that you wasted your money on tokens - your product is so bad no one even wants it for the few dollars it will take to clone it.
I don't particularly care about copyright or whatever ethical arguments yo may come up with -- I write code mostly for money, as do my competitors -- if you can figure out a way to stop them from using AI, I'm fine with not using it either. I'm fairly skeptical you can close Pandora's box though.
That aside, we may see more software going in a source-available direction -- either that or full cloud. Up until now being closed source was a competitive advantage, but now it's trivial to clone even fairly huge software suites, so that's less of a factor.
Having the source may also become a bigger advantage for regular users than before -- given they can now vibecode extensions/plugins, or customize the software more than what a config would personally allow. this probably wings the calculus away from a Photoshop-style license, and closer an Unreal Engine-style license.
Either that; or everything goes full cloud of course.
It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit. Even if they choose to give the code away, that choice is captured in the form of a specifically worded license (MIT, BSD, etc.).
This means that licenses exist because code is copyrightable in the first place, with the license governing the use of said copyright. If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
This is the crux of the issue. A license controls usage of copyrighted intellectual property. Until the underlying copyright/ip issues are resolved, it seems a moot point to discuss licensing.
That said, if AI code is _not_ copyrightable, does it automatically go into the public domain? Or is there a third category?
Even if you accept that AI code isn't protected by copyright, code isn't public domain unless it's released. The legal issue would likely revolve around what 'released' means.
Code that runs on private servers isn't technically released. Code in web pages technically is.
But ultimately legal decisions decide to a large extent on who has the most money.
The frontier labs may eventually try to argue that they own the IP of all code, content, and inventions generated using their technology. That argument may or may not stand, and it's more likely to be over patent rights than plain copyright.
But there's a fair chance they'll try it once AI is unavoidably embedded in everyone's workflow.
It means that AI-generated code, including proprietary code, is not covered by the existing license mechanisms, including EULAs. Companies will of course handwave over this, but it would not surprise me if this is challenged in court at some point.
Just as it's important to remember that the purpose of regulations like copyright and patents are to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
If the absence of a particular person to hold the copyright twists your knickers, you could go a bit further and -say- decide that the people of the United States collectively hold the copyright to all LLM-generated code that's generated by US people or entities, and that relicensing of a particular piece of LLM-generated code must be agreed to by every US citizen that was alive when that code was created.
Maybe, but I don't think there's any legal president for that, is there? Much of existing law is based on centuries of private property rights. I don't see any government undoing that... or at least, not quickly.
We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
Was going to comment something similar; we do have concepts of "dominium eminens", and "escheated property", and "public domain", and many other similar ideas. If the people (through their representatives) decide on a certain property regime, it absolutely can be implemented even if it's different from the status quo.
I have no issue with changing the law. My comment is about the article and the author's misapplication of the law.
What parts of the six-paragraph Fine Article misapply the law? Be sure to quote and include the context surrounding the quoted section(s).
What are they going to do confiscate the world's gamer GPUs that can run this stuff all locally?
It's completely ridiculous.
Everyone is using AI generated code in all sorts of ways, and the idea that the courts are just going to say "nuh-uh. All existing use of AI code is illegal" is completely ridiculous.
Courts don't upend entire economies like that. This would be the remaking of the entire software industry overnight and it would be completely unenforceable.
I'm certainly not going to listen to any such ruling and will continue making code locally. As will basically every other software engineer in the industry.
You're absolutely right! And a little more than two hours before you posted this comment, I posted this [0] one! Make sure to read the parent comment for the context... it's pretty important.
That's absurd. It is a fantasy. Neither lawmakers or anyone else is going to remake the software economy.
But, the license reflects the rights that a copyright owner granted you; I don't see why laundering copyrighted material with training a model should remove the limitations on the material's usage that the author established.
So, while it makes sense to not be able to attach whatever copyright you want to LLM output, if it's the result of training on copyrighted code, the extent to which you're allowed to use it should be the intersection of the rights granted to you by that code's copyright owners.
It should thus carry a license that reflects the intersection of those rights.
What makes it much worse is that the model trainers don't tell you what specific sources determined the output, so you should probably just assume that it's the result of its whole training, and the only rights you have are those granted you by all the authors of the training material; and, this in all likelihood means no rights, for most LLM models in use now.
1. Software had a strong movement of freely sharing all code because they believed this technology was too important to be controlled by corporations.
2. AI companies managed to create millions of RL environments from GitHub PR’s and similar, and train their model to learn what it means to code from all the human labour in the world from the past 30 or so years.
3. Companies now use these closed source AI models, to automate and fire their human workers who enabled this.
Something has gone seriously wrong here, whether this falls under copyright or not is besides the point.
We weaponized a fundamentally good instinct that generated a lot of value for society and allowed corporations to rent seek on all the data these humans generated to help other humans not trillion dollar corporations.
“Well we’ll give them a UBI check”, the AI company says which is a complete non-sequitur. It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
The only solution that sounds good to me, is a model trained on Open Source Data must be Open Source and all the code it generates must also be open source. This is the only way to stop the coming rent seeking. Even mathematicians will be happy with this change!
> It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
This is incredibly detached from reality. Most software engineers care more about money than they do about abstract notions of software from. Most certainly have not saved enough.
One company first pirated my AGPL code (e.g. shipped it without my name, copyright notices, source availability, etc.). I sent them violation notices. After many months of fighting, they had an LLM clone the system. The LLM clone feels:
a) Buggy and bad compared to my code
b) Still, like it's basically my creative content
It's as if you asked an LLM to rewrite Harry Potter, with the same plot, but bad dialogue.
A book with a different plot? That would be obviously unrelated to the comment you're replying to?
I think there’s a lot of nuance and caveats to that kind of claim, assuming I am representing them correctly, but it’s a valid stance and I see where they’re coming from.
If we’ve mapped all of English, there are still ways to construct stories that haven’t been told from the mapping. The most simple would be a subtraction of all objects minus all objects that have ever been used as a murder weapon. Leaving you with a list of never before used objects at your disposal.
There are also probably close vectors conceptually but not in semantic use. Or trying to interpolate or extrapolate what exists in voids of space. Turning up the temperature and adding random generation of words. There’s tons of ways to tune these things to be more creative than regurgitative.
They know you can't enforce it as it will cost you a lot more money to do that than it takes to recover the damages.
So to them, it is just cheaper to clone it using an LLM and close source it down. Unless you have a lot of money for litigation, the economics of free and open source software with its licenses do not work with LLMs bypassing it at every single angle.
It’s interesting because these developments are actually an argument for making closed source software moving forward if you’re hand-crafting it make it the most restrictive license possible and don’t show the sources.
But I don’t agree with the OP everything should be open sourced. For instance, there’s a difference between deliberately steered AI work and something completely vibed. The former takes deliberation and creative choice, the latter will spit out fragments of prior art.
It’s the same with all generative work. Using diffusion models with controlNet (or equivalent) I can pass in a sketch wholly from my line drawings, and ask it to paint for me. That’s my design, assisted by AI, and should be completely copyright by me.
Coding agents will do the same thing when given sufficiently unique inputs. So, the claim all should be open sourced by default is flawed.
At this point, LLMs can just parse the machine code in your binary.
By doing closed source you are making it harder for the good guys (humans trying to learn sth or contribute) but not for the bad guys (LLMs getting trained or otherwise reading the code).
But you’re right, the fact is we simply live in a different world today and it’s tough to say what is the path forward.
But it’s harder to justify giving to the public when companies are making money on our work. It’s not a good situation for creators across the board unless motivations are purely altruistic.
Reads like a non-ironic version of Malus: https://malus.sh/
I think that’s why so many of us get so angry when people just dismiss the theft claim. They either lack imagination or experience. We can debate it and that is valid, but to dismiss it out of hand is not right
I think they just want to be able to take whatever they want without consequence, so it's convenient for them to define it as being different from theft
It also feels like a very discouraging time to release anything that you put a ton of effort just to get someone in minutes to steal your authorship and leave you as if you actually didn't do anything at all? Am I wrong?
If you don't want your code copied, then don't open source it. If it bothers you that others are going to look at and "get inspired by", "make derivatives of", "copy", "fork", etc then you shouldn't be putting it out in the open.
People who care about being respected on the most basic level are not going to stick around in a community that disrespects them. I'm not the person you were responding to, but I am mad because the social contract (not to mention the legal contract) of open source has basically been destroyed, and a lot of people have poured a large portion of their life into that community based in part on the assumption of that contract being upheld. Imagine a social contract that is important to you being violated to such a degree that you cannot go back to that society.
because I am not releasing it into public domain, but under license that requires (for example) attribution or releasing derivative work under the same license
You still have to give the source back and attribution has still to be maintained of its original authors, regardless if is a fork, a derivation or whatever you want to call it.
There are situations where none of these clauses have been complied nor its violators faced any legal consequences. That's what I'm talking about.
Now on top of that you can basically instruct and LLM to generate variations of what someone released and cover that up under the excuse that is a different project when is actually not.
Because it has been generated by a computer then we go into muddy waters about if the code generated is to be considered stolen or not.
Don't worry; the "developers" who generated your code will get their own law back when they find out it's almost impossible to monetise their theft.
I'm frequently amused by the number of "developers" on HN who claim that they poured weeks or months of effort into some product, and that they are the differentiating factor, but can't see that their weeks of effort can be cloned in a few prompts once they release.
People in this thread are acting like the AI companies are just flouting the law and there's nothing that can be done. This is an extremely well documented precedent, and GPL violations routinely show up in court. It's a very easy case to lay out especially because no one is really complaining about money except in the settlement... It's all about distributing the source code. And of course a very nice chunk of change for infringement but that's beside the point.
A successfully litigated case would result in the open sourcing of every AI that touched agpl code in any way because it was in memory with the AI algorithm.
clear in what way?
Isn't this the crux of all IP theft issues?
There was a lawsuit against Katy Perry's _Dark Horse_ song based on a supposedly reused melody. The lawsuit succeeded, but there are music experts who break down the case on YouTube and it's not clear why the plaintiff won (except perhaps the plaintiff's expert was more convincing than the defendant's).
As applied to LLMs, we still don't have clear legal guidance about where the line between copying and "being inspired by", especially since we don't normally apply the verb "inspired by" to non-human things.
All usage of open source to train LLM is basically a theft.
Saying things with your chest out doesn't make them true. In fact, making sweeping declarative statements emphatically is very often a sign that you haven't really thought a subject through.
What do you base this opinion on?
So if you believe that's how things work, well, I'm not sure there's a way to reconcile the two sides of that argument.
It does, however, feel incredulous that somebody would believe that such as entity exists. Yet here I am, aware.
For that matter, I personally don't hold that the concepts of good and bad are even relevant - what is good for the cat is bad for the mouse. Nor do I think that we can even comprehend an entity so outside our everyday experience to even label it good or bad. I often can not even properly label my neighbours as good or bad. Nor do I demand consistency of an entity whose actions and motivations I am unable to comprehend. I can't even claim to be consistent in my handling of my own children, and I have far fewer children than God has of us.
What are you trying to say?
I'm curious why specify Christian provenance?
All he did was reference "God." Are you under the impression that only Christians have a god?
You can mock that as a insufficient as "inspiration", but then... what is photography? Click a button? It turns out there is a whole lot of human creativity that remains, from timing, settings and of course, curation. I can click a button, but I'm no Ansel Adams.
Terrence Tao might solve a 100 year old math problem with AI but I couldn't. I don't know where I would start, what to ask or how to ask, or even what problems are worth solving.
AI is a tool and modern copyright laws have nothing to do with human creativity. Split hairs about attribution and legality all you like. Every creative person driven by curiosity should feel empowered by AI. Every creative person driven by social or monetary reward should feel threatened. Both can be true.
So not all use to train an LLM is a theft!
There are only so many ways to express notes, and they've essentially all been done.
I'm not arguing the copyright situation isn't wrong. Just that generating them isn't likely to sway anything in the legal world.
We can debate clean-room development all day long, and it's fair point, but the pain point is/was reproducing the repo as-is, sans its license and ownership information.
GitHub promised to build tools around its Copilot to find code provenance (e.g.: list of repos with similar code), but they silently dropped all the plans AFAIK, since it'll show how the sausage is made, and nobody wants you to know how that sausage is made.
I stand corrected: They added it, but I don't know at what capacity because I don't use LLM assisted code generation [1].
[0]: https://x.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554
[1]: https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/github-copilot/preview-referen...
For copyright to exist there is some burden of proof. If you claim that an LLM verbatim output your code there can be an expensive lawsuit with expert witnesses that would be able to state that the code was bot original enough for copyright to exist in it and a statistical model outputting the code is evidence of that.
In that case you would end up with a very long lawsuit that is expensive to possibly come out with no resolution in the end and be in the hole for 5-6 figures for it.
The copyright system is broken because it only protects those with money so it is a bad legal foundation.
My personal point is there is only 2 licenses of code, closed source or permissive, because if it ever comes to enforcement I cannot possibly go to court and win a case because I will run out of money far earlier than whoever used the code.
Pretty much if someone with your knowledge would have written the same algorithm because it is the obviously correct solution then there is no copyright there because any clean room implementation would be the same code.
Some further reading on the tech details for those interested: “Extracting books from production language models”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
I suspect the chance of asking for a whole book, by an average or even power user, will spit out any recent work.
Early LLMs were similar. Newer ones have gotten tremendously hard to extract to keep claiming there’s easily or complete books you can dump.
I wonder where else it works.
This is the intro text: "Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense."
This doesn't negate your point, but I believe the landscape has changed in response to this point.
It regurgitated the output earlier and they are still using the same technique only scaled up. If they somehow fixed the underlying problem, they'd probably shout it from the roof-tops.
As the OP originally said, if it is verbatim (or even very obfuscated), then there should absolutely be a case here. But when it's concepts in reasoning to build a new work then it becomes a lot harder. The same would be said for someone watching a YouTube video, reviewing open source code, or a text book.
The good news is that there's a lot of case law that covers this already. The bad news is that it is only going to be plaintiffs with deep pockets that benefit here.
Now the process and artifacts (documentation, requirements, etc) going into the creation of said software is a different story and will prove providence of whomever paid for the tokens to generate the code.
"In the training data" is the polar opposite of the "clean" in "clean room implementation".
If there are more murky situations where people just keep the same context and end up reusing function structure, program architecture, etc. then yeah, that's not very clean room.
Legally, you cannot steal an idea, because you cannot own an idea. There were sound reasons for making this the case. Those reasons stand up today and are clearly for the public good.
Intellectual property is intended to cover works (copyright), methods (patents), and identity (trademarks). Both works and methods are recognised as expressions of ideas, and in an ideal world should belong to noone as well. This is why copyright and patents expire. Those specific grants of temporary possession are to incentivise more things being done.
The belief that you own something because you thought it up has become common, but it is not beneficial to society. It is a moral value asserted but rarely explored. It is certainly in the interests of the wealthy accumulators of intellectual property to maintain that public perception. The 'You wouldn't download a car' may not have stopped piracy much but as a part of a broader campaign of instilling a value in the public mind it appears to have been massively successful. Those beliefs used to be the corporate opinion, now they are entrenched in the younger generation as they use their anger against the growing wealth inequality to fight against AI in a manner ultimately beneficial to those forces that bought about the wealth inequality.
Movements like the pirate party, open source, the EFF fought against those notions. Often the phrase "Information wants to be free" was used. It is, unfortunately, hard to fight the steady drumbeat of well financed PR firms. As one PR chap once described the process "limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand"
(I apologise for the length of my post, I use comment writing to organise my thoughts on a topic)
I genuinely don't understand how one could possibly make that argument.
The entire point of clean-room design is to kill every possibility of copyright infringement before it even starts, by completely separating the source and destination. Everyone who has ever read the copyrighted source is considered "tainted" and may not ever contribute any code to the "clean" destination. The readers and writers are two completely distinct teams, with only the known-clean specification passing between them.
LLMs, on the other hand, are fundamentally nothing more than a "code blender". You mix together giant piles of "tainted" code, and then statistically pull some combined fragments out of it. Following the clean-room legal argument, it should be treated as if everything coming out of it is tainted. There is, by definition, absolutely zero separation between input and output - and the early models verbatim reproducing popular F/LOSS code made that pretty obvious. LLMs are the literal opposite of a clean-room design!
Granted, going for the clean-room approach is overkill - and intentionally so. It is the nuclear option chosen when you believe the risk of getting sued is substantial. It is perfectly possible to write non-infringing code without using a clean-room approach, it is just a lot harder to defend in court when you get sued - be it justifiably or not. But "LLMs are non-clean-room non-infringing" is quite a different argument from "LLMs are clean-room, therefore non-infringing".
If Biz Markie has to clear all his samples (and he does[0]) then so should the Ramburglar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Upright_Music%2C_Ltd._v.....
It didn't protect you. It only protects corporations rich enough to get enforce their IP.
At this point it is better that it goes away.
There was a case about this specific issue, and in order to protect billionaires from coders they effectively declared AI models "natural persons". 50+ times in the copyright act you will find only natural persons can originate copyright.
https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig...
To give the money to billionaire corporations courts ruled DIRECTLY against established law. How much do you want to bet that when it comes to protecting ChatGPT AGAINST OpenAI, when it comes to protect Claude against Anthropic, courts will immediately do a 180 and declare them programs again?
If you look at past cases, it gets much worse. In order to justify a conviction against libraries using DRM to enforce lending, and because old licenses of course have zero language about digital copies, courts were willing to state that making a copy for fair use is not allowed if there is the mere potential for damage to the authors, as judged by the authors EVEN IF THE LICENSE EXPLICITLY ALLOWS IT. Of course, applying this to the above court case, there is no possible defense for OpenAI, after all, by that standard, the open source license doesn't even matter! That's how the law works for billionnaires. Outlawing DRM based lending has destroyed library access to an incredible amount of old works, and effectively denied access to old movies to Americans (because maintaining enough working physical copies over a large area is impossible). Whatever excuse gets the money to the billionaires!
There are many other totally absurd court judgements. For example, in order to get convictions where people didn't re-upload they had to judge that copies in buffers are also "distribution". NOT for billionaire telco's of course. Only the ones in your house. So courts judged that sending from your modem to your computer is distribution but sending over 1000 routers from Los Angeles to Athens is not! WHATEVER protects the billionaires.
As for this court case, obviously it is trivial to make a ML model that just outputs what it gets as input. Make a byte transformer, and just have diagonal matrices as layers. Boom! Done. You can also make it somewhat smarter. Let's make it copy, but make snow white a 220 pound black dude. There is a severe lack of color in old Disney movies anyway! You know, so there is no argument about transformation.
This obviously transforms its input. It's in the name. It's the EXACT same thing as ChatGPT, which according to courts originates copyright. Now run the Disney movies through it, and they'll be byte-identical BUT transformed to the input.
How much do you want to bet they'll still rule the money goes to Disney? Microsoft? So you can bet your left testicle courts will judge for selective copyright enforcement. Finding some excuse so the money keeps flowing to billionaire corporations, that's all courts do.
So Harry Potter?
Do you have some specific, actual examples you can share?
I’ve been hearing this exact claim for years, but every time I ask for a specific example, any example at all, I can’t seem to find anything more than a highly generic snippet of code or a coerced continuation.
He basically said, "I know, there's nothing I can do."
This is a sparse matrix library, IIRC. Numerical linear algebra and applications using it are black art at this point. I have written a Boundary Element Method evaluator for my Ph.D., and know what it entails to work with these things.
Doing fast operations on sparse matrices is a cutthroat race and when you can shave your hot path by seconds, your solution can save hours in some cases. So, it's an interesting niche. i.e.: It's no ordinary boilerplate, and worthy of publications in academia.
While I worked with dense matrices; the effect, difficulty, blood sweat and tears are still there.
When a model can give back your hard work back to you with a "completion" without attribution, that's bad.
Edit: Somebody just posted this below [1]. Added here so it doesn't get lost as the discussion grows bigger.
These algorithms' design starts on paper, as pure maths. You get the analytic form, and convert this to numerical/discrete form and start to design from there.
You need to add normalization, subnormal number prevention, maybe some architecture specific optimization if you are targeting a specific CPU generation, etc. Then it gets optimized further as you run tests, profile the code and run your test cases.
So, no BLAS package looks the same, because they make different trade-offs, have different programming models, and handle things differently, at different points. Even more so, a newer generation processor with much higher FPU performance can have lower performance than previous generation, so you implement another copy of that function or add to detect that processor and have different paths just for that one.
IOW, when doing numerical maths on processors, esp. if you're doing this on many machines with MPI or multiple cores with hand rolled code or OpenMP, there's no single way. Maybe a best way for the specific CPU you have, but it still depends on the trade-offs and design choices you made in the very beginning.
The design of those macros is more art than science.
You’re disqualifying any example that people may provide preemptively. No wonder you’ve missed them.
By “forced continuation” I mean the type of example that was popular for a while where someone would feed a lot of text into LLMs and then ask it to continue the text, then be surprised when it some times predicted the next tokens identical to the original example.
Do this enough times and you can find “examples” that prove your point, but it’s highly automatable so people were using it like a million monkeys at a million typewriters.
I know software patents, the worst idea in IP, do exist, but I think they're as toxically bad an idea now as they were decades before AI, when they were first invented.
You shouldn't be able to own an overall implementation idea. If you can, then Microsoft, Oracle, or Meta can too, and can start suing everyone for 'ripping off' an idea that they happened to come up with first. In that world, you'd have to consult a copyright-police AI (ironically) after every function you write, to scan it for ideas someone else has claimed. "Sorry, the function PadStringL() in this JavaScript is too similar in implementation to str_lpad(), from an AGPL library for perl that was released in 1998."
AI comes along and now grandma, who was formerly a midwife and teenager from home can start bending aluminum and carving wood with their words through AI. There are a bunch of open ships and satellites in the market, but Grandma is using her midwifing skills to ask AI to bend a new tool for her that helps turn breach babies around without requiring a c-section. No open source breach tools or medical tools on the market Grandma just needs aluminum and wood combination she would never be able to achieve without AI. She hammers down a lot - sending 1000 follow-up prompts to make the AI do stuff nobody has done before. Next her grandson decided to combine tungsten and wood to make a new toy that helps kids go airborne and land safely every time - like an egg-drop but for real life people. No open source code for that out there - he used the AI which knew the properties and the languages needed to get his idea to work. He hammers the AI with follow up questions and edits a bunch of the code where the AI defaults to the wrong setup, by trained convention. But he succeede. By this plan should they be allowed to copyright their work? Should their work be automatically open source so they can never monetize it either?
Strong argument, but the case that such a strong transformation should maintain the original licence only applies to my knowledge to GPL, which consists of a very small portion of the training set. Creative Commons would not even require the source code to be distributed, just attribution, which may already be the case by the nature of the models.
>"The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable. The foundation for this principle in the US goes back to the famous Monkey Selfie dispute, which established that non-humans cannot hold copyrights."
But no one claims that the AI holds the copyright, unlike Greenpeace which claimed that Naruto the monkey held the copyright.
But yeah, aside from that, I’m also releasing all my Vibe Coding games under the MIT license: https://github.com/retrogames23/
A person's contribution here is difficult to measure. This statement reminds me of one of my older bosses who priced software per lines written.
An AI-generated software's quality reflects the author's vision, taste, and expertise (if any). These are there regardless of the number of lines reviewed.
I would've supported open source for completely AI-generated apps including the conception of the idea.
RMS would be proud with this post though.
With code itself being so cheap these days, it's the final product that has value. The requirements, architecture, usage data, the hundreds of meetings to figure out what customers want/need, the marketing, etc. A lot of the learnings and most of my business are expressed in the code though, so making it open is a massive risk. The code on it's own I don't even think is valuable. The only ones who'd benefit are competitors and upstarts targeting my customers.
It certainly doesn’t seem to be about practical solutions. It doesn’t even touch on the ramifications of its suggestions. I’m pretty sure that it would be a massive boon to data center operators and cause most of the readers of hacker news to lose our livelihoods.
Until then, I’m sorry, but I have to feed my family while we all navigate this goddamn global transformation process.
Quitting and relaunching Safari, then returning to the site, produces the same results. The process for this website is what is using the RAM, it persists after closing the tab, and needs to be force quit.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
An excerpt, with emphasis mine:
• Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change.
• The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output.
• Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control.
• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI- generated content.
I am sure there will be many more legal battles and probably legislation about this to come.
Why did Andy Warhol hold the copyright on his painting of a Campbell’s soup can?
Reasonable people have been disagreeing about where human expression begins and ends for centuries.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
It is fairly explicit in saying that what AI makes for your is not copyrightable, the vague comes from how much work you need to do to make it your output and not the AIs. Too many people seem to equate "asking for something to be made" with "I made this!", as difficult as it will be to make a prescriptive rule about that which pleases enough people (you'll never please everyone) it would appear to be necessary unless we just accept the free-for-all "no one owns anything because it can just be copied, and the copies copied too" option.
I’ve encountered (many times) people talking about the copyright office as if they don’t support copyright of things touched by AI and I’m constantly correcting them that their guidance is driven by human expression (and not the tools used). It seems like a lot of people don’t want to accept that a reasonable premise is set because it doesn’t fit their agenda or outrage engagement.
"Translate my very detailed pseudocode into Ruby: <pages of pseudocode>": probably.
"Write me a game about a horse. Don't stop until it's finished. Make no mistakes.": probably not.
And unfortunately for us engineers, there's a very big, fuzzy, not-precisely-definable range in between of "I'll know it when I see it".
OP would much prefer their fantasy of tearing the world down with “one weird trick” that only they were brilliant enough to notice.
So slop doesn’t qualify for copyright. I’m not sure why you didn’t emphasize this one.
Does creatively hitting RETURN count? Asking for a friend.
One precedent is that it's not unusual for artists to practice by going to art galleries and sketching or drawing the art on display. It's a standard art student assignment. If that's not a copyright violation, an LLM doing something similar isn't.
Model vendors know this isn't fair use, given that they're self-censoring the training and/or generation of copyrighted materials by entities big enough to hurt them. As usual, the rest of us have no recourse other than bend over and take it.
That means I can't know if my AI generated code can be copyrighted unless someone takes it to court?
You're confusing writing code with software engineering. Devs never just wrote code, they took ownership of the outcome. Business owners put their money on the line for product decisions.
To say that just because devs or founders use AI to write code, the code is no longer their intellectual property is ridiculous. Humans take responsibility for the outcome and are willing to accept the losses. AI can't do that. AI doesn't have any stakes in the output it generates, humans do.
I know that many people would disagree with me on this, but thankfully I'm free to choose what license I consider "free".
Does the same thing apply to Mickey Mouse? Would you say it's fine to use Disney characters in my own creations, as long as I take ownership of the outcome and put my money on the line for product decisions?
My point is that devs have always learned from open-source code and the internet, then used that knowledge to write their own proprietary software. Why should it be any different when AI learns from the same sources and produces new code?
And that's assuming they want to make clear what they are building on.
The stakes in the output go both ways: wanting to profit from IP and risking liability because of violating IP licenses.
What you're saying is already the status quo, but reality is that LLMs make it so easy to "paraphrase" code or simply .. ideas, too... so that the whole concept of IP is eroding. Because the sheer scale makes it almost impossible to distinguish specific things that cross the line from "learning from" to "copying IP".
I'm not really taking a specific stance here but acting as if it would be a solved problem seems hard to believe to me, especially since it is not a new discussion.
I thinl you could argue that the solution is that copyright or IP concepts are not working anymore, something many people already concluded before the LLM and AI explosion of the 2020s.
But that's not the state of the current law, right?
In addition, your claim that the user of an AI system is the only person who has any "stakes" also seems questionable to me, because after all, we are talking about output that the AI user already paid an AI company for to generate it.
edit: word choice
Now just because same devs use AI to create code doesn't mean they should be banned from creating or owning a proprietary software.
In fact, current US law says AI output cannot be copyrighted.
Open source code: reproducing and publishing the code without following the license is a copyright violation. Instruction a computer programme to do the same thing should still be a copyright violation. Since this is the internet, I need to state the obvious: trivial code (defined on a case-by-case basis) is not copyrighted.
Books: the author expects you to reproduce their work, as long as it’s not another book. You wouldn’t get many sales if you sued someone for using the things you taught them.
The internet: actually the same as open source code. StackOverflow enforces a specific licensing clause to allow people to use code you provide. People who write posts that say “use this code to fix this problem,” are implicitly providing a license, too.
I don’t think using an LLM to generate code should remove its copyright but it also doesn’t remove the responsibility to not violate copyright.
Same with the ecosystem of creative work. Will some humans be inspired by my code or other artifacts? Sure. Does it mean it's fine to introduce an automated 1000 times more effective plagiarism machine to that ecosystem? Probably not. Certainly not if avoiding destroying the ecosystem is your consideration.
By this logic, shouldn't any code using a copyleft framework or language also be copyleft?
and yes duh
No, that's not how copyright works.
And I won't comment the rest.
This is a chance for great good for humanity and for the AI companies to do the right thing for themselves and for all of us.
Not releasing the code as open source would be just... well... evil.
And a further question arises for me: If we don't start sharing the fruits of the machines now, then when?
At least, the author should try to back up their demands with further justifications and make them less contradictory.
If I write a space opera that is a LOT like Star Wars there are major legal implications to this. If I write an original work of science fiction involving a weapon that destroys planets as an allegory to the history of the atomic bomb, I’m probably in the clear even if one of the characters is a furry alien with a laser sword.
The challenge now is how to apply that framework when nobody can see the original or resulting code.
This means that all AI generated code is public domain at the point of it being generated.
Of course just because something is public domain that doesnt mean you have to release the code publicly. Public domain just affects what others can do with the output. It doesnt mean you have to release the code yourself.
The new Epic Games Store is apparently entirely vibe coded. So that technically would mean that the source code for it would be public domain right? But people still can't copy the store or do whatever they want as you have trademarks protecting it. And Epic is under no obligation to release the code..
I am not a lawyer. It's possible I am completely misunderstanding the situation. Is there something I am getting wrong?
This is definitely not true.
The only thing a court has ruled is that the AI itself cannot hold any copyrights. Not that there are none or that using LLM based tools removes all copyright.
You've figured out a way to eliminate money.
> Some technologies allow users to provide iterative “feedback” by providing additional prompts to the machine. For example, the user may instruct the AI to revise the generated text to mention a topic or emphasize a particular point. While such instructions may give a user greater influence over the output, the AI technology is what determines how to implement those additional instructions.
- Footnote 30
“Open sourcing” is not just a legal state, it’s an affirmative act that takes work to prepare the codebase for public consumption. Saying that all the weird business code in the world should be involuntarily publicized is an incoherent concept. What precisely would OP expect to happen in a world that adhered to their opinion? Because to be clear, 90%+ of all code being written today is LLM-generated, so OP suggests that companies should no longer have any privacy wrt their internal software, all LLM code just gets yeeted into the public. How could that possibly work?
Given how easy it is to write software now, this perspective seems to overindex on a past state of the world that no longer applies.
Maybe companies should just stop using LLMs for 90% of the code?
This opinion by OP also assumes that code itself has some form of value. With the ways LLM work now code by itself is nigh-on worthless and as the models are becoming more capable, the value of code keeps going down.
It cited Naruto v Slater, which unsuccessfully argued that the copyright for a monkey's selfie belong to the monkey, not to the owner of photography equipment.
The courts dismissed the case as animals cannot hold copyright.
---
While the courts did not rule it, the apparent copyright holder is the photographer Slater who received royalties.
This is directly analogous to AI code, in which a human did not directly author the characters but regardless had "significant creative contributions."
But thats also why its buggy.
As soon as I start refining it, and commanding the AI to fix the mistakes, this argument starts to lose ground fast.
The tech community has adopted open standards for as long as I've been alive, and the AI is using these open standards as much as it is actual code.
Perhaps an open standard to prevent code from being used as training ( it probably already exists, i dunno ).
Methods to detect it ( I've seen that showing up recently. Using AI to detect AI. )
Some sanctioned actionable penalty under provable circumstance as the resolution ?
You can see why the copyright office wants to treat this as any other thing.
The details of proving claims get complicated quickly.
Definitely. And if the result isn’t essentially a clone of some existing copyrighted work, there really is no viable argument under current copyright law.
As an example, I have developed a set of grounding guidance for my AI models at my work. The specific grammar and vocabulary belong to my employer. But I also have a clean-room version of it that completely strips out that proprietary infringing information while still retaining a similar semantic structure. That will be posted next month on my GitHub under a GPL-3 license like I do with my other non-infringing AI-assisted work.
I don't understand this view point. Using ai and making high quality stuff is not pushing a button. Its hard. It takes real effort and diligence. And you have to pay actual money out of pocket to deliver it.
Because chairs are in effect an open source design, does that mean carpenters shouldn't get paid?
Its nonsensical.
I think that people who believe these arguments have bought into ai hype too much and genuinely are fooled into thinking pressing a button to spit out boiler plate code somehow equates to a genuine saleable product. It doesn't and it won't. And that stuff shouldn't be open source because it's a waste of everyone's time to consume.
Chairs can be covered by design protection.
And however hard a carpenter might work on a chair, if he copies a protected design he can't sell the chair.
However much work you might add on top of other people's copyrighted code, you don't get to sell it and use it however you want if you don't have the permission of the original authors.
It gets even more hilarious when you realise that the GP (tim) does not consider that, if you make the output of AI that was trained on copyrighted material legal to re-copyright, then it applies to him as well - all that hard work he did can be used chucked into an LLM either as context, or via LoRA, or even via simple explorative usage via tool calls, and then regenerated from that LLM, taking away whatever copyright the product had by generating a competing clone.
And at least of the level of feeling the answer is that it is my code.
Say I am stealing stuff that’s really heavy, can I demand I earned it because it was a lot of effort?
I am not trying to be facetious. I also question property rights because someone overpowered someone else to make that property theirs at some point in time. Whose effort is earned, and whose is robbery?
As far as I can tell we picked an arbitrary time after which all forced acquisition is considered robbery.
That being said, open source is for everyone to benefit. Violating an open source license is sort of a crime against everyone, not just the creator.
> I don't understand this view point. Using ai and making high quality stuff is not pushing a button. Its hard. It takes real effort and diligence. And you have to pay actual money out of pocket to deliver it.
You seem to believe that because you put months of work into this, you should have rights over the result, right?
But once you release, anyone can spend a few dozens of dollars and replicate it. Do they get the same rights over the clone that you got over your product, even though you potentially spent months coming up with it and they cloned it in a day?
There's really only two answers to this - either you agree that they should get the same rights over the clone that you got over your product, or you don't agree that they should have the same rights over their clone that you have over your product.
In either case, you are not better off:
1. If they get the same rights over the clone that you get on your product, you can't really stop people cloning your stuff, adding a feature or two, removing another feature or two, and then release something better than you for 1/10th of the cost of production.
2. If they don't get the same rights as you did because they used your product as training material for a clone, then wtf do you get any rights at all, after using millions of other people's products as training material?
I don't see any scenario where there is an outcome beneficial to you. Do you?
Whether programs written by LLMs should be protected by copyright law is also an entirely different question than should the authors be legally required to release the source code under a specific kind of license.
The rest of the code will be open source, see how many open Wispr flow alternatives are there already, everyone has same features.
the only merit or such claim is to maybe move the overton window a tiny bit. maybe that’s worth the blog post
AI generated code should be (is?) public domain.
Here's where I can get on board. I think people should be putting AI to work to improve everyone's lives for free. Your version of "should" is like "we should make this a law." My version of "should" is more like a moral recommendation -- we should be using as much of our subscriptions as possible to benefit everyone instead of enriching a handful of people. I view it as a natural extension of the spirit of free software to begin with. Software should be free (as in freedom), and we finally have enough development power to make real headway on that.
No one goes to an LLM and says, 'Make code'. More often than not (and with exceptions) there's a very specific problem getting solved. The distinction between human 'effort' (whatever that means) and Ai effort (??) is more or less arbitrary... Infact, it's almost xenophobic and snooty. Pre-Ai humans had other humans build something like x but with y specific features. If it wasn't a problem then, it's not a problem now just because people don't have to directly deal with another human. In the same vein, I think people are forgetting that sometimes projects are birthed by slapping together code (or an instruction for code) from all across the Internet.
So really... What even is 'purely Ai generated' code? Nothing comes from nothingness and generally I'd prefer the purest expression of my ideas be protected regardless of who wrote it... Human4hire or Chat.
EDIT: This article is unnecessarily upsetting. I don't even understand the problem when at the end of the day. A shit ton of the value accrues to all of us... humans! Not even the companies (atleast not so far). If Artificial Intelligence really is a utility, like electricity, then wtf is exactly the problem? I hope nobody really gives any real thoughts to policing Ai usage... It'd be as unreasonable as policing a calculator or pen and paper.
Manners force me to stop here.
I think that's the actual point here. AI-generated code shouldn't necessarily be open source, but it is not (or should not be) copyrighted. You can still keep it as a trade secret, but you have no legal protections that prevent others from reusing it once they have access to it.
The funny thing is though that soon this isn't even really going to be that much of a need to re-use someone else's code?
This is a debate that we need to have before it gets event more muddier.
I keep seeing posts like this (especially on reddit) that infer some people are still writing code by hand and its confusing.
Some people jump out of planes for fun. I can’t, personally, fathom doing that myself. But you still need to respect that different people behave differently (well, you don’t need to - we may be different in that respect)
I don’t really see a problem with LLMs slurping up and regurgitating the world’s knowledge, if it was all freely and equitably available, and more importantly had been beforehand. We’d all herald it as an incredible innovation. And in some ways it is even now, because I do have access to it in numerous forms.
The problem is that some author’s livelihood is adversely impacted by this, as copyright is (in a sense) what ensured their remuneration for the original work. So LLMs undermine the existing social and financial order in deleterious ways. It’s the same thing we’ve seen play out in mathematics, a bunch if tech bros show up with a powerful tool, use it in a brash manner that likely causes real harm, then worse, start pulling up the ladder when big media conglomerates complain.
I suspect we’ll soon be in a situation where we no longer have easy access to unfiltered LLM outputs. If your OSS project was in the training corpus it will still retrieve it. It will not, however, retrieve content from NYT or other protected sources. The end result is that small-scale, solo creators are damaged, and large-scale creators are still afforded copyright protection.
There is no way to enforce opennness. The LLM gives me output, I iterate on it by hand and with other language models, who does it belong to now? We are ushering in a post scarcity world for a select few.
In other words, almost nothing is closed source to LLMs if they have access to the binary.
by that logic, anyone who learned to code from open source projects should make their own code open source too.
PLEASE stop right there. Nations are sovereign, they decide for themselves if/how far copyrights are enforced. Let's keep it that way. There's enough [800lb gorilla meddling in other's affairs] as it is.
Let us skip the whole Bell Labs C/C++/unix/sh/ksh -> BSD csh/vi/bsd/tcp/ip, and other proprietary unix variants/utils and focus instead on today's landscape.
There are two axes we can partition the whole ecosystem. Free/OpenBSD, Clang/LLVM, musl, busybox, X11/Xlib, sqlite, postgresql, nginx, Python, Go, Rust, many embedded rtos, vendor sdk, utilities etc.. and then there is Linux/GCC/glibc, etc. Along the licensing spectrum there is GPL and then the rest of the permissive licenses MIT/BSD/Apache etc where source code publishing is not a requirement.
These permissive license offerings are more prevalent compared to the GPL offerings and as such one can gain all the knowledge needed to build a fully functional system. LLM could memorize, or copy the pattern, so even though it is not a clean room, courts seem to be ok as long as things are not spit out verbatim.
Add to this, the fact the there are tons of research articles, user manuals, RFCs, so one can learn and understand how to build the needed reusable component if small and give their own prompt (and bugs) and and let LLM do as user described.
In the US, purely AI-generated code isn’t copyrightable, but it also doesn’t mean you have to publish it. Also, putting an open-source license on code nobody holds a copyright to has no legal effect. So, ethically or otherwise, there is no strong and convincing argument that open sourcing is the right thing to do.
What 'creators' could do is to compile a list of all the frequently used permissive licenses that are applicable to their system and just make it part of their software license attribution.
[1] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/03/25/open-source-licensing...
Llms are the compiler, and there are skill levels with vibe coding.
This idea of no libraries/external dependencies sounds extreme, until you got hacked by a tiny library for http calls and that cost you billions of losses.
Much like how a photographer 'just' clicks a button on a machine and through a very complicated process it creates media, so does the human who makes media via an AI machine.
I think because of how corporate power works and how much money is at stake this will end up as the end result. Laws are made up by humans and a majority vote in a parliament can set this to be so, previous rulings be damned. And most treaties never really ever think about how media was made because this was never an question until recently. Copyright are not constitutional rights in most counties.
And then again, I wonder which license should be used. Is this a case of copyleft, and therefore everything generated should be something like GPL, or is it more like public domain because no copyright can be exercised?
Until and unless every creator and contributor of every piece of training data consumed by these models is fairly compensated for the use of their works, then absolutely everything created by these models should be 100% open source - including the models themselves.
That is everything bar one own mind and body, I guess, but your lineage might vary, and for sure some people out there would rather be deemed owner of everything under the sun, starting with human corps and souls.
Joking of course. Not sure copywriting code ever survives the AI era.
The argument between open and closed source has little value anymore and will soon not even make sense to discuss. It will be like writing "2 + 2" and arguing over whether my "closed source" copy of "2 + 2" vs your "open source" copy of "2 + 2". When something is trivial to reproduce it becomes absurd to argue over who owns it.
Point 2: Correct me if wrong but can AI generated code actually be copyrighted? If someone just keeps prompting but not touching the code would this still be considered pure AI generated work? If this is the case then point 1 and point 2 basically means AI generated code is already open source in effect if not in name.
There's a lot of room in between code that is closed-source and code that is "copyrightable".
Should code crafted via cut-and-paste from StackOverflow be open source? How about newsgroups before that? What about apps that use "no code" tooling? Is there a threshold for the use of external libraries and packages that cross the threshold for "that code was simply scraped from the internet and used without permission or proper attribution"? How about code I wrote while using auto-complete a lot?
I appreciate the author's sentiment and recognize that LLMs have aggregated the work of many, many people. I'm guessing their work wasn't wholly original either, like so much of the code I wrote before the age of LLMs. Whether those people whose work has been aggregated to train LLMs own that work - those ideas, those thoughts, those strategies - is exceedingly complex and (I speculate) largely won't hold up to real scrutiny.
This is a very poor definition. I use Phoenix's scaffolding all the time. So, running
mix phx.gen.html Blog Post posts title:string content:text
Actually, why not go straight to the source and tax the AI companies for the public benefit. That is the logical reduction of the argument.
What the software _does_ is almost always more important than how it does it (save for some amazing new technique which is very rare).
There are only so many ways to write a binary search or an octree, but the overall idea behind, say, doom is unique.
Open sourcing big blocks of code generated using standard techniques isn’t that useful (since you can just generate the same ones yourself), but the concept behind the application is the important bit (which of course, is now also easy to just generate).
If anyone can just generate their own version, who cares if it’s open source?
In the UK, the output of an LLM can come under copyright and therefore the author can license it as an open source product, but in the US it can't be done.