Doe v. GitHub already decided (I'm simplifying, read the actual thing yourself) that LLM output is not automatically open source - or specifically it doesn't infringe on the open source training material and doesn't inherit the oss copyright notice.
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.
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's legally untested, so we can't be sure one way or the other. But people definitely seem to assume that's the case.
[−]mapontosevenths · 2026-11-15 Sun 15:32 UTC ·
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Every major corporation on earth is behaving as if it was. If/when it gets tested you can be sure that the pro-copyright side will be very, very well funded.
I think most expect the courts will land on training AI on copyrighted works is fine, as long as the output of the LLMs is transformative enough to not violate the original copyright. Exactly the same as if a human learned on copyrighted material and outputted their own artifacts.
You can't apply naïve transitive reasoning to law. Law is not code. Your assertions are meaningless and unsupported noise until they're actually tried in a court.
[−]partloyaldemon · 2026-11-15 Sun 15:45 UTC ·
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Was your assertion tried in court? legal reasoning is naïve transitive reasoning.
[−]rookienumbers30 · 2026-11-15 Sun 15:55 UTC ·
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a statement *about* the legal system can be true without being litigated *in* the legal system. Courts rely on precedent in addition to logical argument, so their rulings cannot be deduced from rational argument alone.
The US copyright office is not the body that owns interpretation of the law though. They don’t determine in court if an artifact can be protected by copyright law.
The USCO is the regulatory and administrative authority and will inform the decisions of judges. They provide expert legal opinion that carries substantial weight.
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.
This is very much still working it's way through the courts (in the US at least).
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.
People show completely opposite reactions to AI generated creative contents vs technical materials such as source codes and instruction manuals.
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.
Your first cited article doesn’t necessarily support the idea that agentic code generation is copyrightable.
“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.
People who upload or download code from a US service also have to follow the law in their own countries.
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
They will just claim the code is trade secret and use Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA).
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)
That is not the Thaler v. Perlmutter conclusion. That case was about whether the machine itself could be made an author under copyright law. That is very different than whether AI output can be protected by copyright law. I am not aware of any cases that test that question yet.
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)