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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15533

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

In other words, almost nothing is closed source to LLMs if they have access to the binary.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The rest of the code will be open source, see how many open Wispr flow alternatives are there already, everyone has same features.

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.

This is a debate that we need to have before it gets event more muddier.

AI generated code should be (is?) public domain.

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)

At least, the author should try to back up their demands with further justifications and make them less contradictory.

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)

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?

Joking of course. Not sure copywriting code ever survives the AI era.

Llms are the compiler, and there are skill levels with vibe coding.

by that logic, anyone who learned to code from open source projects should make their own code open source too.

You've figured out a way to eliminate money.

But yeah, aside from that, I’m also releasing all my Vibe Coding games under the MIT license: https://github.com/retrogames23/

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.

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.

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.

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."

The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Yes, it was trained on free software. Why does that mean my privacy should be invaded now if I distribute binaries I made?

But we're not headed in that direction are we.

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!

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.

the only merit or such claim is to maybe move the overton window a tiny bit. maybe that’s worth the blog post

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?

Until then, I’m sorry, but I have to feed my family while we all navigate this goddamn global transformation process.

I keep seeing posts like this (especially on reddit) that infer some people are still writing code by hand and its confusing.

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.