If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US.
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Hi @tuban_muzuru , totally with you that this is a deeply wrong, misguided "sky is falling" take; purely speculative, since there are no court rulings related to *code* anywhere in the vicinity of:
"used AI, therefore, *poof* it's legal to open source it!"
edit: at the same time, absolutely, LLMs were not ethically trained. But ethics != judicial systems.
But hey, @jamie , enjoy your popcorn regardless
@dusk @tuban_muzuru @jamie 2nded. I certainly appreciated it. I considered Tuban's perspective from a big tech position. Google would be contributing to their own IP risk. Since their legal team hasn't been lit on fire, I agree there might be nuance.
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
I'm surprised this isn't obvious. No, no, I'm not.
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FWIW I'm not a lawyer and I'm not recommending that you do this.
Even if companies have no legal standing on copyright, their legal team will try it. It *will* cost you money.But man, oh man, I'm gonna have popcorn ready for when someone inevitably pulls this move.
Can’t wait!!
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It'll be interesting to see what happens when a company pisses off an employee to the point where that person creates a public repo containing all the company's AI-generated code. I guarantee what's AI-generated and what's human-written isn't called out anywhere in the code, meaning the entire codebase becomes public domain.
While the company may have recourse based on the employment agreement (which varies in enforceability by state), I doubt there'd be any on the basis of copyright.
@jamie It may not be copyrightable but it can still count as one of the other forms of IP, such as trade secrets, which as a former employee you can very easily be prosecuted for divulging. And there are usually NDAs on top of that. (sorry, replied to wrong post before)
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@tuban_muzuru Buddy, you're the only one that's been whining this whole time. Whining about what I said, whining about "get a Claude subscription".
I was literally talking about "I'm gonna have popcorn ready". I don't know how you read fear from that.
It seems more like you feel attacked because someone criticized AI. You've been the only one alarmed in this whole thread.
@jamie The funny thing about this whole thread is apparently I'd already blocked that guy some time ago, so I'm only seeing your side of the conversation. And…that's all I need to know anyway.
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@starr I did notice it specifically mentions registration, but I thought copyright registration is necessary to enforce your copyright. Is that not correct?
Like, it needs to be confirmed that you indeed own the copyright before infringement of that copyright can be determined. Registration of the copyright is probably the single best way to do that and, if you don’t register it, my first line of questioning would be why you didn’t.
@jamie @starr Registration is required to sue to enforce a copyright, yes. The copyright exists without registration, but as soon as you want to sue, you have to provide the registration number or a copy of the Register of Copyright's formal denial (which you can then litigate).
What registration gives you is "statutory damages": for infringement that occurs prior to registration, you can only receive *actual* damages, not the act's fixed penalty plus treble damages and costs.
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@jamie @starr Registration is required to sue to enforce a copyright, yes. The copyright exists without registration, but as soon as you want to sue, you have to provide the registration number or a copy of the Register of Copyright's formal denial (which you can then litigate).
What registration gives you is "statutory damages": for infringement that occurs prior to registration, you can only receive *actual* damages, not the act's fixed penalty plus treble damages and costs.
@jamie @starr This was a big deal for authors in the Anthropic suit: those whose works had not been registered for whatever reason prior to the infringement were excluded from the settlement because they would only have been entitled to at most a few dollars in lost royalties, a fact-bound question not conducive to class action and for which they could not be awarded fees. (Foreign authors are understandably angry about this.)
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@starr Also, are the full contents of all registered copyrights visible at the Library of Congress? I assumed that was patents only but I used to get copyright and patents confused a lot and this may be one of those things I've been carrying incorrectly in my mind.
@jamie @starr No. You must deposit the work with the Copyright Office but the rules vary depending on the kind of work and the nature of the claim. For very voluminous non-literary works, the Office has long allowed deposit of a representative sample. While the Copyright Office is part of the Library of Congress, copyright deposits do not become part of the Library's public collections. (The Librarian can require publishers to deposit copies of specific works for public access.)
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@jamie It may not be copyrightable but it can still count as one of the other forms of IP, such as trade secrets, which as a former employee you can very easily be prosecuted for divulging. And there are usually NDAs on top of that. (sorry, replied to wrong post before)
@dwineman Yeah, there are a few approaches to IP law that they'd still have available. But even then, the discovery process would probably require them to air out some of their laundry, too.
IIRC one of the AI platforms was sued recently and settled out of court. Someone on here pointed out that they likely did that to avoid discovery, which would enter a lot of internal data into public record. I'm fuzzy on the details, but the gist was companies generally don't like to go to court over this.
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@dwineman Yeah, there are a few approaches to IP law that they'd still have available. But even then, the discovery process would probably require them to air out some of their laundry, too.
IIRC one of the AI platforms was sued recently and settled out of court. Someone on here pointed out that they likely did that to avoid discovery, which would enter a lot of internal data into public record. I'm fuzzy on the details, but the gist was companies generally don't like to go to court over this.
@jamie The problem is that as an individual, that process would likely bankrupt you well before it even got to discovery, and the company knows that.
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@jamie The funny thing about this whole thread is apparently I'd already blocked that guy some time ago, so I'm only seeing your side of the conversation. And…that's all I need to know anyway.
@jaredwhite Yeah, you didn't miss much. Mainly he was replying to things I wasn't saying. Easiest argument I've had on the internet in years.
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@jamie The problem is that as an individual, that process would likely bankrupt you well before it even got to discovery, and the company knows that.
@dwineman 100%. They don't need a favorable judgement to silence you.
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie RIP microsoft
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Stop whining. You and about seventy zillion terrified sheep running around here bleating about the Terrible AI monster under the bed.
@tuban_muzuru @jamie as a random viewer of this thread, you come off as utterly insufferable, which might not be what you think you come off as, and so you might want to reconsider your behavior
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie it's the same in Germany. You can't copyright anything that isn't created by a human.
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie Anything AI-generated is free, BUT anything AI-generated is also worse than simply worthless.
*shrug* -
If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie, so if a code review agent corrects a variable name in a proprietary 5M LOC project and that AI edit is not documented (where?), the entire project becomes public domain?
(Asking not you specifically but to entertain the thought such a law could be written without nuance.)
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie Hmm... this sounds like it's saying is that if a work (e.g. a code base) includes AI-generated content and doesn't identify which parts of it were AI-generated, the whole work and every part of the work, even the human-created parts, become ineligible for copyright. I believe that's wrong. (Maybe misleading, at best, if you meant it in some other way.) I mean, I can't say so authoritatively, since I'm a copyright nerd, not a lawyer, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced the more I look into it. If nothing else, it'd be a quick way to invalidate anybody's copyright on anything by just combining it with some AI-generated content and releasing the combination.
I think a more accurate statement would be that if you fail to disclose which parts were not written by a human, the copyright status of the work is unclear. The human contributions are still copyrighted by their authors, but there are some things that can't be done with the work as a whole without knowing which contributions those are.
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@fsinn @jamie My understanding was that training an AI model on copyrighted work was fair use, because the actual "distribution"--when the AI generates something from a prompt--uses a diminimus amount of copyrighted content from an individual work, except if the user explicitly prompted something like, "Give me Homer Simpson surfing a space orca," at which point the AI company would throw the user all the way under the bus.
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You're attempting to say " If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*
I'll be gracious and say that's not what the law says, and if you want, I can be a jackass about this because it's not true and the last thing this place needs is yet another Chicken Little making absurd claims.
@tuban_muzuru @jamie That's not alarm, that's joy.
