It’s just unsettled law, and the link is basically an opinion piece. But guess who wins major legal battles like this - yep, the big corps. There’s only one way this is going to go for AI generated code
I actually think that’s the best case because it would kill enterprise adoption of AI overnight. All the corps with in-house AI keep using and pushing it, but every small to medium business that isn’t running AI locally will throw it out like yesterday’s trash. OpenAI’s stock price will soar and then plummet.
It is true that AI work (and anything derived from it that isn’t significantly transformative) is public domain. That said, the copyright of code that is a mix of AI and human is much more legally grey.
In other work, where it can be more separated, individual elements may have different copyright. For example, a comic was made using AI generated images. It was ruled that all the images were thus public domain. Despite that, the text and the layout of the comic was human-made and so the copyright to that was owned by the author. Code, obviously can’t be so easily divided up, and it will be much harder to define what is transformative or not. As such, its a legal grey area that will probably depend on a case-by-case basis.
Yeah, it’s like products that include FOSS in them, only have to release the FOSS stuff, not their proprietary. (Was kind of cute to find the whole GNU license buried in the menus of my old TiVo…)
As much as I wish this was true, I don’t really think it is.
It’s just unsettled law, and the link is basically an opinion piece. But guess who wins major legal battles like this - yep, the big corps. There’s only one way this is going to go for AI generated code
One would hope it could be first tested against a small time company that can’t afford a good lawyer
Sadly, any lawsuit that opposed AI will have an army of lawyers defending the AI company.
Precedent affects all, and big companies know this.
Worst case is that its the owner of the agent that recieves the copyright, so all vibe coded stuff outside local ai will be claimed by the big corpos
I actually think that’s the best case because it would kill enterprise adoption of AI overnight. All the corps with in-house AI keep using and pushing it, but every small to medium business that isn’t running AI locally will throw it out like yesterday’s trash. OpenAI’s stock price will soar and then plummet.
Unlikely since, as you say, it would deter business. OpenAI already assigns rights of output to the end user according to their licensing and terms.
The big AI companies would just come out with a business subscription that explicitly gives you copyright.
Damn
If the AI generated code is recognisably close to the code the AI has been trained with, the copyright belongs to the creator of that code.
It is true that AI work (and anything derived from it that isn’t significantly transformative) is public domain. That said, the copyright of code that is a mix of AI and human is much more legally grey.
In other work, where it can be more separated, individual elements may have different copyright. For example, a comic was made using AI generated images. It was ruled that all the images were thus public domain. Despite that, the text and the layout of the comic was human-made and so the copyright to that was owned by the author. Code, obviously can’t be so easily divided up, and it will be much harder to define what is transformative or not. As such, its a legal grey area that will probably depend on a case-by-case basis.
Yeah, it’s like products that include FOSS in them, only have to release the FOSS stuff, not their proprietary. (Was kind of cute to find the whole GNU license buried in the menus of my old TiVo…)