You must log in or # to comment.
This whole post has a strong ‘Sovereign Citizen’ vibe.
The Windows FOSS part, sure, but unenforceable copyright seems quite possible, but probably not court-tested. I mean, AI basically ignored copyright to train in the first place, and there is precedent for animals not getting copyright for taking pictures.
Would that include code and assets generated for AAA games?
How do you prove some codebase was AI generated?
This might be true, but it is practically unenforceable.
Agentic IDEs like Cursor track usage and how much of the code is LLM vs human generated.
Which probably means it tracks every single keystroke inside it. Which rightfully looks like a privacy and/or corporate code ownership nightmare.
But hey at least our corporate overlords are happy to see the trend go up. The fact that we tech people were all very unsubtly threatened into forced agentic IDEs usage despite vocal concerns about code quality drop, productivity losses and increasing our dependence on US tech (especially openly nazi tech) says it all.
Is Windows FOSS now?
Ew, no, thank you, I don’t want it.
Is this how it works? I would be shocked if this was actually how it works.
Nah, laws being like they are the copyright probably belongs to whatever cartel owns the bot you used to perpetrate the code, because fuck human people, that’s why, laws are for corporations’ benefit, not for yours.
Aren’t you all forgetting the core meaning of open source? The source code is not openly accessible, thus it can’t be FOSS or even OSS
This just means microslop can’t enforce their licenses, making it legal to pirate that shit
How the hell did he arrive at the conclusion there was some sort of one-drop rule for non-protected works.
Just because the registration is blocked if you don’t specify which part is the result of human creativity, doesn’t mean the copyright on the part that is the result of human creativity is forfeit.
Copyright exists even before registration, registration just makes it easier to enforce. And nobody says you can’t just properly refile for registration of the part that is the result of human creativity.
Yeah, a lot of copyright law in the US is extremely forgiving towards creators making mistakes. For example, you can only file for damages after you register the copyright, but you can register after the damages. So like if I made a book, someone stole it and starting selling copies, I could register for a copyright afterwards. Which honestly is for the best. Everything you make inherently has copyright. This comment, once I click send, will be copyrighted. It would just senselessly create extra work for the government and small creators if everything needed to be registered to get the protections.
Edit: As an example of this, this is why many websites in their terms of use have something like “you give us the right to display your work” because, in some sense, they don’t have the right to do that unless you give them the right. Because you have a copyright on it. Displaying work over the web is a form of distribution.
Public domain ≠ FOSS
So by that reasoning all Microsoft software is open source
Not that we’d want it, it’s horrendously bad, but still
windows would be OSS, not FOSS.
if you can’t enforce copyright, how do you stop others from giving it away for free and editing it, making it foss…?
Patents, trademarks and ToS.
This is why CC0 should not be used for code. Its public license fallback explicitly does not give patent rights. Compare that to MIT which implicitly does by saying you can use the software however you want. CC0 literally has this clause in the public license fallback.
No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The Al-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
I license my vibe-coded projects with the MIT license, so it’s working either way.
Counterpoint: how do you even prove that any part of the code was AI generated.
Also, i made a script years ago that algorithmically generates python code from user input. Is it now considered AI-generated too?
Computer output cannot be copyrighted, don’t focus on it being “AI”. It’s not quite so simple, there’s some nuance about how much human input is required. We’ll likely see something about that at some point in court. The frustrating thing is that a lot of this boils down to just speculation until it goes to court.
i made a script years ago that algorithmically generates python code from user input. Is it now considered AI-generated too?
No, because you created the generation algorithm. Any code it generates is yours.
Not how I understand it, but I’m not a lawyer. The user that uses the script to generate the code can copyright the output and oop can copyright their script (and the output they themself generate). If it worked like you said, it would be trivial to write a script that generates all possible code by enumerating possible programs, then because the script will eventually generate your code, it’s already copyrighted. This appear absurd to me.
If the script copies chunks of code under the copyright of the original script writer, I typically see for those parts that the original owner keeps copyright of those chunks and usually license it in some way to the user. But the code from the user input part is still copyrightable by the user. And that’s that last part that is most interesting for the copyright of AI works. I’m curious how the law will settle on that.
I’m open to counterarguments.
While nobody created neural nets and back propagation
Guess you can’t really prove that, unless you leave comments like “generated by Claude” in it with timestamp and whatnot 😁 Or one can prove that you are unable to get to that result yourself.
So nonsense, yes.
Or one can prove that you are unable to get to that result yourself.
Oh shit… I’ve got terabytes of code I’ve written over the years that I’d be hard-pressed to even begin to understand today. The other day I discovered a folder full of old C++ libraries I wrote 20+ years ago, and I honestly don’t remember ever coding in C++.
There is absolutely no way you wrote terabytes of code lmao.
True enough, and I expected to get checked on that.
Regardless… along with the archives, assets and versioned duplicates, my old projects dating back to the 90s somehow now fill multiple TB of old hard drives that I continue to pack-rat away in my office. Useless and pointless to keep, but every piece was once a priority for someone.
Cursor, an ai/agentic-first ide, is doing this with a blame-style method. Each line as it’s modified, added DOES show history of ai versus each human contributor.
So, not nonsense in probability, but in practice – no real enforcement to turn the feature on.
Why would you ever want this?
If you pushed the bug that took down production - they aren’t gonna whataboutism the AI generated it. They’re still going to fire you.
Uh, yes, that’s what they call a generative ai
That’s not even remotely true…
The law is very clear that non-human generated content cannot hold copyright.
That monkey that took a picture of itself is a famous example.
But yes, the OP is missing some context. If a human was involved, say in editing the code, then that edited code can be subject to copyright. The unedited code likely cannot.
Human written code cannot be stripped of copyright protection regardless of how much AI garbage you shove in.
Still, all of this is meaningless until a few court cases happen.
So wait, if my start up does a human written “Hello World” and the rest is piled on AI slop it can’t be stripped of copyright? Or is “Hello World” too generic to hold a copyright at all?
Granted, as you said this all has to be defined and tested in court, I’m just trying to understand where the line as you see it is.
“Hello World” is prior art.
https://www.reinhartlaw.com/news-insights/only-humans-can-be-authors-of-copyrightable-works
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf
A human must be involved in the creation. A human can combine non-human created things to make something new, but the human must be involved, and the non-human created elements likely lack protection themselves.
deleted by creator
People will believe anything if the icon on the tweet looks authoritative and the grammar is sound.
Oh darn, our CEO told us to use LLMs to write all this code, and now the good parts might be used for something that helps people. Not our copyrights!
To the CEO, “helps people” means “spreadsheet line goes up”.
how can you tell if it’s AI generated? you can’t
1- Code it in fortran 77.
2- DO NOT use DO or WHILE or any other non-compliant f77 code. Instead, use GOTO
3- makes the spaghetti so spaghetty that it curls in itself.
4- Make sure to use COMMON blocks everyhere! Not only for efficiency purposes but to also holds all that spaghetti in a tiny Schrondinger cat’s box.
5- last step is to do all that to write “Hello World!”
The same way you tell if it’s copy & pasted from Stackoverflow or some other search result!
that’s not my experience, it codes in your style if you give it the correct pointers, examples, and so on
