If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US.
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The post takes real legal uncertainty and cranks it up to maximum alarm. The actual state of things is more nuanced and still evolving — courts are working through these questions case by case, and the Copyright Office indicated that a future may arise in which prompts could "sufficiently control expressive elements in AI-generated outputs to reflect human authorship."
So it's worth being thoughtful about this stuff, but "your vibe-coded repo is public domain" is not an accurate summary of the law.
For more information:
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The post takes real legal uncertainty and cranks it up to maximum alarm. The actual state of things is more nuanced and still evolving — courts are working through these questions case by case, and the Copyright Office indicated that a future may arise in which prompts could "sufficiently control expressive elements in AI-generated outputs to reflect human authorship."
So it's worth being thoughtful about this stuff, but "your vibe-coded repo is public domain" is not an accurate summary of the law.
@tuban_muzuru There's no alarm in what I said.
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@tuban_muzuru There's no alarm in what I said.
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.
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@tuban_muzuru The link I posted was updated more recently than this post.
I'm also fairly certain that sufficient scrutiny will show that you cannot control the LLM to the degree that could justify copyright claim.
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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 You find that alarming? I meant it like "Holy shit, this is an interesting thing I hadn't considered."
And it's not an absurd claim. It's pretty much exactly what someone will say in court.
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@tuban_muzuru You find that alarming? I meant it like "Holy shit, this is an interesting thing I hadn't considered."
And it's not an absurd claim. It's pretty much exactly what someone will say in court.
Holy shit, dude, get a subscription to Claude and be thereby instructed. If you're a competent programmer, you will be asking the LLM for spec. If you're a dumbass, you'll be asking for implementation.
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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
Big bidness lobbyists will be descending on Capitol Hill to fix that.
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Holy shit, dude, get a subscription to Claude and be thereby instructed. If you're a competent programmer, you will be asking the LLM for spec. If you're a dumbass, you'll be asking for implementation.
@tuban_muzuru My company pays for both Claude and Cursor. I use both and my team discusses these tools daily.
I'm also very familiar with how LLMs work down to a mechanical level. I've trained models from scratch with code I wrote by hand and used those models to do some pretty neat things.
I assure you, you don't have a leg up on me in this discussion.
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Big bidness lobbyists will be descending on Capitol Hill to fix that.
@huntingdon I have no doubt they're already there. They probably don't even need to walk through the front door.
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@tuban_muzuru My company pays for both Claude and Cursor. I use both and my team discusses these tools daily.
I'm also very familiar with how LLMs work down to a mechanical level. I've trained models from scratch with code I wrote by hand and used those models to do some pretty neat things.
I assure you, you don't have a leg up on me in this discussion.
I can assure you, Jamie, whatever talents you may possess, possession of a Juris Doctor is not one of them. So do us all a favor and quit handing out what I believe to be so much Chicken Little-ing.
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undefined 77nn@goto.77nn.it shared this topic
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I can assure you, Jamie, whatever talents you may possess, possession of a Juris Doctor is not one of them. So do us all a favor and quit handing out what I believe to be so much Chicken Little-ing.
@tuban_muzuru I don't have a JD, that's correct. I do, however, have two siblings that do and this entire thread came out of a conversation with one of them.
And no, I will do you no favors. You came into *my* mentions. I had no idea you existed 40 minutes ago. So I owe you nothing. You'll just have to find a way to accept that I will continue posting my thoughts on my own account on my own server.
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Holy shit, dude, get a subscription to Claude and be thereby instructed. If you're a competent programmer, you will be asking the LLM for spec. If you're a dumbass, you'll be asking for implementation.
@tuban_muzuru @jamie if youre a competent programmer you will absolutely not be asking an LLM for spec. you will read documentation.
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@tuban_muzuru @jamie if youre a competent programmer you will absolutely not be asking an LLM for spec. you will read documentation.
@oay @tuban_muzuru This is the way.
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@tuban_muzuru I don't have a JD, that's correct. I do, however, have two siblings that do and this entire thread came out of a conversation with one of them.
And no, I will do you no favors. You came into *my* mentions. I had no idea you existed 40 minutes ago. So I owe you nothing. You'll just have to find a way to accept that I will continue posting my thoughts on my own account on my own server.
Shrug. Here's a tip - when you put up a para like this one: "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."
- I can make the observation you're being a Chicken Little. You guaranteed it.
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@tuban_muzuru @jamie if youre a competent programmer you will absolutely not be asking an LLM for spec. you will read documentation.
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@tuban_muzuru @jamie not with LLM
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Shrug. Here's a tip - when you put up a para like this one: "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."
- I can make the observation you're being a Chicken Little. You guaranteed it.
@tuban_muzuru The guarantee is that the parts of the codebase that aren't written by humans are not called out. You can read into the rest however you like.
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@tuban_muzuru The guarantee is that the parts of the codebase that aren't written by humans are not called out. You can read into the rest however you like.
.... how can you distinguish between 'em?
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.... how can you distinguish between 'em?
@tuban_muzuru You came into my mentions with guns blazing, so you'll have to forgive me if I don't consider that to be an honest question.
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@tuban_muzuru You came into my mentions with guns blazing, so you'll have to forgive me if I don't consider that to be an honest question.
Stop whining. You and about seventy zillion terrified sheep running around here bleating about the Terrible AI monster under the bed.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@marcell_o
Se un coltello ha affilatura su entrambi i lati è considerato pugnale.
SEMPRE illegale portarlo dietro.
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@FraEmme L'originale Nano Banana
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@macronaut Possibly. The next two posts in the thread have a little more detail on my understanding of the current state of affairs there.
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@leeloo Last I heard, the holders of the copyrights on the material that the LLMs are trained on are being told to get fucked.
The class action lawsuit that Anthropic lost was decided not because they trained their models on stolen copyrighted material, but because they stored copies of that material to keep training their models on. My understanding is that it was the storage specifically that violated copyright and that, if they'd deleted that data they'd have been legally clear.
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@emma Oh yeah, shit's gonna get weird for a while and I think a lot of legislation going in during this administration as well as recent SCOTUS cases will need to be revisited. Ideally after also instituting laws around conflicts of interest with government officials that don't carve out exceptions for, oh I dunno, members of Congress, for example.
Basically, I want the different branches of the government to fight each other again rather than the different parties.
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@jamie 🤔 Microslop, allegedly, vibe coded up to 30% of the Windows 11 codebase using genAI. Theoretically anyone working for Microslop with access to the codebase can upload the whole codebase without recourse?
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@jamie
That doesn't sound quite right. The code "AI" generates are stolen from other people, presumably they still have their copyright.Also, even if we pretend that it is actually generated by a machine, so is the output of a compiler. Is Microsoft Office in the public domain, because the executable was generated by a compiler?
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@jamie And Microsoft executives keep bragging about how much Windows code is being written by AIs?
Count me as one person NOT AT ALL interested in Windows, regardless of any copyright status.
