There's definitely a "too big to fail" thing going on here given how many billion/trillion dollar companies around the world now have 18+ months of AI-assisted code in their shipped products.
Several of the big LLM vendors offer a "copyright shield" policy to their paying customers, which effectively means that their legal teams will step in to fight for you if someone makes a copyright claim against you.
* quote: "No court has recognized copyright in material created by non-humans".
The problem now becomes how much AI work is influence and what about modifications
* Courts have recognized that using AI as reference and then doing all the work by yourself is copyrightable
* AI can not be considered "Joint work"
* No amount of prompt engineering counts.
* Notable: in case of a hand-drawn picture modified by AI, copyright was assigned exclusively to the originally human hand-drawn parts.
Notable international section:
* Korea allows copyright only on human modifications.
* Japan in case-by-case
* China allows copyright
* EU has no court case yet, only comments. Most of the world is in various levels of "don't really know"
After 40 pages of "People have different opinions, can't really tell", the conclusion section says "existing legal doctrines are adequate", but explicitly excludes using only prompt engineering as copyrightable
> Am I now assured that the copyright is mine if the code is generated by AI? Worldwide? (or at least North America-EU wide)?
Not only is the answer to that no, you have no guarantee that it isn't someone else's copyright. The EU AI Act states that AI providers have to make sure that the output of AI isn't infringing on the source copyright, but I wouldn't trust any one of them bar Mistral to actually do that.
It is going to be so interesting now that most software is going to be public domain. It's going to be us and the fashion world working just fine without intellectual property rights.
Products directly generated by a generative model are not copyrightable in the US. And therefore public domain. Not a lawyer, but I think the cases and commentary have been pretty clear. If you make significant human contribution / arrangement / modification / etc it can be copyrighted.
Long story short, you can't prevent anyone from using AI slop in any way they want. You would have to keep the slop as a trade secret if you want it to remain intellectual property.
"It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts."
Anyone seen clarity anywhere on what that actually means, especially for things like code assistance?
> Has the situation changed on AI code legally speaking?
lol,
l m a o,
essentially people who use LLMs have been betting that courts will rule on their favour, because shit would hit the fan if it didn't.
The courts however, have consistently ruled against AI-generated content. It's really only a matter of time until either the bubble bursts, or legislation happens that pops the bubble. Some people here might hope otherwise, of course, depending on reliant they are on the hallucinating LSD-ridden mechanical turks.
That's different. Courts have ruled on AI training data as being fair use, but whether you can copyright AI-generated content is another issue.
It's pretty unclear to me where this stands right now. In the USA there are high profile examples of the US copyright office saying purely AI-generated artwork isn't protected by copyright: https://www.theverge.com/news/602096/copyright-office-says-a...
But there's clearly a level of human involvement at which that no longer applies. I'm just not sure if that level has been precisely defined.
> The courts however, have consistently ruled against AI-generated content.
No, they haven't consistently “ruled against AI generated content”.
In fact, very few cases involving AI generated content or generative AI systems have made it past preliminary stages, and the rulings that have been reached, preliminary and otherwise, are a mixed bag. Unless you are talking specifically about copyrightability of pure AI content, which is really a pretty peripheral issue.
> It's really only a matter of time until either the bubble bursts, or legislation happens that pops the bubble.
The bubble bursting, as it is certain to do and probably fairly soon, won’t have any significant impact on the trend of AI use, just as the dotcom bubble bursting didn’t on internet use, it will just represent the investment situation reflecting rather than outpacing the reality.
And if you are focusing on an area where, as you say, courts are consistently ruling against AI content, legislation is unlikely to make that worse (but quite plausibly could make it better) for AI.
Am I now assured that the copyright is mine if the code is generated by AI? Worldwide? (or at least North America-EU wide)?
Do projects still risk becoming public domain if they are all AI generated?
Does anyone know of companies that have received *direct lawyer* clearance on this, or are we still at the stage "run and break, we'll fix later"?
Maybe having a clear policy like this might be a defense in case this actually becomes a problem in court.