| ▲ | bandrami 8 hours ago |
| OTOH as of yesterday the output of the LLM isn't copyrightable, which makes licensing it difficult |
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| ▲ | graemep 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| As other's have pointed out, this case is really about refusing to allow an LLM to be recognised as the author. The person using the LLM waived any right to be recognised as the author. Its also US only. Other countries will differ. This means you can only rely on this ruling at all for something you are distributing only in the US. Might be OK for art, definitely not for most software. Very definitely not OK for a software library. For example UK law specifically says "In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken." https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/9 |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The person using the LLM waived any right to be recognised as the author. They can't waive their liability from being identified as an infringer though. | |
| ▲ | bakugo 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken. This seems extremely vague. One could argue that any part of the pipeline counts as an "arrangement necessary for the creation of the work", so who is the author? The prompter, the creator of the model, or the creator of the training data? | | |
| ▲ | graemep 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The courts will have to settle that according to circumstances. I think it is likely to be the prompter, and in some cases the creator of the training data as well. The creator of the model will have copyright on the model, but unlikely to have copyright on its outputs (any more than the writer of a compiler has copyright on its output). |
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| ▲ | NitpickLawyer 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wrote this comment on another thread earlier, but it seems relevant here, so I'll just c/p: I think we didn't even began to consider all the implications of this, and while people ran with that one case where someone couldn't copyright a generated image, it's not that easy for code. I think there needs to be way more litigation before we can confidently say it's settled. If "generated" code is not copyrightable, where do draw the line on what generated means? Do macros count? Does code that generates other code count? Protobuf? If it's the tool that generates the code, again where do we draw the line? Is it just using 3rd party tools? Would training your own count? Would a "random" code gen and pick the winners (by whatever means) count? Bruteforce all the space (silly example but hey we're in silly space here) counts? Is it just "AI" adjacent that isn't copyrightable? If so how do you define AI? Does autocomplete count? Intellisense? Smarter intellisense? Are we gonna have to have a trial where there's at least one lawyer making silly comparisons between LLMs and power plugs? Or maybe counting abacuses (abaci?)... "But your honour, it's just random numbers / matrix multiplications... |
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| ▲ | bandrami 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In terms of adoption, "it's not settled" is even worse | |
| ▲ | amelius 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe we should build an LLM that can be the judge of that :) |
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| ▲ | senko 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's a very incorrect reading. AI can't be the author of the work. Human driving the AI can, unless they zero-shotted the solution with no creative input. |
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| ▲ | camgunz 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Only the authored parts can be copyrighted, and only humans can author [0]. "For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user." "In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that 'the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.'" "Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection. In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are 'independent of' and do 'not affect' the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself." IMO this is pretty common sense. No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it. [0]: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-40 | | |
| ▲ | simiones 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > IMO this is pretty common sense. No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it. Actually this is very much how people think for code. Consider the following consequence. Say I work for a company. Every time I generate some code with Claude, I keep a copy of said code. Once the full code is tested and released, I throw away any code that was not working well. Now I leave the company and approach their competitor. I provide all of the working code generated by Claude to the competitor. Per the new ruling, this should be perfectly legal, as this generated code is not copyrightable and thus doesn't belong to anyone. | |
| ▲ | maxerickson 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | So if I want to publish a project under some license and I put a comment in an AI generated file (never mind what I put in the comment), how do you go about proving which portion of that file is not protected under copyright? If the AI code isn't copyrightable, I don't have any obligations to acknowledge it. | | |
| ▲ | bandrami 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You're looking at this as the infringer rather than the owner. How do you as a copyright owner prove you meaningfully arranged the work when you want to enforce your copyright? | |
| ▲ | camgunz 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Copyright office says this has to be done case-by-case. My guess is they'd ask to see prompts and evidence of authorship. |
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| ▲ | skeledrew 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The human is still at best a co-author, as the primary implementation effort isn't theirs. And I think effort involved is the key contention in these cases. Yesterday ideas were cheap, and it was the execution that matters. Today execution is probably cheaper than ideas, but things should still hold. |
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| ▲ | phire 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's not really what the ruling said. Though, I suspect this type of "vibe rewrite" does fall afoul of the same issue. But for this type of copyright laundering, it doesn't really matter. The goal isn't really about licensing it, it's about avoiding the existing licence. The idea that the code ends up as public domain isn't really an issue for them. |
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| ▲ | oblio 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| As of yesterday? |
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