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

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simiones an hour 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.

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maxerickson 5 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 4 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 4 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.