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| ▲ | Sharlin 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's beyond obvious that a LLM cannot have copyright, any more than a cat or a rock can. The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law. As far as I can see, it depends on the extent of the user's creative effort in controlling the LLM's output. | | |
| ▲ | graemep 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It may be obvious to you, but it has lead to at least one protracted court case in the US: Thaler v. Perlmutter. > The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law. Its is going to vary with copyright law. In the UK the question of computer generated works is addressed by copyright law and the answer is "the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken" Its also not a simple case of LLM generated vs human authored. How much work did the human do? What creative input was there? How detailed were the prompts? In jurisdictions where there are doubts about the question, I think code is a tricky one. If the argument that prompts are just instructions to generate code, therefore the code is not covered by copyright, then you could also argue that code is instructions to a compiler to generate code and the resulting binary is not covered by copyright. | |
| ▲ | computerex 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | According to the law, if I use Claude to generate something, I hold the copyright granted Claude didn’t verbatim copy another project. | | | |
| ▲ | Aramgutang 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is not "beyond obvious" that a cat cannot have copyright, given the lawsuit about a monkey holding copyright [1], and the way PETA tried to used that case as precedent to establish that any animal can hold copyright. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... |
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| ▲ | panny 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Where is there any legal precedent for that? Thaler v. Perlmutter: The D.C. Circuit Court affirmed in March 2025 that the Copyright Act requires works to be authored "in the first instance by a human being," a ruling the Supreme Court left intact by declining to hear the case in 2026. And in the US constitution, https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8... Authors and inventors, courts have ruled, means people. Only people. A monkey taking a selfie with your camera doesn't mean you own a copyright. An AI generating code with your computer is likewise, devoid of any copyright protection. | | |
| ▲ | graemep 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The Thaler ruling addresses a different point. The ruling says that the LLM cannot be the author. It does not say that the human being using the LLM cannot be the author. The ruling was very clear that it did not address whether a human being was the copyright holder because Thaler waived that argument. the position with a monkey using your camera is similar, and you may or may not hold the copyright depending on what you did - was it pure accident or did you set things up. Opinions on the well known case are mixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... Where wildlife photographers deliberately set up a shot to be triggered automatically (e.g. by a bird flying through the focus) they do hold the copyright. | | |
| ▲ | panny 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Guidance on AI is unambiguous. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ AI generated code has no copyright. And if it DID somehow have copyright, it wouldn't be yours. It would belong to the code it was "trained" on. The code it algorithmically copied. You're trying to have your cake, and eat it too. You could maybe claim your prompts are copyrighted, but that's not what leaked. The AI generated code leaked. | | |
| ▲ | graemep 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | can you tell me where exactly in the documents you link to it says that? | |
| ▲ | drzaiusx11 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The linked document labeled "Part 2: Copyrightability", section V. "Conclusions" states the following: > the Copyright Office
concludes that existing legal doctrines are adequate and appropriate to resolve questions of
copyrightability. Copyright law has long adapted to new technology and can enable case-by-
case determinations as to whether AI-generated outputs reflect sufficient human contribution to
warrant copyright protection. As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be
copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able
to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are
unlikely to satisfy those requirements. So the TL;DR basically implies pure slop within the current guidelines outlined in conclusions is NOT copyrightable. However collaboration with an AI copyrightability is determined on a case by case basis. I will preface this all with the standard IANAL, I could be wrong etc, but with the concluding language using "unlikely" copyrightable for slop it sounds less cut and dry than you imply. | | |
| ▲ | panny 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's typical of this site. I hand you a huge volume of evidence explaining why AI generated work cannot be copyrighted. You search for one scrap of text that seems to support your position even when it does not. You have no idea how bad this leak is for Anthropic because with the copyright office, you have a DUTY TO DISCLOSE any AI generated work, and it is fully RETROACTIVE. And what is part of this leak? undercover.ts. https://archive.is/S1bKY Where Claude is specifically instructed to HIDE DISCLOSURE of AI generated work. That's grounds for the copyright office and courts to reject ANY copyright they MIGHT have had a right to. It is one of the WORST things they could have done with regard to copyright. https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/articles/when-registeri... | | |
| ▲ | drzaiusx11 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I merely read the PDF articles you linked, then posted, verbatim, the primary relevant section I could find therein. Nowhere does it say that works involving humans in collaboration with AI can't be copyrighted. The conclusions linked merely state that copyright claims involving AI will be decided on a case by case basis. They MAY reject your claim, they may not. This is all new territory so it will get ironed out in time, however I don't think we've reached full legal consensus on the topic, even when limiting our scope to just US copyright law. I'm interpreting your most recent reply to me as an implication that I'm taking the conclusions you yourself linked out of context. I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt here, but the 3 linked PDF documents aren't "a mountain of evidence" supporting your argument. Maybe I missed something in one of those documents (very possible), but the conclusions are not how you imply. Whether or not a specific git commit message correctly sites Claude usage or not may further muddy the waters more than IP lawyers are comfortable with at this time (and therefore add inherent risk to current and future copyright claims of said works), but those waters were far from crystal clear in the first place. Again, IANAL, but from my limited layman perspective it does not appear the copyright office plans to, at this moment in time, concisely reject AI collaborated works from copyright. Your most recent link (Finnegan) is from an IP lawyer consortium that says it's better to include attribution and disclosure of AI to avoid current and future claim rejections. Sounds like basic cover-your-ass lawyer speak, but I could be wrong. Full disclosure: I primarily use AI (or rather agentic teams) as N sets of new eyeballs on the current problem at hand, to help debug or bounce ideas off of, so I don't really have much skin in this particular game involving direct code contributions spit out by LLMs. Those that have any risk aversion, should probably proceed with caution. I just find the upending of copyright (and many other) norms by GenAI morbidly fascinating. |
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