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- Hacker News
- This just seems clearly false. Jackson Pollock had copyright in his paintings, even though he did not personally apply the paint to the canvas and his creative process left him no control over where exactly it would go. I understand that the Copyright Office has said things that imply otherwise, but I really think these are going to be overturned the instant that someone with enough money to fund the lawsuit is affected.
- I've only seen the Pollock movie but he definitely dripped the paint himself. Are you confusing Pollock with someone else like Sol LeWitt?by wmf
- Personally I don't even want to own my code. If it is useful to others I want them to have the same rights I have to it.
Or should I say, In the case of AI, "my" code :)
- Hypothetical but serious question on your stance: if someone takes "your" code, claims authorship, sells access, and becomes a billionaire from it while you get accused of plagiarizing "their" code and can't get a job coding, are you still cool with it?by avaer
- Scary headline to advertise a workshop ran by a lawyer, great. → https://whoownsthecode.com/workshops/
I won't pretend to have kept up with all the developments, since this is not settled law at all. But I can't imagine the consensus doesn't end somewhere around "if you told the AI what and how to code it, you're the author."
by internet2000 - // © 2026 whoownsthecode.com. All rights reserved.
Ironic.
by Retr0id - // Educational service, not legal advice.
X, not Y
by hexasquid - In what way? If it's written by a human, as is still a thing someone can do, it can be copyrighted.by SwellJoe
- Who owns the code if you built it with AI?
Someone else!
All they have to do is show it's close enough to code that was swallowed during training.
Songwriters have been successfully sued for many decades for creating songs that are too close to songs that they probably heard.
Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose.
by zephen - > Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose.
The notion of “your work is too similar to mine so I get to take ownership of it from you” is a very recent invention that has done more harm than good to human creativity, and if AI is the instrument of that invention's demise, then I look forward to it.
by yellowapple - Ultimately, the current copyright debates and the search for a boundary between “AI-generated” and “non-AI-generated” content are nothing more than a farce aimed at forcibly prolonging the life of *the vested interests (power structures) of an era when value lay in the “physical, manual labor of writing code”* into the AI era. Essential creativity and intellectual value reside in “design (architecture and specification definitions),” and if the design is sound, the code is merely the inevitable, optimized result of that design. As long as we remain fixated on indistinguishable boundaries or establish rules based on the futile self-reporting of “where humans made changes,” the law will continue to be completely left behind by the evolution of our times.
- "Is all of your organization's code free and open source, with no paid tier and nothing sold?"
This question, which pushed my stuff into some corporate route, seems a bit incorrect as it lumps three things together "open source" and "no paid tier" and "nothing sold". Shouldn't those be three separate questions?
by ddxv - Even assuming that AI code can't be copyrighted by the person running the AI (seems like a stretch), the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.by jujube3
- Yes, but to sue for infringement, you must register the work with the Copyright Office, and the registration must specify clearly what's AI and what's human-created, and only the latter is protected.by blacksqr
- >the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.
Company A: You stole our code >:(
Company B: Can you tell us which part we stole?
Company A: It's almost all vibecoded, but there's one function where a developer fixed it by hand
Company B: Okay we'll rewrite that function then :^)
by gruez - And if I use an effect in photoshop, do I own the resulting image?by dingaling911
- come on. people are doing a lot more than that with LLMsby peesem
- The important aspect is human creativity. If you're editing a thing in Photoshop in a way where you have rights to it to begin with, It's presumably starting from a place of human creativity.
So by applying a filter, you're deliberately making a choice that changes your image in a desired manner.
When an AI makes an image, or code, you aren't inherently applying human creativity. Now, if you took an AI image and applied enough traditional talent to modify it on top, is that copyrightable? Nobody knows yet until courts test it.
by techjamie - Sometimes? Depends on how transformative your effect is, and how much creative effort you put into it
That doesn't necessarily negate the copyright claim by the author of the original though. Just like me pressing the shutter button while pointing my phone at the Eiffel tower at night grants me ownership of the image, but if I want to publish it I still get into trouble for publishing a reproduction of a copyrighted light show
by wongarsu - Perhaps. Mere mechanical transformation is not copyrightable, but the decisions about how to apply transformations is.
Under US Copyright guidelines "the work will be copyrightable to the extent that their contributions qualify as authorship ... the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice"
but in a case where a printer rescaled maps on behalf of the plaintiff:
"the “compilation needed only simple transcription to achieve final tangible form.”54 Because the printer “did not change the substance of [plaintiff’s] original expression,” the court held that the plaintiff was the author"
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
by nl - AI = No author is so bloody reductionist.
The copyright ruling was about prompting without modification. The second you modify the result significantly by hand, the ruling doesn't apply. It also had a huge carve out for any future LLM that was more deterministic, which might apply to people with huge skill and other md files to tram in AI. It just hasnt been tested.
These armchair copyright lawyers need to launch a lawsuit and stick their money where their mouth is instead of creating dumb clickbait nonsense.
by protocolture - I removed that part from the submission title, I agree it’s a bit too click-baityby dgellow
- The "significant modification" is key. So I don't think one can claim copyright on a book an AI created from a prompt (or even 10,000 prompts) after performing a search/replace to rename the protagonist from A to B.by Balooga
- Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole.
Really so should all creative works, on the same basis of all creative expression being the product of the society and civilization which fundamentally and inescapably influenced the creator — and they would belong to humanity as a whole, if it wasn't for intellectual property systems demanding the removal of ideas from the commons.
by yellowapple - Really gotta force the starving artist motif or what's the point?by kulahan
- I’m all for this, if we also set up a system to let society pay for artists. And I mean in full: cover for their living expenses; their rent; internet access; materials; everything.
Or how do you suppose art gets created for humanity as a whole to enjoy?
by 9dev - I don't really understand this, I was trained on all the knowledge I was capable of ingesting, but my outputs are largely mine unless there is too much similarity to a copyrighted work. I don't understand why AI would be different. When I do work for hire, my employer owns it, roughly equivalent to me paying Open AI/Anthropic for output.by rileymat2
- It's either/or. Either you reward creators and inventors to keep creating and inventing and keep poverty at bay, or you give everyone enough to avoid poverty whether they work or not and reward c+i in some other way.
What we have now is neither - owners are hugely over-rewarded for owning things and extracting passive value from everyone else, creators and inventors are kinda sorta rewarded sometimes if they're lucky and very much not if they're not. Just like other workers.
"The commons" is not a thing in this model, except in a few small niches.
- >Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole.
No it doesn't, because that would mean any sort of secondary source shouldn't be eligible for copyright either, eg. encyclopedias, which are basically rehashing "the sum of human knowledge".
by gruez - This page tries to make the case the AI generated code is not copyrightable. But the US Copyright Office's guidelines very strongly indicate the opposite, and certainly doesn't rule out AI Code being copyrightable:
While assistive uses that enhance human expression do not limit copyright protection, uses where an AI system makes expressive choices require further analysis. This distinction depends on how the system is being used, not on its inherent characteristics
However it also makes this point:
The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output
but further:
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 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
and
Similarly, the inclusion of elements of AI-generated content in a larger human-authored work does not affect the copyrightability of the larger human-authored work as a whole. For example, a film that includes AI-generated special effects or background artwork is copyrightable, even if the AI effects and artwork separately are not
Note that this isn't settled law though.
Further, note that the failure to register copyright on AI generated images seems mostly because the person attempting this is trying to register it as owned by the AI not a human.
See https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
by nl