I am the author of multiple AGPL systems, many in mainstream use. Early LLM models would spit out my code almost verbatim. Modern systems borrow heavily on the creative design of those systems.
One company first pirated my AGPL code (e.g. shipped it without my name, copyright notices, source availability, etc.). I sent them violation notices. After many months of fighting, they had an LLM clone the system. The LLM clone feels:
a) Buggy and bad compared to my code
b) Still, like it's basically my creative content
It's as if you asked an LLM to rewrite Harry Potter, with the same plot, but bad dialogue.
You can see that even with these licenses, they do not care and see free and open source code as the freedom to not pay for it.
They know you can't enforce it as it will cost you a lot more money to do that than it takes to recover the damages.
So to them, it is just cheaper to clone it using an LLM and close source it down. Unless you have a lot of money for litigation, the economics of free and open source software with its licenses do not work with LLMs bypassing it at every single angle.
By this logic, shouldn't any code using an open-source framework or language also be open source? Even before AI, devs learned from Stack Overflow and plenty of open source code.
You're confusing writing code with software engineering. Devs never just wrote code, they took ownership of the outcome. Business owners put their money on the line for product decisions.
To say that just because devs or founders use AI to write code, the code is no longer their intellectual property is ridiculous. Humans take responsibility for the outcome and are willing to accept the losses. AI can't do that. AI doesn't have any stakes in the output it generates, humans do.
A fair number of FOSS licenses were interpreted this way. The popular migration away from GPLv3 (might’ve been v4?) towards MIT, LGPL, etc had more than one cause (a huge one was the rapid sectoral commercialization; the decline of RMS’s reputation may have contributed, etc), but a big one was the potential interpretation of new GPL as being overly viral and “license-infecting” only slightly related software assets rather than wholly derivative ones.
> Devs never just wrote code, they took ownership of the outcome. Business owners put their money on the line for product decisions.
Does the same thing apply to Mickey Mouse? Would you say it's fine to use Disney characters in my own creations, as long as I take ownership of the outcome and put my money on the line for product decisions?
He’s not wrong, but I would argue a better model is the Derivative Work. This already exists in copyright law.
If I write a space opera that is a LOT like Star Wars there are major legal implications to this. If I write an original work of science fiction involving a weapon that destroys planets as an allegory to the history of the atomic bomb, I’m probably in the clear even if one of the characters is a furry alien with a laser sword.
The challenge now is how to apply that framework when nobody can see the original or resulting code.
Doe v. GitHub already decided (I'm simplifying, read the actual thing yourself) that LLM output is not automatically open source - or specifically it doesn't infringe on the open source training material and doesn't inherit the oss copyright notice.
Thaler v. Perlmutter (again simplified) showed 100% AI output can't be given any copyright.
The directions the current cases are going are very much opposed to that idea and I wouldn't expect things to change in the opposite direction.
You can't apply naïve transitive reasoning to law. Law is not code. Your assertions are meaningless and unsupported noise until they're actually tried in a court.
a statement *about* the legal system can be true without being litigated *in* the legal system. Courts rely on precedent in addition to logical argument, so their rulings cannot be deduced from rational argument alone.
Every major corporation on earth is behaving as if it was. If/when it gets tested you can be sure that the pro-copyright side will be very, very well funded.
It seems pretty clear-cut to me. AI companies plundered the commons, but the commons have licenses that come with them that clearly state that their use and derivatives thereof must also include the license and be open source.
This is a chance for great good for humanity and for the AI companies to do the right thing for themselves and for all of us.
Not releasing the code as open source would be just... well... evil.
And a further question arises for me: If we don't start sharing the fruits of the machines now, then when?
It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit. Even if they choose to give the code away, that choice is captured in the form of a specifically worded license (MIT, BSD, etc.).
This means that licenses exist because code is copyrightable in the first place, with the license governing the use of said copyright. If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
> If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
This is the crux of the issue. A license controls usage of copyrighted intellectual property. Until the underlying copyright/ip issues are resolved, it seems a moot point to discuss licensing.
That said, if AI code is _not_ copyrightable, does it automatically go into the public domain? Or is there a third category?
> It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit.
Just as it's important to remember that the purpose of regulations like copyright and patents are to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
If the absence of a particular person to hold the copyright twists your knickers, you could go a bit further and -say- decide that the people of the United States collectively hold the copyright to all LLM-generated code that's generated by US people or entities, and that relicensing of a particular piece of LLM-generated code must be agreed to by every US citizen that was alive when that code was created.
Maybe, but I don't think there's any legal president for that, is there? Much of existing law is based on centuries of private property rights. I don't see any government undoing that... or at least, not quickly.
> Maybe, but I don't think there's any legal president for that, is there?
We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution and its various subsections pretty clearly gives Congress this power.
• Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law,
without the need for legislative change.
• The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect
the availability of copyright protection for the output.
• Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author,
even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there
is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute
authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not
alone provide sufficient control.
• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are
perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination,
or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI-
generated content.
I am sure there will be many more legal battles and probably legislation about this to come.
Related question I just thought of reading this: if you are an employee at a company that you know 100% AI generates its code, and AI-generated code is not copyrightable... is that employee legally allowed to leave the company taking a full copy of the source code, and set it up as their own business?
Whilst the first training sets would have used Stack overflow and open source projects.
I have my suspicions that the AI companies have been using reverse engineering to gain more training data.
Ethics don't really concern these companies so...
When you have essentially infinite compute and are constantly looking for more training data. To me the next logical step is to start reversing compiled programs.
It could also explain why these AI models are so good at it too...
I mostly agree and have pretty much every one of my projects open source. One in particular, though, is not. And that is because the design of it is heavily domain specific and is built on loads and loads of experience. Not sure how to reconcile that...
There's a difference between something being released as open source and something that never gets released at all. Open source or not only becomes relevant when making the binary available to other people.
What's wrong with this website? When I open it in Safari on macOS, it consumes all my RAM. 20GB to start. I got a system warning to force quit some apps to maintain stability (which was a first in 5 years). When I closed other non-Safari apps, Safari usage then went up to 30GB.
Quitting and relaunching Safari, then returning to the site, produces the same results. The process for this website is what is using the RAM, it persists after closing the tab, and needs to be force quit.
I think the legal standard currently in the United States is that all AI output is public domain.
This means that all AI generated code is public domain at the point of it being generated.
Of course just because something is public domain that doesnt mean you have to release the code publicly. Public domain just affects what others can do with the output. It doesnt mean you have to release the code yourself.
The new Epic Games Store is apparently entirely vibe coded. So that technically would mean that the source code for it would be public domain right? But people still can't copy the store or do whatever they want as you have trademarks protecting it. And Epic is under no obligation to release the code..
I am not a lawyer. It's possible I am completely misunderstanding the situation. Is there something I am getting wrong?
> developers more and more rely on AI without even reviewing the generated output, let alone modifying it to fit their specific needs. Code like this, where humans put little effort, except writing prompts, should definitely be Open Source.
A person's contribution here is difficult to measure. This statement reminds me of one of my older bosses who priced software per lines written.
An AI-generated software's quality reflects the author's vision, taste, and expertise (if any). These are there regardless of the number of lines reviewed.
I would've supported open source for completely AI-generated apps including the conception of the idea.
I'm all for the concept of all code being open source... but I would then need a way to protect my final product from just being cloned or ripped off by a competitor.
With code itself being so cheap these days, it's the final product that has value. The requirements, architecture, usage data, the hundreds of meetings to figure out what customers want/need, the marketing, etc. A lot of the learnings and most of my business are expressed in the code though, so making it open is a massive risk. The code on it's own I don't even think is valuable. The only ones who'd benefit are competitors and upstarts targeting my customers.
Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from
me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
I’m confused. Is this article meant to be a scholarly legal argument (albeit, by a novice)? Or a normative statement about what the author would prefer?
It certainly doesn’t seem to be about practical solutions. It doesn’t even touch on the ramifications of its suggestions. I’m pretty sure that it would be a massive boon to data center operators and cause most of the readers of hacker news to lose our livelihoods.
I agree with the spirit of this. I'm a longtime open source developer and generally prefer GPL for my manual code. For my AI-generated code I'm using a multiple choice license of Apache, BSD, GPL, MIT.
If you're curious, here's my newest open source which helps build Rust web services along with Axum: https://github.com/publicprojects-io/axa and you can see the LICENSE.md file.
This article makes no sense. None of the arguments are sound and conclusive. First argument: Non sequitur. Programmers were also trained by open source software and from stack overflow and stack exchange. That's not a sound reason for their programs to be open source. Second argument: AI-generated content is not copyrightable. If that's the case, then it cannot be open source since open source licenses rely on copyright for their enforcement. The author confuses public domain with open source. Public domain and open source are two completely different types of categories with different legal implications. Third argument: This contradicts the second argument. Now programmers using AI should publish their code under an open source license or under CC0. That's a demand. Not everybody will do that and no argument is presented why they should do so. Fourth point: Not all code is a hundred percent human written and a hundred percent AI written. The author concludes from this problem that "Code like this, where humans put little effort, except writing prompts, should definitely be Open Source." There is no argument here at all. It's another personal demand without justification.
At least, the author should try to back up their demands with further justifications and make them less contradictory.
There is so little value to most code produced with models these days I just don’t see the point.
The real value ends up being found in software where there is a person behind it continuously refining it into something others will look at and say “Someone clearly paid attention to this.” Models can’t (yet) reproduce that because they can’t/don’t go interacting with users or asking bigger picture questions.
Whether someone is producing that software with a model or not doesn’t change much about the ownership picture to me: it’s the person that owns the project, and the LLM is a tool.
Once again, it all comes down to it being a tool and how it’s used, and there are no useful blanket statements that can be made about it (or how the tool’s output should be classified, legally or otherwise)
Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way.
They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.
But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)
> First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement.
I too have trained on the massive corpus of open source code. Should everything I code also be open source? Or only if I leverage an artificial neural network as a prosthesis to enhance the capabilities of my natural neural network?
Makes sense, many of the programming languages are open source, other novelty things were released as open source aswell, we as programmers/software engineers does a bunch of our solutions based on public code or under Creative Commons.
What I agree with the post is specific licenses require us some specific requirements like release the code if it's a derivation of prior work!
I'm tired of these child like responses from adult professionals in this industry. Do you argue just for the sake of arguing? No, your exposure to opensource code wasn't "massive" and you are clearly smart enough to know this but you had this make this comment as rage bait.
I have learnt to read by training on a lot of books, I should then open source all future things I write. I've learnt to walk by watching other people, I probably should publish videos of me whenever I walk.
I will be the first to make all my work free and open-source once I can obtain air, clean water, basic food, shelter for myself and my family, electricity, heating, medicine, education and internet access for free.
Until then, I’m sorry, but I have to feed my family while we all navigate this goddamn global transformation process.
couldn't you always generate infinite code? just write more of it. but what open source lets you do is read the code for a particular piece of software, to see what it actually does. generating infinite code has nothing to do with that.
you could also do this before, but only with infinite time. open source value is shifting. open source is human-validated code. just OSSing generated code has no value.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how LLMs have essentially made all code open source in a strange and very capitalist way: They’ve appropriated our human work—without regard for any licenses—by force and without any compensation to the authors, and are now selling the code back to anyone who’s willing to pay for it.
At the end of the day you don't actually need to see the source code if you can just regenerate it yourself. If you use a later ai model, your code will probably be better anyway.
Even if you modify it before using it, it's still based on open source (often GPL) code, so just everything based in part on LLM output should be open source.
>First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement. That code was simply scraped from the internet and used without permission or proper attribution. The models were also trained on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sister projects, which are released under Creative Commons licenses that legally require attribution. Turning this collective knowledge into proprietary, closed-source code feels like license laundering.
Strong argument, but the case that such a strong transformation should maintain the original licence only applies to my knowledge to GPL, which consists of a very small portion of the training set. Creative Commons would not even require the source code to be distributed, just attribution, which may already be the case by the nature of the models.
>"The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable. The foundation for this principle in the US goes back to the famous Monkey Selfie dispute, which established that non-humans cannot hold copyrights."
But no one claims that the AI holds the copyright, unlike Greenpeace which claimed that Naruto the monkey held the copyright.
1. Software had a strong movement of freely sharing all code because they believed this technology was too important to be controlled by corporations.
2. AI companies managed to create millions of RL environments from GitHub PR’s and similar, and train their model to learn what it means to code from all the human labour in the world from the past 30 or so years.
3. Companies now use these closed source AI models, to automate and fire their human workers who enabled this.
Something has gone seriously wrong here, whether this falls under copyright or not is besides the point.
We weaponized a fundamentally good instinct that generated a lot of value for society and allowed corporations to rent seek on all the data these humans generated to help other humans not trillion dollar corporations.
“Well we’ll give them a UBI check”, the AI company says which is a complete non-sequitur. It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
The only solution that sounds good to me, is a model trained on Open Source Data must be Open Source and all the code it generates must also be open source. This is the only way to stop the coming rent seeking. Even mathematicians will be happy with this change!
> It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
This is incredibly detached from reality. Most software engineers care more about money than they do about abstract notions of software from. Most certainly have not saved enough.
My patterns for loading data into Python is pretty much the same everytime with polars. I didn’t create that - I looked it up from a book somewhere. Do I need to open source it?
The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.
agreed. The problem is _which_ open source, because what we're probably going to slowly realize is most software will now be a public good and proper governance is needed thats indistinguishable from a public utility.
We already have a growing discoverability problem in many areas of content and throwing more slop into the mix is not the solution. This place for example has become a dumping ground for people, usually with no other activity here, to advertise their shovelware AI projects.
The author needs to realize that this is unenforceable.
In fact I'd argue that free software and open source is economically dead and unsustainable because of AI generated code and almost no one wants to pay for their tools because an AI can generate the missing feature for them close to $0.
Maintaining it is another thing, but assuming that the cost of tokens get cheaper, why wait for open source developers to maintain it when a frontier AI model can do it for far cheaper and quicker?
I am just saying what the average manager turned vibe coder would say who will refuse to donate or pay for established open source projects that they use for free.
Here is a different angle. A programming language is a material like wood, aluminum, or stone. If you know the syntax and properties of it can you start trying to bend it to your will - you can make a ship, a satelite, or a children’s toy wihh tv the same language. You first have to spend years mastering the material and its limitations before you can bend it, so only a small number of the people who want to make stuff get to. Some people release open versions of a ship and a satelite you can start from, to lower the threshold of making stuff. They protect them to make sure giant shipbuilder doesn’t go making an army of their ships to kill their trade.
AI comes along and now grandma, who was formerly a midwife and teenager from home can start bending aluminum and carving wood with their words through AI. There are a bunch of open ships and satellites in the market, but Grandma is using her midwifing skills to ask AI to bend a new tool for her that helps turn breach babies around without requiring a c-section. No open source breach tools or medical tools on the market Grandma just needs aluminum and wood combination she would never be able to achieve without AI. She hammers down a lot - sending 1000 follow-up prompts to make the AI do stuff nobody has done before. Next her grandson decided to combine tungsten and wood to make a new toy that helps kids go airborne and land safely every time - like an egg-drop but for real life people. No open source code for that out there - he used the AI which knew the properties and the languages needed to get his idea to work. He hammers the AI with follow up questions and edits a bunch of the code where the AI defaults to the wrong setup, by trained convention. But he succeede. By this plan should they be allowed to copyright their work? Should their work be automatically open source so they can never monetize it either?
I don't see extreme views in this article. When LLMs take creative content from copyleft code, the license says the output has to be copyleft. Otherwise, it's theft.
If LLMs weren't trained on AGPL/GPL/LGPL code, it'd be different. But they are.
Taking all of available human knowledge, knowledge that was published under limited licences, and commercializing all that already is a fairly extreme action.
Merely arguing that perhaps the fruits of that harvest should also be available to the public doesn't seem that extreme.
IMO it'd be better if the weights themselves were considered public domain.
That’s not an extreme view. Anyone who uses software under a copyleft license should also release any derivatives under the same license. While this isn’t currently the case legally since the GPL was never written with the possibility in mind that LLMs might be trained on it in the future it still aligns with the spirit of the license.
> such exterme views spawn extreme views in the opposite side
The opposite side had exrtreme views for at least 4 decades. They publish stuff, cram it into your face with advertisement and demand purchasing a license for consuming it. And if you don't buy they want you to pay thousands of dollars or go to jail. That's as extreme as it goes. Eff them. Reverse engineer, clone and open source everything. There shouldn't be a single proprietary piece of published software left in use.
No, GPL and copyleft licenses very much do and should force OpenSource by its nature. If someone uses GPL or AGPL and doesn't open source, they should be forced to Open Source.
This means “all software should be Open Source unless written fully by humans”, which practically means almost all software in the near future, which is a terrible idea for multiple reasons.
Open source people have had half a century to figure out how to make money with fairly little success (aside from a dozen or so very notable projects, and looking at all my AI slop, I don't see one of these hiding in there).
I don't particularly care about copyright or whatever ethical arguments yo may come up with -- I write code mostly for money, as do my competitors -- if you can figure out a way to stop them from using AI, I'm fine with not using it either. I'm fairly skeptical you can close Pandora's box though.
That aside, we may see more software going in a source-available direction -- either that or full cloud. Up until now being closed source was a competitive advantage, but now it's trivial to clone even fairly huge software suites, so that's less of a factor.
Having the source may also become a bigger advantage for regular users than before -- given they can now vibecode extensions/plugins, or customize the software more than what a config would personally allow. this probably wings the calculus away from a Photoshop-style license, and closer an Unreal Engine-style license.
Either that; or everything goes full cloud of course.
Under those conditions it would be un-licensable (since a license is essentially an agreement not to sue for copyright infringement) but it can still be made open by publication. I'm skeptical that the "anything that comes out of AI can't be copyrighted" argument will end up holding, but in the meantime it provides a strong incentive not to make that code public.
One company first pirated my AGPL code (e.g. shipped it without my name, copyright notices, source availability, etc.). I sent them violation notices. After many months of fighting, they had an LLM clone the system. The LLM clone feels:
a) Buggy and bad compared to my code
b) Still, like it's basically my creative content
It's as if you asked an LLM to rewrite Harry Potter, with the same plot, but bad dialogue.
They know you can't enforce it as it will cost you a lot more money to do that than it takes to recover the damages.
So to them, it is just cheaper to clone it using an LLM and close source it down. Unless you have a lot of money for litigation, the economics of free and open source software with its licenses do not work with LLMs bypassing it at every single angle.
You're confusing writing code with software engineering. Devs never just wrote code, they took ownership of the outcome. Business owners put their money on the line for product decisions.
To say that just because devs or founders use AI to write code, the code is no longer their intellectual property is ridiculous. Humans take responsibility for the outcome and are willing to accept the losses. AI can't do that. AI doesn't have any stakes in the output it generates, humans do.
Does the same thing apply to Mickey Mouse? Would you say it's fine to use Disney characters in my own creations, as long as I take ownership of the outcome and put my money on the line for product decisions?
If I write a space opera that is a LOT like Star Wars there are major legal implications to this. If I write an original work of science fiction involving a weapon that destroys planets as an allegory to the history of the atomic bomb, I’m probably in the clear even if one of the characters is a furry alien with a laser sword.
The challenge now is how to apply that framework when nobody can see the original or resulting code.
Thaler v. Perlmutter (again simplified) showed 100% AI output can't be given any copyright.
The directions the current cases are going are very much opposed to that idea and I wouldn't expect things to change in the opposite direction.
Agentic code development is human steering, thus copyrightable under the same grounds.
Open source code is copyrighted, otherwise we would be talking about public domain.
When you edit something in the public domain to enrich it, it then becomes copyrightable again.
[1] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/invoke-snags-first-ai-imag...
Edit: open source software itself has only been lightly tested in court.
This is a chance for great good for humanity and for the AI companies to do the right thing for themselves and for all of us.
Not releasing the code as open source would be just... well... evil.
And a further question arises for me: If we don't start sharing the fruits of the machines now, then when?
It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit. Even if they choose to give the code away, that choice is captured in the form of a specifically worded license (MIT, BSD, etc.).
This means that licenses exist because code is copyrightable in the first place, with the license governing the use of said copyright. If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
This is the crux of the issue. A license controls usage of copyrighted intellectual property. Until the underlying copyright/ip issues are resolved, it seems a moot point to discuss licensing.
That said, if AI code is _not_ copyrightable, does it automatically go into the public domain? Or is there a third category?
Just as it's important to remember that the purpose of regulations like copyright and patents are to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
If the absence of a particular person to hold the copyright twists your knickers, you could go a bit further and -say- decide that the people of the United States collectively hold the copyright to all LLM-generated code that's generated by US people or entities, and that relicensing of a particular piece of LLM-generated code must be agreed to by every US citizen that was alive when that code was created.
Maybe, but I don't think there's any legal president for that, is there? Much of existing law is based on centuries of private property rights. I don't see any government undoing that... or at least, not quickly.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
An excerpt, with emphasis mine:
• Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change.
• The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output.
• Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control.
• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI- generated content.
I am sure there will be many more legal battles and probably legislation about this to come.
I have my suspicions that the AI companies have been using reverse engineering to gain more training data.
Ethics don't really concern these companies so...
When you have essentially infinite compute and are constantly looking for more training data. To me the next logical step is to start reversing compiled programs.
It could also explain why these AI models are so good at it too...
How do you copyright stolen material?
Quitting and relaunching Safari, then returning to the site, produces the same results. The process for this website is what is using the RAM, it persists after closing the tab, and needs to be force quit.
This means that all AI generated code is public domain at the point of it being generated.
Of course just because something is public domain that doesnt mean you have to release the code publicly. Public domain just affects what others can do with the output. It doesnt mean you have to release the code yourself.
The new Epic Games Store is apparently entirely vibe coded. So that technically would mean that the source code for it would be public domain right? But people still can't copy the store or do whatever they want as you have trademarks protecting it. And Epic is under no obligation to release the code..
I am not a lawyer. It's possible I am completely misunderstanding the situation. Is there something I am getting wrong?
A person's contribution here is difficult to measure. This statement reminds me of one of my older bosses who priced software per lines written.
An AI-generated software's quality reflects the author's vision, taste, and expertise (if any). These are there regardless of the number of lines reviewed.
I would've supported open source for completely AI-generated apps including the conception of the idea.
RMS would be proud with this post though.
With code itself being so cheap these days, it's the final product that has value. The requirements, architecture, usage data, the hundreds of meetings to figure out what customers want/need, the marketing, etc. A lot of the learnings and most of my business are expressed in the code though, so making it open is a massive risk. The code on it's own I don't even think is valuable. The only ones who'd benefit are competitors and upstarts targeting my customers.
Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
My manners begin to fail, so I’ll stop here.
Doesn't mean it did either. (99% of the time it didn't tho. Nobody reaches to a vibe code machine because they care or want to dedicate effort.)
It certainly doesn’t seem to be about practical solutions. It doesn’t even touch on the ramifications of its suggestions. I’m pretty sure that it would be a massive boon to data center operators and cause most of the readers of hacker news to lose our livelihoods.
If you're curious, here's my newest open source which helps build Rust web services along with Axum: https://github.com/publicprojects-io/axa and you can see the LICENSE.md file.
At least, the author should try to back up their demands with further justifications and make them less contradictory.
The real value ends up being found in software where there is a person behind it continuously refining it into something others will look at and say “Someone clearly paid attention to this.” Models can’t (yet) reproduce that because they can’t/don’t go interacting with users or asking bigger picture questions.
Whether someone is producing that software with a model or not doesn’t change much about the ownership picture to me: it’s the person that owns the project, and the LLM is a tool.
Once again, it all comes down to it being a tool and how it’s used, and there are no useful blanket statements that can be made about it (or how the tool’s output should be classified, legally or otherwise)
Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way. They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.
But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)
I too have trained on the massive corpus of open source code. Should everything I code also be open source? Or only if I leverage an artificial neural network as a prosthesis to enhance the capabilities of my natural neural network?
What I agree with the post is specific licenses require us some specific requirements like release the code if it's a derivation of prior work!
You're also unlikely to output what you trained on verbatim.
Until then, I’m sorry, but I have to feed my family while we all navigate this goddamn global transformation process.
But yeah, aside from that, I’m also releasing all my Vibe Coding games under the MIT license: https://github.com/retrogames23/
Strong argument, but the case that such a strong transformation should maintain the original licence only applies to my knowledge to GPL, which consists of a very small portion of the training set. Creative Commons would not even require the source code to be distributed, just attribution, which may already be the case by the nature of the models.
>"The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable. The foundation for this principle in the US goes back to the famous Monkey Selfie dispute, which established that non-humans cannot hold copyrights."
But no one claims that the AI holds the copyright, unlike Greenpeace which claimed that Naruto the monkey held the copyright.
1. Software had a strong movement of freely sharing all code because they believed this technology was too important to be controlled by corporations.
2. AI companies managed to create millions of RL environments from GitHub PR’s and similar, and train their model to learn what it means to code from all the human labour in the world from the past 30 or so years.
3. Companies now use these closed source AI models, to automate and fire their human workers who enabled this.
Something has gone seriously wrong here, whether this falls under copyright or not is besides the point.
We weaponized a fundamentally good instinct that generated a lot of value for society and allowed corporations to rent seek on all the data these humans generated to help other humans not trillion dollar corporations.
“Well we’ll give them a UBI check”, the AI company says which is a complete non-sequitur. It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
The only solution that sounds good to me, is a model trained on Open Source Data must be Open Source and all the code it generates must also be open source. This is the only way to stop the coming rent seeking. Even mathematicians will be happy with this change!
> It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
This is incredibly detached from reality. Most software engineers care more about money than they do about abstract notions of software from. Most certainly have not saved enough.
The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.
Yes, it was trained on free software. Why does that mean my privacy should be invaded now if I distribute binaries I made?
But we're not headed in that direction are we.
In fact I'd argue that free software and open source is economically dead and unsustainable because of AI generated code and almost no one wants to pay for their tools because an AI can generate the missing feature for them close to $0.
Maintaining it is another thing, but assuming that the cost of tokens get cheaper, why wait for open source developers to maintain it when a frontier AI model can do it for far cheaper and quicker?
I am just saying what the average manager turned vibe coder would say who will refuse to donate or pay for established open source projects that they use for free.
AI comes along and now grandma, who was formerly a midwife and teenager from home can start bending aluminum and carving wood with their words through AI. There are a bunch of open ships and satellites in the market, but Grandma is using her midwifing skills to ask AI to bend a new tool for her that helps turn breach babies around without requiring a c-section. No open source breach tools or medical tools on the market Grandma just needs aluminum and wood combination she would never be able to achieve without AI. She hammers down a lot - sending 1000 follow-up prompts to make the AI do stuff nobody has done before. Next her grandson decided to combine tungsten and wood to make a new toy that helps kids go airborne and land safely every time - like an egg-drop but for real life people. No open source code for that out there - he used the AI which knew the properties and the languages needed to get his idea to work. He hammers the AI with follow up questions and edits a bunch of the code where the AI defaults to the wrong setup, by trained convention. But he succeede. By this plan should they be allowed to copyright their work? Should their work be automatically open source so they can never monetize it either?
First of all, nobody must force OpenSource. Period. Second, such exterme views spawn extreme views in the opposite side.
Discussion is good, but this article is too draconian to be practical.
If LLMs weren't trained on AGPL/GPL/LGPL code, it'd be different. But they are.
IMO it'd be better if the weights themselves were considered public domain.
The opposite side had exrtreme views for at least 4 decades. They publish stuff, cram it into your face with advertisement and demand purchasing a license for consuming it. And if you don't buy they want you to pay thousands of dollars or go to jail. That's as extreme as it goes. Eff them. Reverse engineer, clone and open source everything. There shouldn't be a single proprietary piece of published software left in use.
No, GPL and copyleft licenses very much do and should force OpenSource by its nature. If someone uses GPL or AGPL and doesn't open source, they should be forced to Open Source.
I don't particularly care about copyright or whatever ethical arguments yo may come up with -- I write code mostly for money, as do my competitors -- if you can figure out a way to stop them from using AI, I'm fine with not using it either. I'm fairly skeptical you can close Pandora's box though.
That aside, we may see more software going in a source-available direction -- either that or full cloud. Up until now being closed source was a competitive advantage, but now it's trivial to clone even fairly huge software suites, so that's less of a factor.
Having the source may also become a bigger advantage for regular users than before -- given they can now vibecode extensions/plugins, or customize the software more than what a config would personally allow. this probably wings the calculus away from a Photoshop-style license, and closer an Unreal Engine-style license.
Either that; or everything goes full cloud of course.