this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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As much as I wish this was true, I don't really think it is.
It's just unsettled law, and the link is basically an opinion piece. But guess who wins major legal battles like this - yep, the big corps. There's only one way this is going to go for AI generated code
Worst case is that its the owner of the agent that recieves the copyright, so all vibe coded stuff outside local ai will be claimed by the big corpos
I actually think that's the best case because it would kill enterprise adoption of AI overnight. All the corps with in-house AI keep using and pushing it, but every small to medium business that isn't running AI locally will throw it out like yesterday's trash. OpenAI's stock price will soar and then plummet.
The big AI companies would just come out with a business subscription that explicitly gives you copyright.
Damn
Unlikely since, as you say, it would deter business. OpenAI already assigns rights of output to the end user according to their licensing and terms.
It is true that AI work (and anything derived from it that isn't significantly transformative) is public domain. That said, the copyright of code that is a mix of AI and human is much more legally grey.
In other work, where it can be more separated, individual elements may have different copyright. For example, a comic was made using AI generated images. It was ruled that all the images were thus public domain. Despite that, the text and the layout of the comic was human-made and so the copyright to that was owned by the author. Code, obviously can't be so easily divided up, and it will be much harder to define what is transformative or not. As such, its a legal grey area that will probably depend on a case-by-case basis.
So, you're telling me I can copypaste 100% some of the ai slop books on amazon and resell it as mine? Brb, gonna make a shit site an absolute diarrhea
Yeah, it's like products that include FOSS in them, only have to release the FOSS stuff, not their proprietary. (Was kind of cute to find the whole GNU license buried in the menus of my old TiVo...)
Even if it were, it would be for you or I, but not for Microsoft, apple, Google, or Amazon.
If the AI generated code is recognisably close to the code the AI has been trained with, the copyright belongs to the creator of that code.
And they should obey the license of the code.
Since AIs are trained on copyleft code, either every output of AI code generators is copyleft, or none of it is legal to use at all.
I may be wrong but I think current legal understanding doesn't support this
Wikipedia – AI and copyright
I've found a similar formulation in a official German document before posting my above comment. Essentially, it doesn't matter if you've ~~"stolen"~~ copied somebody else's code yourself and used it in your work or did so by using an AI.
The part that is untrue is the "public domain" part. If you generate code then you don't own it because the actual human work that went into creating it was done by the owner of the AI Model and whatever they trained on.
Iirc it's even funnier: the relevant case law comes from Naruto v Slater. A case about a monkey taking a selfie and a photographer failing to acquire copyright of it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute).
The copyright belonged to whoever shot the selfie, but because it was the monkey and animals aren't juristic entities, they can not hold copyright. Therefore, as it stands and as new case law outlines, AIs are compared to monkeys, in that the copyright would fall onto them but it's not a juristic entities either, and therefore copyright just vanishes and no one can claim it.
The wikipedia page suggests current cases on generative AI directly build on this.
It was an especially interesting case because there was a question of whether the photographer lied about who actually took the picture. So he could either claim the monkey took it an lose the copyright or claim he took it and have it lose all value.
See that's kind of what I'm talking about. The monkeys who pressed the buttons to make the AI Generate the code isn't the computer, it isn't the user, it's the employees at the AI company. My advice is that until laws are properly in place that we shouldn't use AI for any generative industry.
The AI company didn't do shit. They stole apples from someone elses tree and threw it in a blender. They didn't make the apples, nor did they buy them, so they don't legally own the juice.
While I agree with the general idea, please don't call piracy "stealing". It's not stealing, whether you do it or some giant corpo.
Don't call copyright infringement "piracy," either.
While I agree², their use of "steal" makes sense in the analogy because the apple doesn't belong to the "thief"; besides, you can't pirate an apple
Evidently you can!
If the AI produces verbatim the licensed works of others then the others own it.
If the AI took individual unlicensed elements and pieced them together then the AI Company owns it.
In any and every case, neither the User nor the Public Domain owns it. Moral of the story is: never use AI for anything.
The AI company stole other people's code, threw it into a blender, and is selling the output. They didn't do any real work, and they don't own the materials. They have no legal claim over the result. You do not own a car you made from stolen parts, no matter how many cars you stole from.
Stop trying to imply your buddies at AI companies have value.
We appear to be talking in circles.
I'm literally sitting here telling people it isn't safe to use AI Code, you're doing the opposite, and you're accusing me of being buddies with the Slop Companies?
Yes. You're giving the companies WAY too much credit for owning the blender they throw stolen content into, and you're even trying to give them ownership of what clearly doesn't belong to them. I'm sure they're just as eager to claim they did all the work and license the materials they use as you are.
I try not to call people idiots in debates, so there's really only one reason you'd be giving them so much support.
I guarantee you that the AI Companies don't give a single fuck about our opinion on copyrightable status, they've made an industry off of ignoring copyright laws entirely, and are instead salivating at the idea of a bunch of fucking idiots putting their slop code in everything so that they can try to enforce rights on it later.
You're just making shit up. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has affirmed that AI-generated work is in the public domain. Put up or shut up.
Edit: Additionally, the US Copyright Office writes:
Is letting an LSP auto complete for you "assistance of technology"?
How does this work in practice? Someone would have to prove that it's AI generated, which isn't straight forward.
Also, I'm not clear this protects the release of code centered a trade secret or under NDA.
So while the court ruled it's public domain. Could it still be prevented from release? Like a Microsoft employee couldn't just dump sections of the AI code to the internet I imagine.
https://www.upcounsel.com/patents-trademarks-copyrights-and-trade-secrets
I would imagine dumping Microsoft code to the internet would be sued under NDA
The answer is that it's messy and that I'm not qualified to say where the line is (nor, I think, is anyone yet). The generated parts are not copyrightable, but you can still have a valid copyright by bringing together things that aren't individually copyrightable. For example, if I make a manga where Snow White fights Steamboat Willie, I've taken two public domain elements and used them to create a copyrightable work.
So it's not like the usage of AI inherently makes a project uncopyrightable unless the entire thing or most of it was just spat out of a machine. Where's the line on this? Nobody (definitely not me, but probably nobody) really knows.
As for courts ever finding out, how this affects trade secret policy... Dunno? I'm sure a Microsoft employee couldn't release it publicly, because as you said, it'd probably violate an NDA. If there were some civil case, the source may come out during discovery and could maybe be analysed programmatically or by an expert. You would probably subpoena the employee(s) who wrote the software and ask them to testify. This is just spitballing, though, over something that's probably inconsequential, because the end product is prooooobably still copyrightable.
This kind of reminds me of the blurry line we have in FOSS, where everyone retains the copyright to their individual work. But if push comes to shove, how much does there need to be for it to be copyrightable? Where does it stop being a boilerplate
forloop and start being creative expression?That's the rest of what you posted. I guess you just didn't read it, right? Even if it comes right after and is part of the same paragraph. What a joke.
I clarified this a bit in a follow-up comment, but my first comment was simplifying for the sake of countering:
Their claim that the copyright for AI-generated works belongs to the model creator and the authors of the training material – and is never in the public domain – is patent, easily disprovable nonsense.
Yes, I understand it's more nuanced than what I said. No, it's not nuanced in their favor. No, I'm not diving into that with a pathological liar (see their other comments) when it's immaterial to my rebuttal of their bullshit claim. I guess you just didn't read the claim I was addressing?
Technology is an extremely vague word in this context. If the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has affirmed that then I haven't heard of it, it's not posted here, and most importantly: such rules are not currently enshrined in law.
Dude, just shut the fuck up and own up to what you were doing. You're acting like a snivelly little child. I've seen you around a couple times before, and it's like all you exist to do on Lemmy is make up and spread misinformation.
The fact that you're this upset about my warning about the use of AI really shows which side you're on, techbro.
No it's that you're trying to walk back a provably false claim and then deflect the claims by pretending the people calling you out are doing so because they like AI instead of, you know, valuing the truth.
I walk back no claims. The AI Companies have more claim on ownership of the output than the public. Don't use Slop Code, it's not safe.
Er, no - about it not being public domain. That's the claim you made that has been shown to be false. Trying to make it about AI being bad is the walking back.
AI Slop is not Public Domain. My statements have been consistent about that and remain true.
Aight and the proof already provided shows that it is in fact considered to be in the public domain, which proves you're wrong.
May I see it?
You already responded to it?
I'm not going to go fishing around for the case you and technician are referring to, but if it's anything like OP's links then it doesn't say what you're claiming it says and/or isn't nearly as broad and all encompassing as you describe. I don't live in a nation ruled by the blog/tabloid "synthtopia".
I mean sure you can ignore the court ruling, but here's the copyright office's guidance (which they also provided later in an edit) and it clarifies that AI generated work is not eligible for copyright