alt Hacker Newshttps://newsroom.loc.gov/news/copyright-office-releases-part...
> The Copyright Office affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.
People have tried over and over again to register copyright of AI output they supplied the prompts for, for example, in one instance[1], someone prompted AI with over 600+ cumulative iterations of prompting to arrive at the final product, and it wasn't accepted by the Copyright Office.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...
Replies
Yes, but the point is that the AI output could still be covered by the definitely-human copyright in the prompt, just not a new copyright in the output.
For example, machine-translating a book doesn't create a new copyright in the new translation, but that new translation would still inherit the copyright in the original book.
> In March 2023, the Office provided public guidance on registration of works created by a generative-AI system. The guidance explained that, in considering an application for registration, the Office will ask “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”
You are going to have to prove that things Claude stamps as co-authored are not the work of an "assisting instrument". It's certainly true that some vibe-coded one-shot thing might not apply.
I would also note that the applicant applying for copyright in your linked case explicitly refused guidance and advice from the examiner. That could well be because the creation of that specific work was not shaped much by that artist's efforts.
I wouldn't read too much into that when discussing a GitHub repo. It really will depend on how the user is using Claude and their willingness to demonstrate which parts they contributed themselves. You need to remember that copyright extends to plays and other works of performance. Everything the copyright office is saying in your linked ruling suggests that an AI-implementation of a human-design is copyrightable.