alt Hacker NewsThis is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from public domain sources.
Replies
No such assumption is made in the article.
Nor does it give a single answer.
Mere prompting is still not enough for copyright, and the problem is unsolved on how much contribution a human needs to make to the generated code.
In the case for generated images copyright has been assigned only to the human-modified parts.
Even worse, it will be slightly different in other nations.
The only one that accepts copyright for the unchanged output of a prompt is China.
I'm sure it's not quite that simple. Only parts the parts of those knock-off works that aren't public domain could be copyrightable. If you only own the copyright to ten lines in a 10k line codebase, then it's probably fair use for someone else to just to take the whole thing.
Plus what if Anna Karenina was GPL?
You use humans to edit AI code? When you level up you are just using AI to write, AI to review, AI to edit, AI to test. Not a lot of steps left for meat bags.
Ok what about all the Anthropic’s engineers who say they don’t write code at all and it’s 100% AI-generated?
> This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged.
How much code do you need to change in order for it to be original? One line? 10%? More than 50%?
That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.
> This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't.
That's not how copyright works. The modified version is derivative. You can't just take the Linux kernel, make some changes, and slap a new license on it.
If you modify the work, that creates a derived work from whatever copyright the original works has, not a new work that is fully copyrightable.
As the article says in the Tl;DR at the top the code may be contaminated by open source licenses
> Agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate code that may be uncopyrightable, owned by your employer, or contaminated by open source licenses you cannot see
Wrong. This territory was heavily covered in music before this code concept - it has to be “transformative” in the eyes of the law. Even going in and cleaning up code or adding 10-25% new code won’t pass this threshold. Don't bother arguing with me on this, just accept reality and deal with it.
The article addresses this explicitly:
> Works predominantly generated by AI without meaningful human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection
Note the word "predominantly", and the discussion that follows in the article about what the courts and the copyright office said.