alt Hacker NewsOne question I have is this: if an employee produces code predominantly generated by AI, it means that it is not copyrightable. Does that mean that the employee can take that code and publish it on the Internet?
Or is it still IP even if it is not copyrightable? That would feel weird: if it's in the public domain, then it's not IP, is it?
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A recipe isn't copyrightable but is still protected under trade secret law. I imagine that the same would apply. I think the major difference with software copyright is that I can just decompile your binary or copy a binary and give it to other people. For SAAS companies that don't distribute binaries, I imagine they basically have the same protections against rogue employees.
To look at it another way, just because some code I work on at my job is derived from open source MIT-licensed code doesn't mean I personally have the right to distribute it if my company doesn't want me to. I'd guess this comes under some generic "confidential information" clause in the employment contract.
Presumably company policy would be implicated here, not copyright law. Whether or not it's copyrightable, what you create using AI is work product.
That is exactly the right question and the answer is genuinely strange. Uncopyrightable work falls into the public domain, which means anyone can use it, copy it, or build on it freely. The employer can still call it a trade secret and protect it through confidentiality obligations in employment contracts, but that protection is contractual rather than property-based. A trade secret loses protection the moment it is disclosed. So the employer's claim over purely AI-generated code is essentially: "you cannot share this" rather than "we own this." Those are meaningfully different legal positions, and most companies have not thought through which one they actually have.