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Alive-in-2025yesterday at 9:07 PM1 replyview on HN

I think if I as a human use an llm to do something technical that would qualify copyright, it should still qualify for copyright. How do you decide how much human is copyrightable. If I use a package that writes code or use a library for some piece of it, I could still copyright.

I don't like this idea that llm code can't be owned by a human, copyrighted. It's just code.

I think your last example with flock camera is relevant here - I can take a picture of a public football as a reporter or something (or a fan I guess) and I can copyright and sell that picture. Newspapers do it every day.

So if I stand on a street corner and take a pic, it's copyrightable. If I take a pic using a flock camera it should also be copyrightable, just like if my nest camera at home takes a pic of something, I can use that.

I guess you are saying "someone else owns the flock camera" so you don't get to own pictures. What if I buy the flock-like camera and put it up, I should own that.


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tga_dyesterday at 10:17 PM

You seem to have misunderstood an is/ought distinction. You may hold the (fairly extreme, as far as copyright goes) position that surveillance footage should be subject to copyright, but it's well established that it's not. Who owns the camera is irrelevant. At least in the US; I'm not aware of any jurisdictions that hold otherwise. This is why Wikipedia articles on world events in the past few decades are full of stills from surveillance cameras: it's one of the few sources of imagery of an event that are unambiguously legal to include, because unlike a photo or intentionally made video of something specific, it's not a creative work. It's also pretty firmly established that human authorship is required for something to be subject to copyright, and having an idea that lead to some particular expression is itself not sufficient; see, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

(Not a lawyer, just a Wikipedia editor.)

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