alt Hacker News> it's still your code
I wholly agree with your comment, but is it legally "your code"? Copyright is implicit at the moment of human creation. But there isn't yet settled law on AI-assisted creation.
So it might be a problem for projects to accept contributions where it's not clear who actually owns that work.
Replies
> Copyright
Literally irrelevant and I have no idea why people even bring this up constantly. Copyright is practically unenforceable in the software world, when was the last time you saw someone (a company or an individual) actually sue _and win_? Apple wasn't capable of stopping all the other phone manufacturers from directly cloning their product (despite having patents & copyright) so how can an individual? The only thing that matters is execution.
For instance, my repos are cloned like ~100/week by what I presume are bots and AI lab scrapers using them for training material. How am I supposed to even find out who's doing it, and if they're abiding by the licenses I provided? It's impossible.
Lastly, having copyright isn't the same thing as being allowed to commercialize the software (and I believe loads of people confuse the two). You can still sell public domain code, even if you don't have copyright over it.
At this point, who could bring a copyright claim? Well, considering the massive AI training effort hoovering everything up, seems it might be approximately everyone.
Who would they be making the claim against? Well, considering the massive uptake of AI across the tech industry & beyond... approximately everyone.
Yes, the model companies are in the middle, but it's getting to the point where it seems a bit doubtful that claims will have any significant outcomes.
NYT might be able to get OpenAI to pay them for their content, but that's more of a financial tweak than a up-ending of industry.
Not a lawyer, but to some degree I think policies like the one Debian came up with can help the argument. You’re not submitting a stream of commits that all have an Authored-By: Claude Code footer and massive yappy commits and comments. The policy essentially forces there to be a degree of human authorship to each commit even if some of the bits came from LLM assistance.