I am the author of multiple AGPL systems, many in mainstream use. Early LLM models would spit out my code almost verbatim. Modern systems borrow heavily on the creative design of those systems.
One company first pirated my AGPL code (e.g. shipped it without my name, copyright notices, source availability, etc.). I sent them violation notices. After many months of fighting, they had an LLM clone the system. The LLM clone feels:
a) Buggy and bad compared to my code
b) Still, like it's basically my creative content
It's as if you asked an LLM to rewrite Harry Potter, with the same plot, but bad dialogue.
> b) Still, like it's basically my creative content
Isn't this the crux of all IP theft issues?
There was a lawsuit against Katy Perry's _Dark Horse_ song based on a supposedly reused melody. The lawsuit succeeded, but there are music experts who break down the case on YouTube and it's not clear why the plaintiff won (except perhaps the plaintiff's expert was more convincing than the defendant's).
As applied to LLMs, we still don't have clear legal guidance about where the line between copying and "being inspired by", especially since we don't normally apply the verb "inspired by" to non-human things.
You can see that even with these licenses, they do not care and see free and open source code as the freedom to not pay for it. As long as the cloned output is "good enough" they will continue to keep using LLMs to clone everything else regardless of the license.
They know you can't enforce it as it will cost you a lot more money to do that than it takes to recover the damages.
So to them, it is just cheaper to clone it using an LLM and close source it down. Unless you have a lot of money for litigation, the economics of free and open source software with its licenses do not work with LLMs bypassing it at every single angle.
I’m curious what programming languages was it for? And did they open source their version?
It’s interesting because these developments are actually an argument for making closed source software moving forward if you’re hand-crafting it make it the most restrictive license possible and don’t show the sources.
But I don’t agree with the OP everything should be open sourced. For instance, there’s a difference between deliberately steered AI work and something completely vibed. The former takes deliberation and creative choice, the latter will spit out fragments of prior art.
It’s the same with all generative work. Using diffusion models with controlNet (or equivalent) I can pass in a sketch wholly from my line drawings, and ask it to paint for me. That’s my design, assisted by AI, and should be completely copyright by me.
Coding agents will do the same thing when given sufficiently unique inputs. So, the claim all should be open sourced by default is flawed.
I agree their phrasing is a little strange but I feel like the meaning is still clear. They are (I believe) saying that an LLM can’t generate anything other than facsimiles of existing content. It can’t actually explore novel ideas and branches, it can’t innovate and create on its own. Everything is inherently derivative yada yada, I don’t mean it in the usual “everything is derivative” way we often refer to when people make music and such. It can’t ideate and express something personal.
I think there’s a lot of nuance and caveats to that kind of claim, assuming I am representing them correctly, but it’s a valid stance and I see where they’re coming from.
People who haven’t had this happen to them really don’t understand what it feels like. It feels very violating. You almost don’t believe it’s happening when you see it. You’re essentially watching somebody pretend to be you.
I think that’s why so many of us get so angry when people just dismiss the theft claim. They either lack imagination or experience. We can debate it and that is valid, but to dismiss it out of hand is not right
I think they just want to be able to take whatever they want without consequence, so it's convenient for them to define it as being different from theft
This is a very clear agpl violation. FSF should be all over this and sue the living crap out of the AI companies. You could even get it class action by gathering a few agpl code authors.
People in this thread are acting like the AI companies are just flouting the law and there's nothing that can be done. This is an extremely well documented precedent, and GPL violations routinely show up in court. It's a very easy case to lay out especially because no one is really complaining about money except in the settlement... It's all about distributing the source code. And of course a very nice chunk of change for infringement but that's beside the point.
A successfully litigated case would result in the open sourcing of every AI that touched agpl code in any way because it was in memory with the AI algorithm.
As clear as "can I take a copyrighted photo, use a photoshop filter on it, and then it's not copyrighted anymore?" is pretty clearly a solved question in any copyright system.
• Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law,
without the need for legislative change.
• The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect
the availability of copyright protection for the output.
• Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author,
even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there
is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute
authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not
alone provide sufficient control.
• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are
perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination,
or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI-
generated content.
I am sure there will be many more legal battles and probably legislation about this to come.
I’ve encountered (many times) people talking about the copyright office as if they don’t support copyright of things touched by AI and I’m constantly correcting them that their guidance is driven by human expression (and not the tools used). It seems like a lot of people don’t want to accept that a reasonable premise is set because it doesn’t fit their agenda or outrage engagement.
By this logic, shouldn't any code using an open-source framework or language also be open source? Even before AI, devs learned from Stack Overflow and plenty of open source code.
You're confusing writing code with software engineering. Devs never just wrote code, they took ownership of the outcome. Business owners put their money on the line for product decisions.
To say that just because devs or founders use AI to write code, the code is no longer their intellectual property is ridiculous. Humans take responsibility for the outcome and are willing to accept the losses. AI can't do that. AI doesn't have any stakes in the output it generates, humans do.
Humans will often fail to take responsibility for derivative works though when they don't know what work the output is derivative of, and how strongly.
And that's assuming they want to make clear what they are building on.
The stakes in the output go both ways: wanting to profit from IP and risking liability because of violating IP licenses.
What you're saying is already the status quo, but reality is that LLMs make it so easy to "paraphrase" code or simply .. ideas, too... so that the whole concept of IP is eroding. Because the sheer scale makes it almost impossible to distinguish specific things that cross the line from "learning from" to "copying IP".
I'm not really taking a specific stance here but acting as if it would be a solved problem seems hard to believe to me, especially since it is not a new discussion.
I thinl you could argue that the solution is that copyright or IP concepts are not working anymore, something many people already concluded before the LLM and AI explosion of the 2020s.
But that's not the state of the current law, right?
In addition, your claim that the user of an AI system is the only person who has any "stakes" also seems questionable to me, because after all, we are talking about output that the AI user already paid an AI company for to generate it.
Whether if using ML models as a form of IP laundering, is legal or not, still seems to be an open question. It's not ridiculous at all. If I lossy-compress Harry Potter, then unzip it in a way that mixes some words, is that fair use? Should I be financially rewarded for my "work"? Is this work now mine? If it is legal, why not just go through every book in this kind of automated fashion and start selling them as my own?
My question is still the same. Human devs have learned from open-source projects, books and code on the internet then used opensource frameworks to create proprietary software logic.
Now just because same devs use AI to create code doesn't mean they should be banned from creating or owning a proprietary software.
What is transformative enough to be legal is fuzzy. At the end of the day, it only matters how the courts rule. I do know that the amount of actual mechanical change has less bearing on determining if the work was transformative. There are cases where you can copy 90% of a code base verbatim legally, and there are cases where no code is copied verbatim and it is a copyright violation. What you are describing most likely would not fly in court.
A fair number of FOSS licenses were interpreted this way. The popular migration away from GPLv3 (might’ve been v4?) towards MIT, LGPL, etc had more than one cause (a huge one was the rapid sectoral commercialization; the decline of RMS’s reputation may have contributed, etc), but a big one was the potential interpretation of new GPL as being overly viral and “license-infecting” only slightly related software assets rather than wholly derivative ones.
For me, it's the latter: the GPL feels overbearing and patronizing, and I don't want some dependency to dictate under which terms I can release my own software. I pay the community back by using MIT whenever I open-source something. This feels more "free" than RMS's view of freedom.
I know that many people would disagree with me on this, but thankfully I'm free to choose what license I consider "free".
> Devs never just wrote code, they took ownership of the outcome. Business owners put their money on the line for product decisions.
Does the same thing apply to Mickey Mouse? Would you say it's fine to use Disney characters in my own creations, as long as I take ownership of the outcome and put my money on the line for product decisions?
I am not saying that taking responsibility gives you the license to violate copyrights.
My point is that devs have always learned from open-source code and the internet, then used that knowledge to write their own proprietary software. Why should it be any different when AI learns from the same sources and produces new code?
Valid point but this will happen due to market forces rather than moral reasons. Anyone can write code now using AI, so charging for the code itself is getting harder every day, and only the trustworthy people will get the distribution.
The rest of the code will be open source, see how many open Wispr flow alternatives are there already, everyone has same features.
Doe v. GitHub already decided (I'm simplifying, read the actual thing yourself) that LLM output is not automatically open source - or specifically it doesn't infringe on the open source training material and doesn't inherit the oss copyright notice.
Thaler v. Perlmutter (again simplified) showed 100% AI output can't be given any copyright.
The directions the current cases are going are very much opposed to that idea and I wouldn't expect things to change in the opposite direction.
They will just claim the code is trade secret and use Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA).
And, the DTSA has only two reqs:
derive independent economic value from not being generally known or readily ascertainable by others, and the "owner" takes reasonable measures to maintain their secrecy (e.g., coke secret sauce).
since trade secret law does not prevent independent development or lawful reverse engineering, there are still opportunities. also, if a someone independently devs the same functionality, trade secret generally does not give them original dev ownership of that functionality. so, win.
Artcraft will be a good test case if Adobe goes after Brandon Thomas.
Much to be developed.
(and, this is why we keep extensive commit and development records outside of our genAI - ie provenance tracking)
That is not the Thaler v. Perlmutter conclusion. That case was about whether the machine itself could be made an author under copyright law. That is very different than whether AI output can be protected by copyright law. I am not aware of any cases that test that question yet.
Edit: open source software itself has only been lightly tested in court. But that isn't even my point here.
The US Copyright Office has assigned copyright to works that leveraged AI. The USCO stated,
> “[we] decided to register a copyright claim in [the] work because we find that it contains a sufficient amount of human original authorship in the selection, arrangement, and coordination of the AI-generated material that may be regarded as copyrightable.”
Copyright office activity is orthogonal to litigation and the court system.
If a work receives a copyright, the courts will treat it differently if it becomes the subject of litigation.
Even open source license claims have not been fully litigated. We don't have to wait on the court to make certain assumptions.
You can't apply naïve transitive reasoning to law. Law is not code. Your assertions are meaningless and unsupported noise until they're actually tried in a court.
a statement *about* the legal system can be true without being litigated *in* the legal system. Courts rely on precedent in addition to logical argument, so their rulings cannot be deduced from rational argument alone.
The US copyright office is not the body that owns interpretation of the law though. They don’t determine in court if an artifact can be protected by copyright law.
The USCO is the regulatory and administrative authority and will inform the decisions of judges. They provide expert legal opinion that carries substantial weight.
It would be a surprising result for the courts to overturn the USCO. The courts routinely side with the USCO.
This is very much still working it's way through the courts (in the US at least).
The first major precedent was in 2023 with Zarya of the Dawn comic book, where the US Copyright Office rules the midjourney-generated images were not protected, but the human-written text was.
Every major corporation on earth is behaving as if it was. If/when it gets tested you can be sure that the pro-copyright side will be very, very well funded.
I think most expect the courts will land on training AI on copyrighted works is fine, as long as the output of the LLMs is transformative enough to not violate the original copyright. Exactly the same as if a human learned on copyrighted material and outputted their own artifacts.
It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit. Even if they choose to give the code away, that choice is captured in the form of a specifically worded license (MIT, BSD, etc.).
This means that licenses exist because code is copyrightable in the first place, with the license governing the use of said copyright. If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
> If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
This is the crux of the issue. A license controls usage of copyrighted intellectual property. Until the underlying copyright/ip issues are resolved, it seems a moot point to discuss licensing.
That said, if AI code is _not_ copyrightable, does it automatically go into the public domain? Or is there a third category?
> That said, if AI code is _not_ copyrightable, does it automatically go into the public domain? Or is there a third category?
It means that AI-generated code, including proprietary code, is not covered by the existing license mechanisms, including EULAs. Companies will of course handwave over this, but it would not surprise me if this is challenged in court at some point.
Maybe the Do What The F*ck You Want To Public License (WTFPL). Its a super-permissive open-source license that acts almost like a public domain dedication.
The distinction is between creation and distribution.
Even if you accept that AI code isn't protected by copyright, code isn't public domain unless it's released. The legal issue would likely revolve around what 'released' means.
Code that runs on private servers isn't technically released. Code in web pages technically is.
But ultimately legal decisions decide to a large extent on who has the most money.
The frontier labs may eventually try to argue that they own the IP of all code, content, and inventions generated using their technology. That argument may or may not stand, and it's more likely to be over patent rights than plain copyright.
But there's a fair chance they'll try it once AI is unavoidably embedded in everyone's workflow.
Code without a copyright can generally be distributed and put in the pubic domain, and I wouldn't bet that the few existing court decisions won't be reversed.
But, the license reflects the rights that a copyright owner granted you; I don't see why laundering copyrighted material with training a model should remove the limitations on the material's usage that the author established.
So, while it makes sense to not be able to attach whatever copyright you want to LLM output, if it's the result of training on copyrighted code, the extent to which you're allowed to use it should be the intersection of the rights granted to you by that code's copyright owners.
It should thus carry a license that reflects the intersection of those rights.
What makes it much worse is that the model trainers don't tell you what specific sources determined the output, so you should probably just assume that it's the result of its whole training, and the only rights you have are those granted you by all the authors of the training material; and, this in all likelihood means no rights, for most LLM models in use now.
> It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit.
Just as it's important to remember that the purpose of regulations like copyright and patents are to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
If the absence of a particular person to hold the copyright twists your knickers, you could go a bit further and -say- decide that the people of the United States collectively hold the copyright to all LLM-generated code that's generated by US people or entities, and that relicensing of a particular piece of LLM-generated code must be agreed to by every US citizen that was alive when that code was created.
> We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
I have no issue with changing the law. My comment is about the article and the author's misapplication of the law.
> you could go a bit further and -say- decide that the people of the United States collectively hold the copyright
Was going to comment something similar; we do have concepts of "dominium eminens", and "escheated property", and "public domain", and many other similar ideas. If the people (through their representatives) decide on a certain property regime, it absolutely can be implemented even if it's different from the status quo.
Maybe, but I don't think there's any legal president for that, is there? Much of existing law is based on centuries of private property rights. I don't see any government undoing that... or at least, not quickly.
> Maybe, but I don't think there's any legal president for that, is there?
We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution and its various subsections pretty clearly gives Congress this power.
The IP laws are a) not really modelled after material property rights; b) are quite much more recent than "centuries"; c) there is legal precedent for that, see e.g. the airplane-related patents being pooled in 1917 by the demand from the US government.
I have some projects I've been working on over a year. Sitting down working making design decisions. Research. Using ai doesn't mean I did no work. It doesn't matter if the ai was trained. I still did work.
I don't understand this view point. Using ai and making high quality stuff is not pushing a button. Its hard. It takes real effort and diligence. And you have to pay actual money out of pocket to deliver it.
Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from
me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
Furthermore, copyright protects only the expression, not the idea - reimplementing the same idea with "different words" has always been permitted under copyright law (patents may protect the idea, though).
Of course, the fact that it would lack copyright protection it doesn't implythat you have to do something with the code for management of your kid's schedules, just that if someone else somehow legally gets hold of it, the law won't prevent them from making and distributing copies or derived work.
> Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me
You are the one "stealing" the time and effort of thousands of people who have written free and open source software. If the ratio really is so huge, then just cut out the small part that does all of the stealing.
> So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
Open source licensing is only relevant when distributing the software, if you just use it privately it has no effect. You are not forced to make it public.
Whilst the first training sets would have used Stack overflow and open source projects.
I have my suspicions that the AI companies have been using reverse engineering to gain more training data.
Ethics don't really concern these companies so...
When you have essentially infinite compute and are constantly looking for more training data. To me the next logical step is to start reversing compiled programs.
It could also explain why these AI models are so good at it too...
I really have to wonder what context this person is operating in. The vast majority of software written in the world is proprietary, written for a company to aid some business process, and ridiculously specific to its use case, and freely intermixed with proprietary business information.
“Open sourcing” is not just a legal state, it’s an affirmative act that takes work to prepare the codebase for public consumption. Saying that all the weird business code in the world should be involuntarily publicized is an incoherent concept. What precisely would OP expect to happen in a world that adhered to their opinion? Because to be clear, 90%+ of all code being written today is LLM-generated, so OP suggests that companies should no longer have any privacy wrt their internal software, all LLM code just gets yeeted into the public. How could that possibly work?
Given how easy it is to write software now, this perspective seems to overindex on a past state of the world that no longer applies.
He’s not wrong, but I would argue a better model is the Derivative Work. This already exists in copyright law.
If I write a space opera that is a LOT like Star Wars there are major legal implications to this. If I write an original work of science fiction involving a weapon that destroys planets as an allegory to the history of the atomic bomb, I’m probably in the clear even if one of the characters is a furry alien with a laser sword.
The challenge now is how to apply that framework when nobody can see the original or resulting code.
The article is right. If no human effort is involved then the code should be open source. The article also implies a very detailed line too. It doesn’t say that the human effort part can’t be copyrighted or intellectual property.
As an example, I have developed a set of grounding guidance for my AI models at my work. The specific grammar and vocabulary belong to my employer. But I also have a clean-room version of it that completely strips out that proprietary infringing information while still retaining a similar semantic structure. That will be posted next month on my GitHub under a GPL-3 license like I do with my other non-infringing AI-assisted work.
> As soon as I start refining it, and commanding the AI to fix the mistakes, this argument starts to lose ground fast.
Definitely. And if the result isn’t essentially a clone of some existing copyrighted work, there really is no viable argument under current copyright law.
I mostly agree and have pretty much every one of my projects open source. One in particular, though, is not. And that is because the design of it is heavily domain specific and is built on loads and loads of experience. Not sure how to reconcile that...
There's a difference between something being released as open source and something that never gets released at all. Open source or not only becomes relevant when making the binary available to other people.
It seems pretty clear-cut to me. AI companies plundered the commons, but the commons have licenses that come with them that clearly state that their use and derivatives thereof must also include the license and be open source.
This is a chance for great good for humanity and for the AI companies to do the right thing for themselves and for all of us.
Not releasing the code as open source would be just... well... evil.
And a further question arises for me: If we don't start sharing the fruits of the machines now, then when?
What's wrong with this website? When I open it in Safari on macOS, it consumes all my RAM. 20GB to start. I got a system warning to force quit some apps to maintain stability (which was a first in 5 years). When I closed other non-Safari apps, Safari usage then went up to 30GB.
Quitting and relaunching Safari, then returning to the site, produces the same results. The process for this website is what is using the RAM, it persists after closing the tab, and needs to be force quit.
I’m confused. Is this article meant to be a scholarly legal argument (albeit, by a novice)? Or a normative statement about what the author would prefer?
It certainly doesn’t seem to be about practical solutions. It doesn’t even touch on the ramifications of its suggestions. I’m pretty sure that it would be a massive boon to data center operators and cause most of the readers of hacker news to lose our livelihoods.
I get the sentiment, but how would you prove a negative? You can get "caught" using AI, but not having been caught does not and can not prove you didn't. Given that 99.999% of projects now use AI to some extend, the logical default assumption is going to be you are probably not in the 0.001%
> developers more and more rely on AI without even reviewing the generated output, let alone modifying it to fit their specific needs. Code like this, where humans put little effort, except writing prompts, should definitely be Open Source.
A person's contribution here is difficult to measure. This statement reminds me of one of my older bosses who priced software per lines written.
An AI-generated software's quality reflects the author's vision, taste, and expertise (if any). These are there regardless of the number of lines reviewed.
I would've supported open source for completely AI-generated apps including the conception of the idea.
I'm all for the concept of all code being open source... but I would then need a way to protect my final product from just being cloned or ripped off by a competitor.
With code itself being so cheap these days, it's the final product that has value. The requirements, architecture, usage data, the hundreds of meetings to figure out what customers want/need, the marketing, etc. A lot of the learnings and most of my business are expressed in the code though, so making it open is a massive risk. The code on it's own I don't even think is valuable. The only ones who'd benefit are competitors and upstarts targeting my customers.
Related question I just thought of reading this: if you are an employee at a company that you know 100% AI generates its code, and AI-generated code is not copyrightable... is that employee legally allowed to leave the company taking a full copy of the source code, and set it up as their own business?
Fully AI output from a single prompt is not copyrightable (in the US). Is fully AI output from a sequence of prompts not copyrightable? If it is, at what point does this change?
I agree with the spirit of this. I'm a longtime open source developer and generally prefer GPL for my manual code. For my AI-generated code I'm using a multiple choice license of Apache, BSD, GPL, MIT.
If you're curious, here's my newest open source which helps build Rust web services along with Axum: https://github.com/publicprojects-io/axa and you can see the LICENSE.md file.
There is so little value to most code produced with models these days I just don’t see the point.
The real value ends up being found in software where there is a person behind it continuously refining it into something others will look at and say “Someone clearly paid attention to this.” Models can’t (yet) reproduce that because they can’t/don’t go interacting with users or asking bigger picture questions.
Whether someone is producing that software with a model or not doesn’t change much about the ownership picture to me: it’s the person that owns the project, and the LLM is a tool.
Once again, it all comes down to it being a tool and how it’s used, and there are no useful blanket statements that can be made about it (or how the tool’s output should be classified, legally or otherwise)
This article makes no sense. None of the arguments are sound and conclusive. First argument: Non sequitur. Programmers were also trained by open source software and from stack overflow and stack exchange. That's not a sound reason for their programs to be open source. Second argument: AI-generated content is not copyrightable. If that's the case, then it cannot be open source since open source licenses rely on copyright for their enforcement. The author confuses public domain with open source. Public domain and open source are two completely different types of categories with different legal implications. Third argument: This contradicts the second argument. Now programmers using AI should publish their code under an open source license or under CC0. That's a demand. Not everybody will do that and no argument is presented why they should do so. Fourth point: Not all code is a hundred percent human written and a hundred percent AI written. The author concludes from this problem that "Code like this, where humans put little effort, except writing prompts, should definitely be Open Source." There is no argument here at all. It's another personal demand without justification.
At least, the author should try to back up their demands with further justifications and make them less contradictory.
You cannot enforce that it's available without copyright and a corresponding license. I thought the author meant the code produced by AI should also be available to others somehow but perhaps I've misunderstood.
Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way.
They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.
But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)
No, the four freedoms rely on copyright. If there is no copyright, any company can take the open source code, modify it as they like, and never give back the modifications to anyone. It's the equivalent of an MIT license (technically, it's more like public domain but let's ignore this detail here). That's fine for many but far from the goals of the GPL.
No copyright doesn't mean you can't keep your source code a tightly kept business secret. You can even combine it with NDAs and contracts to re-institute something akin to copyright.
> First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement.
I too have trained on the massive corpus of open source code. Should everything I code also be open source? Or only if I leverage an artificial neural network as a prosthesis to enhance the capabilities of my natural neural network?
Makes sense, many of the programming languages are open source, other novelty things were released as open source aswell, we as programmers/software engineers does a bunch of our solutions based on public code or under Creative Commons.
What I agree with the post is specific licenses require us some specific requirements like release the code if it's a derivation of prior work!
I'm tired of these child like responses from adult professionals in this industry. Do you argue just for the sake of arguing? No, your exposure to opensource code wasn't "massive" and you are clearly smart enough to know this but you had this make this comment as rage bait.
An entire generation of web developers learned by viewing the source of webpages they visited at a time when HTML and JavaScript were still nascent. I don't think setting the bar for "massive" is the way to win this argument. It's valid because the biggest difference between an LLM reading Stack Overflow and remembering content and me finding answers there and learning something is that the LLM can do it much, much faster.
The difference is, just as a child doesn't need to consume the entirety of a language before being able to communicate with said language, a human developer doesn't need to consume all of Stack Overflow, Open source projects etc. in order to start producing functional work.
I have learnt to read by training on a lot of books, I should then open source all future things I write. I've learnt to walk by watching other people, I probably should publish videos of me whenever I walk.
If humans are directing AI to generate code, it cannot be open source unless the human decides to make it. It is their vision that AI acted upon. So, i dont see the logic in this post or thinking. this sounds like an another altruistic progressive california thing
It is disappointing to see many people who espoused that copyright is bullshit now saying copyright should make people do what they personally want. I suppose it was never about freedom for them, only getting what they want when they want it.
couldn't you always generate infinite code? just write more of it. but what open source lets you do is read the code for a particular piece of software, to see what it actually does. generating infinite code has nothing to do with that.
you could also do this before, but only with infinite time. open source value is shifting. open source is human-validated code. just OSSing generated code has no value.
Good idea. We just have to pay for the human-written part. Same with medical research and new medicines, new energy technologies, robotics, movies and music, and future AI. Eventually, as AI does more and more, everything will be free and open source.
Following this logic, there should be no fees at all on coding models, since they scraped the web on this knowledge. Same applies for books, pictures, music btw. This debate has not even started yet.
I will be the first to make all my work free and open-source once I can obtain air, clean water, basic food, shelter for myself and my family, electricity, heating, medicine, education and internet access for free.
Until then, I’m sorry, but I have to feed my family while we all navigate this goddamn global transformation process.
These don't seem related? I don't think the author says you can't charge or have a business model or make money. The code being open source is unrelated to these things.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how LLMs have essentially made all code open source in a strange and very capitalist way: They’ve appropriated our human work—without regard for any licenses—by force and without any compensation to the authors, and are now selling the code back to anyone who’s willing to pay for it.
This article misunderstands copyright law -- citing an example that argues against it.
It cited Naruto v Slater, which unsuccessfully argued that the copyright for a monkey's selfie belong to the monkey, not to the owner of photography equipment.
The courts dismissed the case as animals cannot hold copyright.
---
While the courts did not rule it, the apparent copyright holder is the photographer Slater who received royalties.
This is directly analogous to AI code, in which a human did not directly author the characters but regardless had "significant creative contributions."
At the end of the day you don't actually need to see the source code if you can just regenerate it yourself. If you use a later ai model, your code will probably be better anyway.
The output of machine intelligence has to be available to everyone or we're just breeding a new demigod class. We should make it a public utility, like water or electricity.
My patterns for loading data into Python is pretty much the same everytime with polars. I didn’t create that - I looked it up from a book somewhere. Do I need to open source it?
The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.
I think the legal standard currently in the United States is that all AI output is public domain.
This means that all AI generated code is public domain at the point of it being generated.
Of course just because something is public domain that doesnt mean you have to release the code publicly. Public domain just affects what others can do with the output. It doesnt mean you have to release the code yourself.
The new Epic Games Store is apparently entirely vibe coded. So that technically would mean that the source code for it would be public domain right? But people still can't copy the store or do whatever they want as you have trademarks protecting it. And Epic is under no obligation to release the code..
I am not a lawyer. It's possible I am completely misunderstanding the situation. Is there something I am getting wrong?
> I think the legal standard currently in the United States is that all AI output is public domain.
This is definitely not true.
The only thing a court has ruled is that the AI itself cannot hold any copyrights. Not that there are none or that using LLM based tools removes all copyright.
Open source people have had half a century to figure out how to make money with fairly little success (aside from a dozen or so very notable projects, and looking at all my AI slop, I don't see one of these hiding in there).
I don't particularly care about copyright or whatever ethical arguments yo may come up with -- I write code mostly for money, as do my competitors -- if you can figure out a way to stop them from using AI, I'm fine with not using it either. I'm fairly skeptical you can close Pandora's box though.
That aside, we may see more software going in a source-available direction -- either that or full cloud. Up until now being closed source was a competitive advantage, but now it's trivial to clone even fairly huge software suites, so that's less of a factor.
Having the source may also become a bigger advantage for regular users than before -- given they can now vibecode extensions/plugins, or customize the software more than what a config would personally allow. this probably wings the calculus away from a Photoshop-style license, and closer an Unreal Engine-style license.
Either that; or everything goes full cloud of course.
Under those conditions it would be un-licensable (since a license is essentially an agreement not to sue for copyright infringement) but it can still be made open by publication. I'm skeptical that the "anything that comes out of AI can't be copyrighted" argument will end up holding, but in the meantime it provides a strong incentive not to make that code public.
>First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement. That code was simply scraped from the internet and used without permission or proper attribution. The models were also trained on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sister projects, which are released under Creative Commons licenses that legally require attribution. Turning this collective knowledge into proprietary, closed-source code feels like license laundering.
Strong argument, but the case that such a strong transformation should maintain the original licence only applies to my knowledge to GPL, which consists of a very small portion of the training set. Creative Commons would not even require the source code to be distributed, just attribution, which may already be the case by the nature of the models.
>"The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable. The foundation for this principle in the US goes back to the famous Monkey Selfie dispute, which established that non-humans cannot hold copyrights."
But no one claims that the AI holds the copyright, unlike Greenpeace which claimed that Naruto the monkey held the copyright.
1. Software had a strong movement of freely sharing all code because they believed this technology was too important to be controlled by corporations.
2. AI companies managed to create millions of RL environments from GitHub PR’s and similar, and train their model to learn what it means to code from all the human labour in the world from the past 30 or so years.
3. Companies now use these closed source AI models, to automate and fire their human workers who enabled this.
Something has gone seriously wrong here, whether this falls under copyright or not is besides the point.
We weaponized a fundamentally good instinct that generated a lot of value for society and allowed corporations to rent seek on all the data these humans generated to help other humans not trillion dollar corporations.
“Well we’ll give them a UBI check”, the AI company says which is a complete non-sequitur. It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
The only solution that sounds good to me, is a model trained on Open Source Data must be Open Source and all the code it generates must also be open source. This is the only way to stop the coming rent seeking. Even mathematicians will be happy with this change!
> It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
This is incredibly detached from reality. Most software engineers care more about money than they do about abstract notions of software from. Most certainly have not saved enough.
Fair enough, Im talking about Bay Area software engineers, most of whom have saved enough. Maybe not enough to live in the Bay Area whose house prices keep increasing with no end in sight, but plenty for elsewhere in the US (or the world) for that matter.
Even if you modify it before using it, it's still based on open source (often GPL) code, so just everything based in part on LLM output should be open source.
agreed. The problem is _which_ open source, because what we're probably going to slowly realize is most software will now be a public good and proper governance is needed thats indistinguishable from a public utility.
The author needs to realize that this is unenforceable.
In fact I'd argue that free software and open source is economically dead and unsustainable because of AI generated code and almost no one wants to pay for their tools because an AI can generate the missing feature for them close to $0.
Maintaining it is another thing, but assuming that the cost of tokens get cheaper, why wait for open source developers to maintain it when a frontier AI model can do it for far cheaper and quicker?
I am just saying what the average manager turned vibe coder would say who will refuse to donate or pay for established open source projects that they use for free.
We already have a growing discoverability problem in many areas of content and throwing more slop into the mix is not the solution. This place for example has become a dumping ground for people, usually with no other activity here, to advertise their shovelware AI projects.
Here is a different angle. A programming language is a material like wood, aluminum, or stone. If you know the syntax and properties of it can you start trying to bend it to your will - you can make a ship, a satelite, or a children’s toy wihh tv the same language. You first have to spend years mastering the material and its limitations before you can bend it, so only a small number of the people who want to make stuff get to. Some people release open versions of a ship and a satelite you can start from, to lower the threshold of making stuff. They protect them to make sure giant shipbuilder doesn’t go making an army of their ships to kill their trade.
AI comes along and now grandma, who was formerly a midwife and teenager from home can start bending aluminum and carving wood with their words through AI. There are a bunch of open ships and satellites in the market, but Grandma is using her midwifing skills to ask AI to bend a new tool for her that helps turn breach babies around without requiring a c-section. No open source breach tools or medical tools on the market Grandma just needs aluminum and wood combination she would never be able to achieve without AI. She hammers down a lot - sending 1000 follow-up prompts to make the AI do stuff nobody has done before. Next her grandson decided to combine tungsten and wood to make a new toy that helps kids go airborne and land safely every time - like an egg-drop but for real life people. No open source code for that out there - he used the AI which knew the properties and the languages needed to get his idea to work. He hammers the AI with follow up questions and edits a bunch of the code where the AI defaults to the wrong setup, by trained convention. But he succeede. By this plan should they be allowed to copyright their work? Should their work be automatically open source so they can never monetize it either?
I don't see extreme views in this article. When LLMs take creative content from copyleft code, the license says the output has to be copyleft. Otherwise, it's theft.
If LLMs weren't trained on AGPL/GPL/LGPL code, it'd be different. But they are.
Taking all of available human knowledge, knowledge that was published under limited licences, and commercializing all that already is a fairly extreme action.
Merely arguing that perhaps the fruits of that harvest should also be available to the public doesn't seem that extreme.
IMO it'd be better if the weights themselves were considered public domain.
That’s not an extreme view. Anyone who uses software under a copyleft license should also release any derivatives under the same license. While this isn’t currently the case legally since the GPL was never written with the possibility in mind that LLMs might be trained on it in the future it still aligns with the spirit of the license.
No, GPL and copyleft licenses very much do and should force OpenSource by its nature. If someone uses GPL or AGPL and doesn't open source, they should be forced to Open Source.
> such exterme views spawn extreme views in the opposite side
The opposite side had exrtreme views for at least 4 decades. They publish stuff, cram it into your face with advertisement and demand purchasing a license for consuming it. And if you don't buy they want you to pay thousands of dollars or go to jail. That's as extreme as it goes. Eff them. Reverse engineer, clone and open source everything. There shouldn't be a single proprietary piece of published software left in use.
This means “all software should be Open Source unless written fully by humans”, which practically means almost all software in the near future, which is a terrible idea for multiple reasons.
I am the author of multiple AGPL systems, many in mainstream use. Early LLM models would spit out my code almost verbatim. Modern systems borrow heavily on the creative design of those systems.
One company first pirated my AGPL code (e.g. shipped it without my name, copyright notices, source availability, etc.). I sent them violation notices. After many months of fighting, they had an LLM clone the system. The LLM clone feels:
a) Buggy and bad compared to my code
b) Still, like it's basically my creative content
It's as if you asked an LLM to rewrite Harry Potter, with the same plot, but bad dialogue.
> b) Still, like it's basically my creative content
Isn't this the crux of all IP theft issues?
There was a lawsuit against Katy Perry's _Dark Horse_ song based on a supposedly reused melody. The lawsuit succeeded, but there are music experts who break down the case on YouTube and it's not clear why the plaintiff won (except perhaps the plaintiff's expert was more convincing than the defendant's).
As applied to LLMs, we still don't have clear legal guidance about where the line between copying and "being inspired by", especially since we don't normally apply the verb "inspired by" to non-human things.
I wonder if the defendant knew about https://allthemusic.info/?
There are only so many ways to express notes, and they've essentially all been done.
Human can be inspired. Machine can not. End of story.
All usage of open source to train LLM is basically a theft.
Mind sharing which repo that was?
Copyright as it exist is meaningless.
It didn't protect you. It only protects corporations rich enough to get enforce their IP.
At this point it is better that it goes away.
You can see that even with these licenses, they do not care and see free and open source code as the freedom to not pay for it. As long as the cloned output is "good enough" they will continue to keep using LLMs to clone everything else regardless of the license.
They know you can't enforce it as it will cost you a lot more money to do that than it takes to recover the damages.
So to them, it is just cheaper to clone it using an LLM and close source it down. Unless you have a lot of money for litigation, the economics of free and open source software with its licenses do not work with LLMs bypassing it at every single angle.
I’m curious what programming languages was it for? And did they open source their version?
It’s interesting because these developments are actually an argument for making closed source software moving forward if you’re hand-crafting it make it the most restrictive license possible and don’t show the sources.
But I don’t agree with the OP everything should be open sourced. For instance, there’s a difference between deliberately steered AI work and something completely vibed. The former takes deliberation and creative choice, the latter will spit out fragments of prior art.
It’s the same with all generative work. Using diffusion models with controlNet (or equivalent) I can pass in a sketch wholly from my line drawings, and ask it to paint for me. That’s my design, assisted by AI, and should be completely copyright by me.
Coding agents will do the same thing when given sufficiently unique inputs. So, the claim all should be open sourced by default is flawed.
> After many months of fighting, they had an LLM clone the system.
Reads like a non-ironic version of Malus: https://malus.sh/
Can an LLM write unseen plots with a greater dialogue ?
If the plots are "unseen", then to what are you comparing the "greater" dialogue?
A book with a different plot? That would be obviously unrelated to the comment you're replying to?
I agree their phrasing is a little strange but I feel like the meaning is still clear. They are (I believe) saying that an LLM can’t generate anything other than facsimiles of existing content. It can’t actually explore novel ideas and branches, it can’t innovate and create on its own. Everything is inherently derivative yada yada, I don’t mean it in the usual “everything is derivative” way we often refer to when people make music and such. It can’t ideate and express something personal.
I think there’s a lot of nuance and caveats to that kind of claim, assuming I am representing them correctly, but it’s a valid stance and I see where they’re coming from.
People who haven’t had this happen to them really don’t understand what it feels like. It feels very violating. You almost don’t believe it’s happening when you see it. You’re essentially watching somebody pretend to be you.
I think that’s why so many of us get so angry when people just dismiss the theft claim. They either lack imagination or experience. We can debate it and that is valid, but to dismiss it out of hand is not right
> They either lack imagination or experience.
I think they just want to be able to take whatever they want without consequence, so it's convenient for them to define it as being different from theft
This is a very clear agpl violation. FSF should be all over this and sue the living crap out of the AI companies. You could even get it class action by gathering a few agpl code authors.
People in this thread are acting like the AI companies are just flouting the law and there's nothing that can be done. This is an extremely well documented precedent, and GPL violations routinely show up in court. It's a very easy case to lay out especially because no one is really complaining about money except in the settlement... It's all about distributing the source code. And of course a very nice chunk of change for infringement but that's beside the point.
A successfully litigated case would result in the open sourcing of every AI that touched agpl code in any way because it was in memory with the AI algorithm.
> This is a very clear agpl violation
clear in what way?
As clear as "can I take a copyrighted photo, use a photoshop filter on it, and then it's not copyrighted anymore?" is pretty clearly a solved question in any copyright system.
In the United States the Copyright Office actually has guidance on this that I feel most people aren’t aware of.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
An excerpt, with emphasis mine:
• Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change.
• The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output.
• Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control.
• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI- generated content.
I am sure there will be many more legal battles and probably legislation about this to come.
[delayed]
How dare you disrupt the narrative with facts and moderate positions!
OP would much prefer their fantasy of tearing the world down with “one weird trick” that only they were brilliant enough to notice.
It’s so reasonable, it’s almost offensive. /s
I’ve encountered (many times) people talking about the copyright office as if they don’t support copyright of things touched by AI and I’m constantly correcting them that their guidance is driven by human expression (and not the tools used). It seems like a lot of people don’t want to accept that a reasonable premise is set because it doesn’t fit their agenda or outrage engagement.
By this logic, shouldn't any code using an open-source framework or language also be open source? Even before AI, devs learned from Stack Overflow and plenty of open source code.
You're confusing writing code with software engineering. Devs never just wrote code, they took ownership of the outcome. Business owners put their money on the line for product decisions.
To say that just because devs or founders use AI to write code, the code is no longer their intellectual property is ridiculous. Humans take responsibility for the outcome and are willing to accept the losses. AI can't do that. AI doesn't have any stakes in the output it generates, humans do.
Humans will often fail to take responsibility for derivative works though when they don't know what work the output is derivative of, and how strongly.
And that's assuming they want to make clear what they are building on.
The stakes in the output go both ways: wanting to profit from IP and risking liability because of violating IP licenses.
What you're saying is already the status quo, but reality is that LLMs make it so easy to "paraphrase" code or simply .. ideas, too... so that the whole concept of IP is eroding. Because the sheer scale makes it almost impossible to distinguish specific things that cross the line from "learning from" to "copying IP".
I'm not really taking a specific stance here but acting as if it would be a solved problem seems hard to believe to me, especially since it is not a new discussion.
I thinl you could argue that the solution is that copyright or IP concepts are not working anymore, something many people already concluded before the LLM and AI explosion of the 2020s.
But that's not the state of the current law, right?
In addition, your claim that the user of an AI system is the only person who has any "stakes" also seems questionable to me, because after all, we are talking about output that the AI user already paid an AI company for to generate it.
edit: word choice
Whether if using ML models as a form of IP laundering, is legal or not, still seems to be an open question. It's not ridiculous at all. If I lossy-compress Harry Potter, then unzip it in a way that mixes some words, is that fair use? Should I be financially rewarded for my "work"? Is this work now mine? If it is legal, why not just go through every book in this kind of automated fashion and start selling them as my own?
My question is still the same. Human devs have learned from open-source projects, books and code on the internet then used opensource frameworks to create proprietary software logic.
Now just because same devs use AI to create code doesn't mean they should be banned from creating or owning a proprietary software.
Given how agents are already able to easily decompile software, this could be an entirely moot point.
What is transformative enough to be legal is fuzzy. At the end of the day, it only matters how the courts rule. I do know that the amount of actual mechanical change has less bearing on determining if the work was transformative. There are cases where you can copy 90% of a code base verbatim legally, and there are cases where no code is copied verbatim and it is a copyright violation. What you are describing most likely would not fly in court.
A fair number of FOSS licenses were interpreted this way. The popular migration away from GPLv3 (might’ve been v4?) towards MIT, LGPL, etc had more than one cause (a huge one was the rapid sectoral commercialization; the decline of RMS’s reputation may have contributed, etc), but a big one was the potential interpretation of new GPL as being overly viral and “license-infecting” only slightly related software assets rather than wholly derivative ones.
For me, it's the latter: the GPL feels overbearing and patronizing, and I don't want some dependency to dictate under which terms I can release my own software. I pay the community back by using MIT whenever I open-source something. This feels more "free" than RMS's view of freedom.
I know that many people would disagree with me on this, but thankfully I'm free to choose what license I consider "free".
more like
By this logic, shouldn't any code using a copyleft framework or language also be copyleft?
and yes duh
> Devs never just wrote code, they took ownership of the outcome. Business owners put their money on the line for product decisions.
Does the same thing apply to Mickey Mouse? Would you say it's fine to use Disney characters in my own creations, as long as I take ownership of the outcome and put my money on the line for product decisions?
I am not saying that taking responsibility gives you the license to violate copyrights.
My point is that devs have always learned from open-source code and the internet, then used that knowledge to write their own proprietary software. Why should it be any different when AI learns from the same sources and produces new code?
Valid point but this will happen due to market forces rather than moral reasons. Anyone can write code now using AI, so charging for the code itself is getting harder every day, and only the trustworthy people will get the distribution.
The rest of the code will be open source, see how many open Wispr flow alternatives are there already, everyone has same features.
Doe v. GitHub already decided (I'm simplifying, read the actual thing yourself) that LLM output is not automatically open source - or specifically it doesn't infringe on the open source training material and doesn't inherit the oss copyright notice.
Thaler v. Perlmutter (again simplified) showed 100% AI output can't be given any copyright.
The directions the current cases are going are very much opposed to that idea and I wouldn't expect things to change in the opposite direction.
They will just claim the code is trade secret and use Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA).
And, the DTSA has only two reqs:
derive independent economic value from not being generally known or readily ascertainable by others, and the "owner" takes reasonable measures to maintain their secrecy (e.g., coke secret sauce).
since trade secret law does not prevent independent development or lawful reverse engineering, there are still opportunities. also, if a someone independently devs the same functionality, trade secret generally does not give them original dev ownership of that functionality. so, win.
Artcraft will be a good test case if Adobe goes after Brandon Thomas.
Much to be developed.
(and, this is why we keep extensive commit and development records outside of our genAI - ie provenance tracking)
That is not the Thaler v. Perlmutter conclusion. That case was about whether the machine itself could be made an author under copyright law. That is very different than whether AI output can be protected by copyright law. I am not aware of any cases that test that question yet.
Remember that's in the US, most other places (UK etc..), it can be copyrighted.
Unfortunately, even if other countries have different rules, the US service like GitHub still has to follow the US law and DMCA.
AI generated art with human steering is copyrightable [1,2].
Agentic code development is human steering, thus copyrightable under the same grounds per the language used by the US Copyright Office.
Open source code is copyrighted, otherwise we would be talking about public domain.
When you edit something in the public domain to enrich it, that derived work then becomes copyrightable again.
[1] https://journals.law.harvard.edu/jsel/2025/03/u-s-copyright-...
[2] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/invoke-snags-first-ai-imag...
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Edit: open source software itself has only been lightly tested in court. But that isn't even my point here.
The US Copyright Office has assigned copyright to works that leveraged AI. The USCO stated,
> “[we] decided to register a copyright claim in [the] work because we find that it contains a sufficient amount of human original authorship in the selection, arrangement, and coordination of the AI-generated material that may be regarded as copyrightable.”
Copyright office activity is orthogonal to litigation and the court system.
If a work receives a copyright, the courts will treat it differently if it becomes the subject of litigation.
Even open source license claims have not been fully litigated. We don't have to wait on the court to make certain assumptions.
You can't apply naïve transitive reasoning to law. Law is not code. Your assertions are meaningless and unsupported noise until they're actually tried in a court.
Was your assertion tried in court? legal reasoning is naïve transitive reasoning.
a statement *about* the legal system can be true without being litigated *in* the legal system. Courts rely on precedent in addition to logical argument, so their rulings cannot be deduced from rational argument alone.
I'm reporting on what the US Copyright Office is saying. Not the court system.
The US copyright office is not the body that owns interpretation of the law though. They don’t determine in court if an artifact can be protected by copyright law.
The USCO is the regulatory and administrative authority and will inform the decisions of judges. They provide expert legal opinion that carries substantial weight.
It would be a surprising result for the courts to overturn the USCO. The courts routinely side with the USCO.
It depends on the degree of human steering. Vibe slopped code is probably not copyrightable.
This is very much still working it's way through the courts (in the US at least).
The first major precedent was in 2023 with Zarya of the Dawn comic book, where the US Copyright Office rules the midjourney-generated images were not protected, but the human-written text was.
The active front is Allen v. Perlmutter.
It's legally untested, so we can't be sure one way or the other. But people definitely seem to assume that's the case.
Every major corporation on earth is behaving as if it was. If/when it gets tested you can be sure that the pro-copyright side will be very, very well funded.
I think most expect the courts will land on training AI on copyrighted works is fine, as long as the output of the LLMs is transformative enough to not violate the original copyright. Exactly the same as if a human learned on copyrighted material and outputted their own artifacts.
There's still something dark at the center; a lawless visciousness to the new era.
The article contradicts itself.
It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit. Even if they choose to give the code away, that choice is captured in the form of a specifically worded license (MIT, BSD, etc.).
This means that licenses exist because code is copyrightable in the first place, with the license governing the use of said copyright. If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
> If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
This is the crux of the issue. A license controls usage of copyrighted intellectual property. Until the underlying copyright/ip issues are resolved, it seems a moot point to discuss licensing.
That said, if AI code is _not_ copyrightable, does it automatically go into the public domain? Or is there a third category?
> That said, if AI code is _not_ copyrightable, does it automatically go into the public domain? Or is there a third category?
It means that AI-generated code, including proprietary code, is not covered by the existing license mechanisms, including EULAs. Companies will of course handwave over this, but it would not surprise me if this is challenged in court at some point.
Maybe the Do What The F*ck You Want To Public License (WTFPL). Its a super-permissive open-source license that acts almost like a public domain dedication.
The distinction is between creation and distribution.
Even if you accept that AI code isn't protected by copyright, code isn't public domain unless it's released. The legal issue would likely revolve around what 'released' means.
Code that runs on private servers isn't technically released. Code in web pages technically is.
But ultimately legal decisions decide to a large extent on who has the most money.
The frontier labs may eventually try to argue that they own the IP of all code, content, and inventions generated using their technology. That argument may or may not stand, and it's more likely to be over patent rights than plain copyright.
But there's a fair chance they'll try it once AI is unavoidably embedded in everyone's workflow.
Code without a copyright can generally be distributed and put in the pubic domain, and I wouldn't bet that the few existing court decisions won't be reversed.
But, the license reflects the rights that a copyright owner granted you; I don't see why laundering copyrighted material with training a model should remove the limitations on the material's usage that the author established.
So, while it makes sense to not be able to attach whatever copyright you want to LLM output, if it's the result of training on copyrighted code, the extent to which you're allowed to use it should be the intersection of the rights granted to you by that code's copyright owners.
It should thus carry a license that reflects the intersection of those rights.
What makes it much worse is that the model trainers don't tell you what specific sources determined the output, so you should probably just assume that it's the result of its whole training, and the only rights you have are those granted you by all the authors of the training material; and, this in all likelihood means no rights, for most LLM models in use now.
> It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit.
Just as it's important to remember that the purpose of regulations like copyright and patents are to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
If the absence of a particular person to hold the copyright twists your knickers, you could go a bit further and -say- decide that the people of the United States collectively hold the copyright to all LLM-generated code that's generated by US people or entities, and that relicensing of a particular piece of LLM-generated code must be agreed to by every US citizen that was alive when that code was created.
> We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
I have no issue with changing the law. My comment is about the article and the author's misapplication of the law.
> you could go a bit further and -say- decide that the people of the United States collectively hold the copyright
Was going to comment something similar; we do have concepts of "dominium eminens", and "escheated property", and "public domain", and many other similar ideas. If the people (through their representatives) decide on a certain property regime, it absolutely can be implemented even if it's different from the status quo.
> even if no one company or person owns it.
Maybe, but I don't think there's any legal president for that, is there? Much of existing law is based on centuries of private property rights. I don't see any government undoing that... or at least, not quickly.
> Maybe, but I don't think there's any legal president for that, is there?
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution and its various subsections pretty clearly gives Congress this power.The IP laws are a) not really modelled after material property rights; b) are quite much more recent than "centuries"; c) there is legal precedent for that, see e.g. the airplane-related patents being pooled in 1917 by the demand from the US government.
If AI services that created open source were free, I agree with the sentiment.
I have some projects I've been working on over a year. Sitting down working making design decisions. Research. Using ai doesn't mean I did no work. It doesn't matter if the ai was trained. I still did work.
I don't understand this view point. Using ai and making high quality stuff is not pushing a button. Its hard. It takes real effort and diligence. And you have to pay actual money out of pocket to deliver it.
Strongly disagree.
Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
My manners begin to fail, so I’ll stop here.
US legal practice (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Ru....) is that "sweat of the brow" is irrelevant and the fact that something took significant effort doesn't mean that the product deserves copyright protection.
Furthermore, copyright protects only the expression, not the idea - reimplementing the same idea with "different words" has always been permitted under copyright law (patents may protect the idea, though).
Of course, the fact that it would lack copyright protection it doesn't implythat you have to do something with the code for management of your kid's schedules, just that if someone else somehow legally gets hold of it, the law won't prevent them from making and distributing copies or derived work.
> Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me
You are the one "stealing" the time and effort of thousands of people who have written free and open source software. If the ratio really is so huge, then just cut out the small part that does all of the stealing.
> So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
Open source licensing is only relevant when distributing the software, if you just use it privately it has no effect. You are not forced to make it public.
Thought production isn't copyrightable. Processes and procedures aren't copyrightable. Might get you a patent.
> Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
Doesn't mean it did either. (99% of the time it didn't tho. Nobody reaches to a vibe code machine because they care or want to dedicate effort.)
Whilst the first training sets would have used Stack overflow and open source projects.
I have my suspicions that the AI companies have been using reverse engineering to gain more training data.
Ethics don't really concern these companies so...
When you have essentially infinite compute and are constantly looking for more training data. To me the next logical step is to start reversing compiled programs.
It could also explain why these AI models are so good at it too...
How do you copyright stolen material?
Reverse engineering is legal so I'm not sure what you're trying to imply here
I really have to wonder what context this person is operating in. The vast majority of software written in the world is proprietary, written for a company to aid some business process, and ridiculously specific to its use case, and freely intermixed with proprietary business information.
“Open sourcing” is not just a legal state, it’s an affirmative act that takes work to prepare the codebase for public consumption. Saying that all the weird business code in the world should be involuntarily publicized is an incoherent concept. What precisely would OP expect to happen in a world that adhered to their opinion? Because to be clear, 90%+ of all code being written today is LLM-generated, so OP suggests that companies should no longer have any privacy wrt their internal software, all LLM code just gets yeeted into the public. How could that possibly work?
Given how easy it is to write software now, this perspective seems to overindex on a past state of the world that no longer applies.
He’s not wrong, but I would argue a better model is the Derivative Work. This already exists in copyright law.
If I write a space opera that is a LOT like Star Wars there are major legal implications to this. If I write an original work of science fiction involving a weapon that destroys planets as an allegory to the history of the atomic bomb, I’m probably in the clear even if one of the characters is a furry alien with a laser sword.
The challenge now is how to apply that framework when nobody can see the original or resulting code.
The article is right. If no human effort is involved then the code should be open source. The article also implies a very detailed line too. It doesn’t say that the human effort part can’t be copyrighted or intellectual property.
As an example, I have developed a set of grounding guidance for my AI models at my work. The specific grammar and vocabulary belong to my employer. But I also have a clean-room version of it that completely strips out that proprietary infringing information while still retaining a similar semantic structure. That will be posted next month on my GitHub under a GPL-3 license like I do with my other non-infringing AI-assisted work.
I can understand the case being made on "purely AI generated code."
But thats also why its buggy.
As soon as I start refining it, and commanding the AI to fix the mistakes, this argument starts to lose ground fast.
The tech community has adopted open standards for as long as I've been alive, and the AI is using these open standards as much as it is actual code.
Perhaps an open standard to prevent code from being used as training ( it probably already exists, i dunno ).
Methods to detect it ( I've seen that showing up recently. Using AI to detect AI. )
Some sanctioned actionable penalty under provable circumstance as the resolution ?
You can see why the copyright office wants to treat this as any other thing.
The details of proving claims get complicated quickly.
> As soon as I start refining it, and commanding the AI to fix the mistakes, this argument starts to lose ground fast.
Definitely. And if the result isn’t essentially a clone of some existing copyrighted work, there really is no viable argument under current copyright law.
Do we still care if its open or closed? Isn't reverse engineering basically solved anyway?
I mostly agree and have pretty much every one of my projects open source. One in particular, though, is not. And that is because the design of it is heavily domain specific and is built on loads and loads of experience. Not sure how to reconcile that...
There's a difference between something being released as open source and something that never gets released at all. Open source or not only becomes relevant when making the binary available to other people.
Yes, but the one project I'm excluding from open source may be one I sell to companies - we'll see.
It seems pretty clear-cut to me. AI companies plundered the commons, but the commons have licenses that come with them that clearly state that their use and derivatives thereof must also include the license and be open source.
This is a chance for great good for humanity and for the AI companies to do the right thing for themselves and for all of us.
Not releasing the code as open source would be just... well... evil.
And a further question arises for me: If we don't start sharing the fruits of the machines now, then when?
What's wrong with this website? When I open it in Safari on macOS, it consumes all my RAM. 20GB to start. I got a system warning to force quit some apps to maintain stability (which was a first in 5 years). When I closed other non-Safari apps, Safari usage then went up to 30GB.
Quitting and relaunching Safari, then returning to the site, produces the same results. The process for this website is what is using the RAM, it persists after closing the tab, and needs to be force quit.
I’m confused. Is this article meant to be a scholarly legal argument (albeit, by a novice)? Or a normative statement about what the author would prefer?
It certainly doesn’t seem to be about practical solutions. It doesn’t even touch on the ramifications of its suggestions. I’m pretty sure that it would be a massive boon to data center operators and cause most of the readers of hacker news to lose our livelihoods.
I get the sentiment, but how would you prove a negative? You can get "caught" using AI, but not having been caught does not and can not prove you didn't. Given that 99.999% of projects now use AI to some extend, the logical default assumption is going to be you are probably not in the 0.001%
All 100% ai generated assets, art, music, text should be free and open source too.
Why only code? What about music, movies, images? If AI generated code isn't copyrightable, why should they be?
> developers more and more rely on AI without even reviewing the generated output, let alone modifying it to fit their specific needs. Code like this, where humans put little effort, except writing prompts, should definitely be Open Source.
A person's contribution here is difficult to measure. This statement reminds me of one of my older bosses who priced software per lines written.
An AI-generated software's quality reflects the author's vision, taste, and expertise (if any). These are there regardless of the number of lines reviewed.
I would've supported open source for completely AI-generated apps including the conception of the idea.
RMS would be proud with this post though.
I'm all for the concept of all code being open source... but I would then need a way to protect my final product from just being cloned or ripped off by a competitor.
With code itself being so cheap these days, it's the final product that has value. The requirements, architecture, usage data, the hundreds of meetings to figure out what customers want/need, the marketing, etc. A lot of the learnings and most of my business are expressed in the code though, so making it open is a massive risk. The code on it's own I don't even think is valuable. The only ones who'd benefit are competitors and upstarts targeting my customers.
Related question I just thought of reading this: if you are an employee at a company that you know 100% AI generates its code, and AI-generated code is not copyrightable... is that employee legally allowed to leave the company taking a full copy of the source code, and set it up as their own business?
Probably not. Even if the code is not copyrightable, I would assume it's still considered a trade secret.
Your employment contract most likely classifies it as a trade secret.
I doubt anyone is 100% AI generating anything
Fully AI output from a single prompt is not copyrightable (in the US). Is fully AI output from a sequence of prompts not copyrightable? If it is, at what point does this change?
I agree with the spirit of this. I'm a longtime open source developer and generally prefer GPL for my manual code. For my AI-generated code I'm using a multiple choice license of Apache, BSD, GPL, MIT.
If you're curious, here's my newest open source which helps build Rust web services along with Axum: https://github.com/publicprojects-io/axa and you can see the LICENSE.md file.
Hot take indeed, and something I disagree with. If I am paying for AI, my code is my code, no?
Does it matter at this point when you can generate the same code easily with the same AI model?
Downvoting sentiments that don't agree with the author's position is gross.
If you put your code online just assume it's gonna get stolen and you'll never see a penny
You mean copied? I assume the purpose of putting it online is so it can be copied
There is so little value to most code produced with models these days I just don’t see the point.
The real value ends up being found in software where there is a person behind it continuously refining it into something others will look at and say “Someone clearly paid attention to this.” Models can’t (yet) reproduce that because they can’t/don’t go interacting with users or asking bigger picture questions.
Whether someone is producing that software with a model or not doesn’t change much about the ownership picture to me: it’s the person that owns the project, and the LLM is a tool.
Once again, it all comes down to it being a tool and how it’s used, and there are no useful blanket statements that can be made about it (or how the tool’s output should be classified, legally or otherwise)
No, but all models trained on public data should be open weights by law.
What is public data?
This article makes no sense. None of the arguments are sound and conclusive. First argument: Non sequitur. Programmers were also trained by open source software and from stack overflow and stack exchange. That's not a sound reason for their programs to be open source. Second argument: AI-generated content is not copyrightable. If that's the case, then it cannot be open source since open source licenses rely on copyright for their enforcement. The author confuses public domain with open source. Public domain and open source are two completely different types of categories with different legal implications. Third argument: This contradicts the second argument. Now programmers using AI should publish their code under an open source license or under CC0. That's a demand. Not everybody will do that and no argument is presented why they should do so. Fourth point: Not all code is a hundred percent human written and a hundred percent AI written. The author concludes from this problem that "Code like this, where humans put little effort, except writing prompts, should definitely be Open Source." There is no argument here at all. It's another personal demand without justification.
At least, the author should try to back up their demands with further justifications and make them less contradictory.
I mean, public domain code which is available is certainly open source. Just not the most common kind.
You cannot enforce that it's available without copyright and a corresponding license. I thought the author meant the code produced by AI should also be available to others somehow but perhaps I've misunderstood.
This post is so close to getting it ;)
Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way. They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.
But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)
I mostly agree with you, but public domain licensing doesn't get us software freedom by itself if the source code is not available.
OTOH as models get better at RE it may become moot.
no because nobody is required to release the source code of their derivative work absent a license like GPL that requires you to do it.
No, the four freedoms rely on copyright. If there is no copyright, any company can take the open source code, modify it as they like, and never give back the modifications to anyone. It's the equivalent of an MIT license (technically, it's more like public domain but let's ignore this detail here). That's fine for many but far from the goals of the GPL.
No copyright doesn't mean you can't keep your source code a tightly kept business secret. You can even combine it with NDAs and contracts to re-institute something akin to copyright.
> First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement.
I too have trained on the massive corpus of open source code. Should everything I code also be open source? Or only if I leverage an artificial neural network as a prosthesis to enhance the capabilities of my natural neural network?
Makes sense, many of the programming languages are open source, other novelty things were released as open source aswell, we as programmers/software engineers does a bunch of our solutions based on public code or under Creative Commons.
What I agree with the post is specific licenses require us some specific requirements like release the code if it's a derivation of prior work!
No, because open source licenses don't cover that, and artificial neural networks are very different from your "natural neural network".
You're also unlikely to output what you trained on verbatim.
I'm tired of these child like responses from adult professionals in this industry. Do you argue just for the sake of arguing? No, your exposure to opensource code wasn't "massive" and you are clearly smart enough to know this but you had this make this comment as rage bait.
An entire generation of web developers learned by viewing the source of webpages they visited at a time when HTML and JavaScript were still nascent. I don't think setting the bar for "massive" is the way to win this argument. It's valid because the biggest difference between an LLM reading Stack Overflow and remembering content and me finding answers there and learning something is that the LLM can do it much, much faster.
The difference is, just as a child doesn't need to consume the entirety of a language before being able to communicate with said language, a human developer doesn't need to consume all of Stack Overflow, Open source projects etc. in order to start producing functional work.
A child or a human developer cant do all the thousands of different things an LLM can do either.
I have learnt to read by training on a lot of books, I should then open source all future things I write. I've learnt to walk by watching other people, I probably should publish videos of me whenever I walk.
If humans are directing AI to generate code, it cannot be open source unless the human decides to make it. It is their vision that AI acted upon. So, i dont see the logic in this post or thinking. this sounds like an another altruistic progressive california thing
It is disappointing to see many people who espoused that copyright is bullshit now saying copyright should make people do what they personally want. I suppose it was never about freedom for them, only getting what they want when they want it.
What’s the point, if you can generate infinte code?
couldn't you always generate infinite code? just write more of it. but what open source lets you do is read the code for a particular piece of software, to see what it actually does. generating infinite code has nothing to do with that.
you could also do this before, but only with infinite time. open source value is shifting. open source is human-validated code. just OSSing generated code has no value.
Good idea. We just have to pay for the human-written part. Same with medical research and new medicines, new energy technologies, robotics, movies and music, and future AI. Eventually, as AI does more and more, everything will be free and open source.
You've figured out a way to eliminate money.
Following this logic, there should be no fees at all on coding models, since they scraped the web on this knowledge. Same applies for books, pictures, music btw. This debate has not even started yet.
I will be the first to make all my work free and open-source once I can obtain air, clean water, basic food, shelter for myself and my family, electricity, heating, medicine, education and internet access for free.
Until then, I’m sorry, but I have to feed my family while we all navigate this goddamn global transformation process.
These don't seem related? I don't think the author says you can't charge or have a business model or make money. The code being open source is unrelated to these things.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how LLMs have essentially made all code open source in a strange and very capitalist way: They’ve appropriated our human work—without regard for any licenses—by force and without any compensation to the authors, and are now selling the code back to anyone who’s willing to pay for it.
But yeah, aside from that, I’m also releasing all my Vibe Coding games under the MIT license: https://github.com/retrogames23/
Are they selling it back? All the best models are free downloads. At most you're paying for compute.
This article misunderstands copyright law -- citing an example that argues against it.
It cited Naruto v Slater, which unsuccessfully argued that the copyright for a monkey's selfie belong to the monkey, not to the owner of photography equipment.
The courts dismissed the case as animals cannot hold copyright.
---
While the courts did not rule it, the apparent copyright holder is the photographer Slater who received royalties.
This is directly analogous to AI code, in which a human did not directly author the characters but regardless had "significant creative contributions."
At the end of the day you don't actually need to see the source code if you can just regenerate it yourself. If you use a later ai model, your code will probably be better anyway.
This will never happen because it would essentially destroy every corporation now, the economy, and therefore every politician's funding source.
The output of machine intelligence has to be available to everyone or we're just breeding a new demigod class. We should make it a public utility, like water or electricity.
My patterns for loading data into Python is pretty much the same everytime with polars. I didn’t create that - I looked it up from a book somewhere. Do I need to open source it?
The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.
I can get behind that.
I think the legal standard currently in the United States is that all AI output is public domain.
This means that all AI generated code is public domain at the point of it being generated.
Of course just because something is public domain that doesnt mean you have to release the code publicly. Public domain just affects what others can do with the output. It doesnt mean you have to release the code yourself.
The new Epic Games Store is apparently entirely vibe coded. So that technically would mean that the source code for it would be public domain right? But people still can't copy the store or do whatever they want as you have trademarks protecting it. And Epic is under no obligation to release the code..
I am not a lawyer. It's possible I am completely misunderstanding the situation. Is there something I am getting wrong?
> I think the legal standard currently in the United States is that all AI output is public domain.
This is definitely not true.
The only thing a court has ruled is that the AI itself cannot hold any copyrights. Not that there are none or that using LLM based tools removes all copyright.
Open source people have had half a century to figure out how to make money with fairly little success (aside from a dozen or so very notable projects, and looking at all my AI slop, I don't see one of these hiding in there).
I don't particularly care about copyright or whatever ethical arguments yo may come up with -- I write code mostly for money, as do my competitors -- if you can figure out a way to stop them from using AI, I'm fine with not using it either. I'm fairly skeptical you can close Pandora's box though.
That aside, we may see more software going in a source-available direction -- either that or full cloud. Up until now being closed source was a competitive advantage, but now it's trivial to clone even fairly huge software suites, so that's less of a factor.
Having the source may also become a bigger advantage for regular users than before -- given they can now vibecode extensions/plugins, or customize the software more than what a config would personally allow. this probably wings the calculus away from a Photoshop-style license, and closer an Unreal Engine-style license.
Either that; or everything goes full cloud of course.
If AI generated code is not copyrightable, releasing it under an open source license is meaningless.
Under those conditions it would be un-licensable (since a license is essentially an agreement not to sue for copyright infringement) but it can still be made open by publication. I'm skeptical that the "anything that comes out of AI can't be copyrighted" argument will end up holding, but in the meantime it provides a strong incentive not to make that code public.
Releasing it for sure is meaningful
I'm not sure you understand all the things that an OSS license does. For example: liability.
Maybe not, could you explain?
>First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement. That code was simply scraped from the internet and used without permission or proper attribution. The models were also trained on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sister projects, which are released under Creative Commons licenses that legally require attribution. Turning this collective knowledge into proprietary, closed-source code feels like license laundering.
Strong argument, but the case that such a strong transformation should maintain the original licence only applies to my knowledge to GPL, which consists of a very small portion of the training set. Creative Commons would not even require the source code to be distributed, just attribution, which may already be the case by the nature of the models.
>"The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable. The foundation for this principle in the US goes back to the famous Monkey Selfie dispute, which established that non-humans cannot hold copyrights."
But no one claims that the AI holds the copyright, unlike Greenpeace which claimed that Naruto the monkey held the copyright.
I strongly agree. Look at what we’ve done here:
1. Software had a strong movement of freely sharing all code because they believed this technology was too important to be controlled by corporations.
2. AI companies managed to create millions of RL environments from GitHub PR’s and similar, and train their model to learn what it means to code from all the human labour in the world from the past 30 or so years.
3. Companies now use these closed source AI models, to automate and fire their human workers who enabled this.
Something has gone seriously wrong here, whether this falls under copyright or not is besides the point.
We weaponized a fundamentally good instinct that generated a lot of value for society and allowed corporations to rent seek on all the data these humans generated to help other humans not trillion dollar corporations.
“Well we’ll give them a UBI check”, the AI company says which is a complete non-sequitur. It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
The only solution that sounds good to me, is a model trained on Open Source Data must be Open Source and all the code it generates must also be open source. This is the only way to stop the coming rent seeking. Even mathematicians will be happy with this change!
I agree with you on most things but man
> It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
This is incredibly detached from reality. Most software engineers care more about money than they do about abstract notions of software from. Most certainly have not saved enough.
Fair enough, Im talking about Bay Area software engineers, most of whom have saved enough. Maybe not enough to live in the Bay Area whose house prices keep increasing with no end in sight, but plenty for elsewhere in the US (or the world) for that matter.
I think this misses the point a bit. All code should be open source. Full stop.
Even if you modify it before using it, it's still based on open source (often GPL) code, so just everything based in part on LLM output should be open source.
agreed. The problem is _which_ open source, because what we're probably going to slowly realize is most software will now be a public good and proper governance is needed thats indistinguishable from a public utility.
But we're not headed in that direction are we.
Why do people think that people receive the gift of open source software are somehow obligated as a result of receiving that gift?
Yes, it was trained on free software. Why does that mean my privacy should be invaded now if I distribute binaries I made?
Because instead of treating it as the gift it is, you're treating it as a service you are entitled to
I see you asserting that, I don't see him saying it...
Privacy?
There is still substantial human effort and R&D that goes into developing a complex code base with AI agents.
The author needs to realize that this is unenforceable.
In fact I'd argue that free software and open source is economically dead and unsustainable because of AI generated code and almost no one wants to pay for their tools because an AI can generate the missing feature for them close to $0.
Maintaining it is another thing, but assuming that the cost of tokens get cheaper, why wait for open source developers to maintain it when a frontier AI model can do it for far cheaper and quicker?
I am just saying what the average manager turned vibe coder would say who will refuse to donate or pay for established open source projects that they use for free.
Is it unenforceable to check that a company openly all in on AI is releasing all the source code of their products?
We already have a growing discoverability problem in many areas of content and throwing more slop into the mix is not the solution. This place for example has become a dumping ground for people, usually with no other activity here, to advertise their shovelware AI projects.
Here is a different angle. A programming language is a material like wood, aluminum, or stone. If you know the syntax and properties of it can you start trying to bend it to your will - you can make a ship, a satelite, or a children’s toy wihh tv the same language. You first have to spend years mastering the material and its limitations before you can bend it, so only a small number of the people who want to make stuff get to. Some people release open versions of a ship and a satelite you can start from, to lower the threshold of making stuff. They protect them to make sure giant shipbuilder doesn’t go making an army of their ships to kill their trade.
AI comes along and now grandma, who was formerly a midwife and teenager from home can start bending aluminum and carving wood with their words through AI. There are a bunch of open ships and satellites in the market, but Grandma is using her midwifing skills to ask AI to bend a new tool for her that helps turn breach babies around without requiring a c-section. No open source breach tools or medical tools on the market Grandma just needs aluminum and wood combination she would never be able to achieve without AI. She hammers down a lot - sending 1000 follow-up prompts to make the AI do stuff nobody has done before. Next her grandson decided to combine tungsten and wood to make a new toy that helps kids go airborne and land safely every time - like an egg-drop but for real life people. No open source code for that out there - he used the AI which knew the properties and the languages needed to get his idea to work. He hammers the AI with follow up questions and edits a bunch of the code where the AI defaults to the wrong setup, by trained convention. But he succeede. By this plan should they be allowed to copyright their work? Should their work be automatically open source so they can never monetize it either?
Articles like this promotes extreme views while we should be moderate on what should be OpenSource or not.
First of all, nobody must force OpenSource. Period. Second, such exterme views spawn extreme views in the opposite side.
Discussion is good, but this article is too draconian to be practical.
I don't see extreme views in this article. When LLMs take creative content from copyleft code, the license says the output has to be copyleft. Otherwise, it's theft.
If LLMs weren't trained on AGPL/GPL/LGPL code, it'd be different. But they are.
The current trend is for model output to be public domain, which is “more extreme”. Merely copyleft is not as extreme.
Taking all of available human knowledge, knowledge that was published under limited licences, and commercializing all that already is a fairly extreme action. Merely arguing that perhaps the fruits of that harvest should also be available to the public doesn't seem that extreme.
IMO it'd be better if the weights themselves were considered public domain.
That’s not an extreme view. Anyone who uses software under a copyleft license should also release any derivatives under the same license. While this isn’t currently the case legally since the GPL was never written with the possibility in mind that LLMs might be trained on it in the future it still aligns with the spirit of the license.
>First of all, nobody must force OpenSource.
No, GPL and copyleft licenses very much do and should force OpenSource by its nature. If someone uses GPL or AGPL and doesn't open source, they should be forced to Open Source.
> such exterme views spawn extreme views in the opposite side
The opposite side had exrtreme views for at least 4 decades. They publish stuff, cram it into your face with advertisement and demand purchasing a license for consuming it. And if you don't buy they want you to pay thousands of dollars or go to jail. That's as extreme as it goes. Eff them. Reverse engineer, clone and open source everything. There shouldn't be a single proprietary piece of published software left in use.
This means “all software should be Open Source unless written fully by humans”, which practically means almost all software in the near future, which is a terrible idea for multiple reasons.
Or practically means that much less software should be written with AI
You say “should” which is an opinion. Legally you can’t enforce people to open source their software or never use AI.
Well, it's to be seen if you can't.
This is like saying: All humans who learned from open source code should only produce open source code.
Humans aren‘t technology.