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> The US Copyright Office confirmed this in January 2025, and the Supreme Court declined to disturb it in March 2026 when it turned away the Thaler appeal. Works predominantly generated by AI without meaningful human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection, and that rule is now settled at the highest judicial level available. Misstates the law. Denial of certiorari can happen for many reasons unrelated t…
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Well, you are responsible for the consequences. Liability is simply a different thing than copyright.
The copyright office says that you don't get copyright because you're not considered the author: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ > The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts…
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Funny how the copyright industry was able to spin copyright infringment into the pejorative "stealing". If you still have the item, what was stolen? Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
I still find the idea that "learning" from code is "stealing" kind of ridiculous.
Personally, I think that the human directing the agent owns the copyright for whatever is produced, but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP. I'm concerned about the copyright 'washing' this enables though, especially in OSS, and I think the right thing for OSS devs to do is to try to publish resulting code with the strongest copyleft licensing that they are comfortable w…
I can totally see this applying here as well.
Now this doesn't resolve the issue of AIs being trained on copyrighted works it had no rights to. The counterargument is that this is a derivative or transformative work but I don't believe that's settled law at all.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
(Of course, there's no way to be certain of this, but it's what our software thinks, and the overall pattern is pretty convincing.)
See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
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Humans should have more legal privileges than machines, just as individuals should have more legal privileges than corporations. It's really as simple as that. I don't want to gripe around making up justifications, that's how the law should be and if it turns out not to be that, I'm going to be nettled. I live in the UK, and most US law is based upon English common law, it's not some immutable code given to us from a…
I get the individual/corporation distinction, but how is a machine another tier here? It's a tool, it can't have any rights at all. The wielder has rights, and curtailing their rights depending on what tool they're using to exercise them seems strange. Potentially justifiable, but it's a different axis from the nature of the actor.
If they have only the rights that their human creators have, then access to them cannot be sold, in the exact same way that I cannot sell you a database that I have collected filled with copyrighted material. The "humans do training too" argument only holds if you imbue LLMs with similar rights to humans.
I am allowed to sell myself (in a very limited capacity) to others for them to exploit my training, even if that training was on protected material, which is a privilege humans should have, but machines should not.
But something that is overlooked is that the world is bigger than the US and it's an absolute zoo out there in terms of copyright laws in different countries. Anything you think you might understand about this topic goes out of the window if you have international customers or provide software services outside the US. Or are not actually based there to begin with. And there are treaties between countries to consider as well.
Courts tend to try to be consistent with previous rulings, interpretations, etc. When it comes to copyright, there are a few centuries of such rulings. The commonly held opinions among developers that aren't lawyers are that AI is somehow different. And of course since the law hasn't actually changed, the simple legal question then becomes "How?". And the answer to that seems to involve a lot of different notions.
For example, "AIs are not people, and therefore any content produced by them isn't covered by copyright to begin with" is one of the notions brought up in the article. A lawyer might have some legal nits to pick with that one but it seems to broadly be the common interpretation. So AI's don't violate copyright by doing what they do. In the same way you can't charge a Xerox machine with copyright infringements. Or Xerox. But you could go after a person using one.
And another notion is that any content distributed by a human can be infringing on somebody else's copyright and that party can try to argue their case in a court and ask for compensation. Note that that sentence doesn't involve the word AI in any way. How the infringing party creates/copies the content is actually irrelevant. Either it infringes or it doesn't. You could be using AI, a Tibetan Monk copying things by hand, trained monkeys hitting the keyboard randomly, a photo copier, or whatever. It does not really matter from a legal point of view. All that matters is that you somehow obtained a copy of an apparently copyrighted work. AI is just yet another way to create copies and not in any way special here.
There are of course lots of legal fine points to make to how models are trained, how training data is handled, etc. But if you break each of those down it boils down to "this large blob of random numbers doesn't really resemble the shape or form of some copyrighted thing" and "Anthropic used dodgy means to get their hands on copies of copyrighted work". I actually received a letter inviting me to claim some money back from them recently, like many other copyright holders.
Could you please stop posting generated comments to HN? It's not allowed here, and it looks like you've done it over 30 times already. (Of course, there's no way to be certain of this, but it's what our software thinks, and the overall pattern is pretty convincing.) See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079