Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft • Hacker News Board

Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#621

Post by ranger_danger » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 3:42 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #606

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So they're saying that the LLM cannot be the author, because LLMs cannot claim copyright. They're saying that the LLM can't be the author. Now suppose you supply the LLM with a prompt that contains human creativity, it performs a deterministic mathematical transformation on the prompt to produce a derivative text, and you want to copyright that, claiming yourself as the author. What happens then? If you think the a…

> What happens then? The part that the human created, the prompt, can be copyrighted. The part that the LLM created, cannot be. Copyright in code works exactly the same way: the source code is copyrighted. The binary code is only copyrighted to the extent that it is derived from the source code. This is well-established.

Maybe I am just misunderstanding something, but I feel like you might be contradicting yourself here... why can LLM output not be copyrighted, but compiler output can be?

Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#622

Post by marcus_holmes » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 12:20 AM UTC

ranger_danger wrote: post #621

marcus_holmes wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens then? The part that the human created, the prompt, can be copyrighted. The part that the LLM created, cannot be. Copyright in code works exactly the same way: the source code is copyrighted. The binary code is only copyrighted to the extent that it is derived from the source code. This is well-established.

Maybe I am just misunderstanding something, but I feel like you might be contradicting yourself here... why can LLM output not be copyrighted, but compiler output can be?

No, that's the point - the compiler output is only copyrighted to the extent that it is derived from the source code. The compiler itself cannot create anything copyrightable, but because there is a deterministic link between the source code and the binary code, and the source code was the product of a human, the binary code is covered by the source code copyright.

It's like a photocopier. If you photocopy a page from a book, that page is still covered by the copyright of the book author, even if the page is 2x larger or otherwise transformed by the machine.

Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#623

Post by account42 » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 12:10 PM UTC

PowerElectronix wrote: post #552

fc417fc802 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is copyright meaningful for aerospace software? I'm largely unfamiliar with that domain but I have trouble imagining that (for example) Boeing cares much about people redistributing or hacking on the control software for a 777. How would that impact their bottom line? I could understand for medical devices maybe but even then it seems like the software is a tiny part of the overall cost of a given design. A competito…

Nope, it falls more under trade secrets than copyright. If you do something that requires stealing the code (publishing it, selling it, etc) the company can legally fuck you up. Now, once it's in tbe wind, it becomes almost impossible to pursue from a practical point of view, as any implementer can claim trade secrets to avoid showing you the code.

I think the point is more that many kinds of software (presumably including aerospace software) doesn't really need any kinds of protections from redistribution because it is effectively only useful for a specific design and much of the effort in creating it is not the algorithms that a competitor could steal without copyright or alternative protection but certifying that the software fits the rest of the system, which any competitor making use of the software would have to do again.

Also remember that the original point of copyright and patent protections is to encourage people to create the protected works in the first place but Boeing isn't just going to stop making aerospace software without copyright because their hardware will be useless without it. So if anything, any software that is needed for hardware made by the same company to function doesn't really have any right to be copyrightable at all.