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490 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.232s | source
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benlivengood ◴[] No.44383064[source]
Open source and libre/free software are particularly vulnerable to a future where AI-generated code is ruled to be either infringing or public domain.

In the former case, disentangling AI-edits from human edits could tie a project up in legal proceedings for years and projects don't have any funding to fight a copyright suit. Specifically, code that is AI-generated and subsequently modified or incorporated in the rest of the code would raise the question of whether subsequent human edits were non-fair-use derivative works.

In the latter case the license restrictions no longer apply to portions of the codebase raising similar issues from derived code; a project that is only 98% OSS/FS licensed suddenly has much less leverage in takedowns to companies abusing the license terms; having to prove that infringers are definitely using the human-generated and licensed code.

Proprietary software is only mildly harmed in either case; it would require speculative copyright owners to disassemble their binaries and try to make the case that AI-generated code infringed without being able to see the codebase itself. And plenty of proprietary software has public domain code in it already.

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zer00eyz ◴[] No.44383218[source]
> or public domain

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-art-us-copyright-office...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Im pretty sure that this ship has sailed.

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raincole ◴[] No.44383728[source]
It's sailed, but towards the other way: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5vjqdm1ypo
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1. zer00eyz ◴[] No.44384264[source]
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-art-copyright-matthew-allen/

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/19/ai-art-cannot-be-copyrighted...

Here are cases where the product of AI/ML are not the products of people and not capable of being copyrighted. These are about the OUTPUT being unable to be copyrighted.