This seems extremely confused. The copyright system does not have a way to grant these permissions because the material is not covered under copyright! You can distribute it at will, not due to any sort of legal grant but simply because you have the ability and the law says nothing to stop you.
That's not the case here. A re-implemented piece of software that does not contain meaningful verbatim excerpts from the original is not subject to the copyright of the original.
this is similar to creating an extension to some program, because the extension could not be written without the original even if the interface the extension is using is a public API. the claim has been made that the copyright of the original program applies. i think the linux kernel is an example here.
see also these questions on stackexchange:
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2087...
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/8675...
This is just lazy copyright whitewashing.
This opinion is simplistic. LLMs are trained with pre-existing content, and their output directly reflects their training corpus. This means LLMs can generate output that matches verbatim existing work. And that work can very well be subjected to copyright.
The US Copyright Office has published a piece that argues otherwise, but a) unless they pass regulation their opinion doesn't really matter, and b) there is way too much money resting on the assumption code can be copyrighted despite AI involvement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Also, it is essentially an ext2 filesystem as it does not support journaling.
I know, the courts have ruled against this, but like, it's AI man!
Maybe for lawyers, AI is some kind of magical thing on its own. But having successfully created a working inference engine for Qwen3, and seeing how the core loop is just ~50 lines of very simple matrix multiplication code, I can't see LLMs as anything more than pretty simple interpreters that process "neural network bytecode," which can output code from pre-existing templates just like some compilers. And I'm not sure how this is different from transpilers or autogenerated code (like server generators based on an OpenAPI schema)
Sure, if an LLM was trained on GPL code, it's possible it may output GPL-licensed code verbatim, but that's a different matter from the question of whether AI-generated code is copyrightable in principle.
Interestingly, I found an opinion here [0] that binaries technically shouldn't be copyrightable, and currently they are because:
the copyright office listened to software publishers, and they wanted binaries protected by copyright so they could sell them that way
IMO, your intuition regarding AI is right--it's not a magic copyright laundering machine, and AFAIU courts have very quickly agreed that infringement is occurring. But in copyright law establishing infringement (or the possibility of infringement) is the easy, straight-forward part. Copyright infringement liability is a much more complex question. Transformative uses in particular are a Fair Use, and Fair Use is technically treated as an affirmative defense to infringement.[1] If something is Fair Use, infringement is effectively presumed. But Fair Uses are typically very fact-intensive questions, and unlike the case with search engines I'm not sure we'll get to the point where there's a well-defined fence protecting "AI".
[1] There's a scholarly pedantic debate about whether Fair Use is properly a "defense", rather than "exception" to infringement, but it walks and talks like a defense in the sense that the defendant has the burden of proving Fair Use after the plaintiff has established infringement. There's a similarly pedantic (though slightly more substantive) debate in criminal law regarding affirmative defenses. But the very term "affirmative defense" was coined to recognize and avoid these pedantic debates.
Thats awesome lmao
there are lots of portions of code today, prior to AI authorship, that are already not copyrightable due to the way they are produced. the existence of such code does not decimate the copyright of an overall collective work.
Can someone explain this to me? I was under the impression that if a work of authorship was not copyrightable because it was AI generated and not authored by a human, it was in the public domain and therefore you could do whatever you wanted with it. Normal copyright restrictions would not apply here.
For example, when an LLM does a vector search, there is a high probability of pirated content bleed-though and isomorphic plagiarism in the high dimensional vector space results. Thus, often when you coincidentally type in "name a cartoon mouse", there is a higher probability Disney "Micky Mouse" will pop out in the output rather than "Mighty Mouse". Note Trademarks never expire if the fees are paid, and Disney can still technically sue anyone that messes with their mouse.
Much like em dashes "--", telling the current set of models to stop using them inappropriately often fails. Also, activation capping is used to improve the models behavioral vector, and have nothing to do with the Anthropic CEO developing political ethics.
LLM are useful for context search, but can't function properly without constantly stealing from actual humans. Thus, will often violate copyright, trademark, and patents. In a commercial context it is legally irrelevant how the output has misappropriated IP, and one can bet your wallet the lawyers won't care either. No, IP is not public domain for a long time (17 to 78 years) regardless of peoples delusions, even if some kid in a place like India (no software patents) thinks it is..
This channel offers several simplified explanations of the work being done with models, and Anthropic posts detailed research papers on its website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDdKiQNw80c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcwtV_bFp4
Many YC bots are poisoning discourse -- so this thread will likely get negative karma. Some LLM users seem to develop emotional or delusional relationships with the algorithms. The internet is already >52% generated nonsense and growing. =3
The quoted content said that "Lacking Copyright (or similarily a Public Domain declaration by a human), we don't receive sufficient rights grants which would permit us to include it into the aggregate body of source code, without that aggregate body becoming less free than it is now." I was explicitly asking how this meshed with my understanding of copyright, at least in the United States, which requires that a work of authorship be authored by a human and not by a machine; where a work is not authored by a human, copyright protection does not subsist, and therefore the respective work is in the public domain. And I was further asking for an explanation as to how including a work that is AI-generated (aka in the public domain) made "... that aggregate body becoming less free". Unless my understanding of copyright law and court precedent is massively off the mark, I am confused as to how less freedom is aforded in this instance.
Thus, one should not contaminate GPL/LGPL licensed source code with such content. The reason it causes problems is the legal submarines may (or may not if they settled out of court with Disney) surface at a later date, as the lawsuits and DMCA strikes hit publishers.
It doesn't mean people won't test this US legal precedent, as most won't necessarily personally suffer if a foundation gets sued out of existence for their best intentions/slop-push. =3
I don't love this take. Specifically:
> it's clear the human offering the patch didn't do it
I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a good bit of "blood, sweat, and tears" invested by a human directing the LLM to make this happen. Yes, LLMs can spit out full projects in 1 prompt but that's not what happened here. From his blog the work on this spanned 5 months at least. And while he probably wasn't working on it exclusively during that time, I find it hard to believe it was him sending "continue" periodically to an LLM.
Anyone who has built something large or complicated with LLM assistance knows that it takes more than just asking the LLM to accomplish your end goal, saying "it's clear the human offering the patch didn't do it" is insulting.
I've done a number of things with the help of LLMs, in all but the most contrived of cases it required knowledge, input from me, and careful guidance to accomplish. Multiple plans, multiple rollbacks, the knowledge of when we needed to step back and when to push forward. The LLM didn't bring that to the table. It brought the ability to crank out code to test a theory, to implement a plan only after we had gone 10+ rounds, or to function as grep++ or google++.
LLMs are tools, they aren't a magic "Make me ext4 for OpenBSD"-button (or at least they sure as hell aren't that today, or 5 months ago when this was started).
Must be a bug in the linux kernel, let me git clone and build an out-of-tree module...
Discussion then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11469535
Mirror of the slides https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid...
I didn't look closely at most of the code but one thing that caught my eye, pid is not safe for tempfile name generation, another user of the system can easily generate files that conflict with this. Functions like mktemp and mkstemp are there for a reason. Some of the other "safety" checks make no sense. If the LLM code generator is coming up with things which any competent unix sysadmin (let alone programmer) can tell are obviously wrong, it doesn't bode well for the rest.The next AI winter can't come soon enough…
Fast forward to 2026, Theo says no to vibe-coded slop, prove to me your magic oracle LLM didn't ingest gobs of GPL code before spitting out an answer.
People are big mad of course, but you want me to believe Theo is the bad guy here for playing it conservatively?
There's another issue surrounding developer skill atrophy or stunting that I find \ particularly concerning on an existential level.
If we allow people to use LLMs to write code for a given project/platform, experience \ in that platform will potentially atrophy or under develop as contributors \ increasingly rely on out sourcing their applicable skills and decisions to "AI".
Even if you believe out sourcing the minutia of coding is a net positive, the \ "enshitification" principal in general should give you pause; as soon as the net \ developer skill for a project has degraded to a point of reliance, even somewhat, I \ think we can be confident those AI tools will NOT get less expensive.
I'd rather be independently less productive, than dependent on some MegaCorp(TM)'s \ good will to rent us back access to our brains at a fair price.
- achaean
Copyright prevents copying. It doesn't prevent using knowledge.
Its 2026, just shut up and give us at least one modern filesystem already!
This comment on the article is spot on. I don't vibe code or care about AI really, but it's so exhausting to see people playing lawyer in threads about LLM-generated code. No one knows, a ton of people are using LLMs, the companies behind these models torrented content themselves, and why would you spend your time defending copyright / use it as a tool to spread FUD? Copyright is a made up concept that exists to kill competition and protect those who suck at executing on ideas.
Who wants to test it ? Preferably on real hardware. /s