this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
710 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
89355 readers
3473 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Only if it is protected.Which code is afaik not.
In the US code is copyrighted the same as literary works. But that only covers the actual lines of code and not the ideas, functions or algorithms they implement. This means that if someone copy pastes your code word for word they are infringing your copyright but if they write their own code that does the same function as yours they are fine.
It absolutely is.
Human-generated code absolutely is, correct. But AI-generated code is still untested. AI-generated art does not have copyright protection currently. My money is that AI-generated code will have copyright protection through some mental and legal gymnastics. Because money.
Copyright generally requires human expression regardless of what the type of work is, it's not about what you were inspired by
If you did derive your work from something else and yours is similar enough, then now both you and the original author has separate copyrights on the result which both needs to be licensed to sell the work (prime example is book translations)
Oh, AI-generated code may not be, but like you said we don't have a court ruling yet.
I don't think it can't be, but we'd first have to have models trained without violating the rights of all the authors of the works in the training data. Like if you trained a model only on GPL software, then the model and its output should also be GPL.
I'm not so convinced on that one. Copying code without permission, yes, that's illegal. Distributing copied code without permission, also illegal. But processing code (copied with permission) into weights, that doesn't feel to me like a violation. If I have a legit copy of something, I should be able to distribute computed statistics about that copy.
EFF points out some hazards: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/rewriting-copyright-law-generative-ai-would-hurt-everyone
Sure, but it's not just statistics like "30% of lines contain the letter E". It reproduces the material, sometimes verbatim.
A model is very obviously a derivative work, as it has 0% original content input. Under fair use law, it also very obviously fails all four tests.
Reproduction of the material we agree is against the law.