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by matheusmoreira·17d ago·view on hn ↗
> The fact that AI generated code is not subject to copyright

Only if there was "no human creativity or direction". I always ensure that both are present. I don't just randomly prompt and ship AI output.

And that's just some kind of preliminary ruling by the US copyright office. It'll probably change at some point. AI work should be considered as work for hire, no different than a corporation hiring someone and owning the copyrights on the works they produce.

And even if it doesn't change, it's fine. AI generated code being declared public domain is one of the most refreshing developments in computing in a long time. It'll be just like before copyright protection was extended towards code, one of the events that let to the GPL to begin with.

There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from using public domain code. The GNU folks don't want it because they want to leverage the code into more free software via viral licensing, but it's not like they're prohibited from merging it. Public domain means you can do whatever you want, there are no licensing terms to obey here. Permissively licensed software has literally no reason to decline the code, given that the license has literally one requirement, namely keeping your name and copyright notice.

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Just prompts are not considered to be "direction". The example in the US Copyright Office report was of a client providing "direction" to an architect, which did not provide the client with any claim of ownership over the actual architectural drawings.

On the other hand, the architect using CAD tools to create those drawings did include the necessary human creativity/direction even if the tools did things like apply building code rules etc.

Source code being subject to copyright and also considered to be "speech" has provided much more protection to the public from government overreach, eg restrictions on cryptography source code.

> Just prompts are not considered to be "direction".

Which is why you don't just prompt and ship AI output. You review it, edit it, make it your own.