And the reason for this is that there is no limit as to how much money corporations can pay for the election campaigns of politicians who make the laws. Right?

No, lawyers will want software patents as that's the only group that would benefit from them, apart from large litigation-happy companies that want to squash any competition.

Not sure I can follow your reasoning. Wouldn't the developer of the software who got a patent for an invention embodied in the software she developed benefit as well?

Not if the developer is employed at the time as contracts will usually mean that the company owns the patents, even if the developer was working on their own time.

The bigger issue is patent abuse - file or buy a few poorly specified patents and then use them along with litigation to shut down competitors. This generally leads to bolstering the bigger companies at the expense of smaller companies due to the costs of litigation.

Basically, software patents can turn developing software into a minefield. It can end up that only people with access to legal departments will be able to sell software.

If a recordoing is made in a club, doesn't the party doing the recording have the copyright to that (live) recording, or is it the performers?

Sans contract? Probably like if I take a photo of you holding a copy of a recent book. I own copy right of the photo. The author still has copyright of the book.

Would writing a prompt, or few, for an LLM qualify as "the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice"

Read the linked report - it discusses this.

The short answer is that it's possible if the prompt has sufficient control but only the parts controlled by the human are eligible for copyright.

Using AI doesn't automatically disqualify from copyright protection though.

BUt LLM has seen millions (?) of other code-bases too. If you give it a functional spec it has no reason to prefer any one of those code-bases in particular. Except perhaps if it has seen the original spec (if such can be read from public sources) associated with the old implementation, and the new spec is a copy of the old spec.

Yes if you are solving the exact problem that the original code solved and that original code was labeled as solving that exact problem then that’s very good reason for the LLM to produce that code.

Researchers have shown that an LLM was able to reproduce the verbatim text of the first 4 Harry Potter books with 96% accuracy.

> that an LLM was able to reproduce the verbatim text of the first 4 Harry Potter books with 96% accuracy.

Kinda weird argument, in their research (https://forum.gnoppix.org/t/researchers-extract-up-to-96-of-...) LLM was explicitly asked to reproduce the book. There are people that can do so without LLMs out there, by this logic everything they write is a copyright infringement an every book they can reproduce.

> Yes if you are solving the exact problem that the original code solved and that original code was labeled as solving that exact problem then that’s very good reason for the LLM to produce that code.

I think you're overestimating LLM ability to generalize.

I guess the text of Harry Potter was used as training material as one big chunk. That would be a copyright violation.

This is where I disagree. Copyright was most likely violated, but (most likely) because book was obtained not via a legal way.

LLMs didn't spit out Harry Potter until it was prompted to do so. There is argument to be make that LLM can be used as transport of pirated content.

My argument is that it's not different from searching for "file:pdf Harry Potter"

I see your point but it also seems clear to me that somebody violated copyright, most likely the people or company that trained the AI.

This is not an argument against coding in a different language, though. It would be like having it restate Harry Potter in a different language with different main character names, and reshuffled plot points.

"... If AI-generated code cannot be copyrighted (as the courts suggest) ".

So, Supreme Court has said that. AI-produced code can not be copyrighted. (Am I right?). Then who's to blame if AI produces code large portions of which already exist coded and copyrigted by humans (or corporations).

I assume it goes something like this:

A) If you distribute code produced by AI, YOU cannot claim copyright to it.

B) If you distribute code produced by AI, YOU CAN be held liable for distributing it.

SCOTUS hasn't ruled on any AI copyright cases yet. But they've said in Feist v Rural (1991) that copyright requires a minimum creative spark. The US Copyright Office maintains that human authorship is required for copyright, and the 9th Circuit in 2019 explicitly agreed with the law that a non-human animal cannot hold any copyright.

Functionally speaking, AI is viewed as any machine tool. Using, say, Photoshop to draw an image doesn't make that image lose copyright, but nor does it imbue the resulting image with copyright. It's the creativity of the human use of the tool (or lack thereof) that creates copyright.

Whether or not AI-generated output a) infringes the copyright of its training data and b) if so, if it is fair use is not yet settled. There are several pending cases asking this question, and I don't think any of them have reached the appeals court stage yet, much less SCOTUS. But to be honest, there's a lot of evidence of LLMs being able to regurgitate training inputs verbatim that they're capable of infringing copyright (and a few cases have already found infringement in such scenarios), and given the 2023 Warhol decision, arguing that they're fair use is a very steep claim indeed.

The lack thereof (of human use). Prompts are not copyrightable thus the output also - not. Besides retelling a story is fair use, right? Otherwise we should ban all generative AI and prepare for Dune/Foundation future. But we not there, and we perhaps never going to be.

So the LLM training first needs to be settled, then we talk whether retelling a whole software package infringes anyone's right. And even if it does, there are no laws in place to chase it.

> Prompts are not copyrightable

Surely that varies on a case by case basis? With agentic coding the instructions fed in are often incredibly detailed.

In practice the output of the LLM does not tell what the prompt was, and the output varies randomly, so it is unlikely you would be sued for copying the prompt. And in fact you would not know what the prompt, if any, was for the original unless you copied the prompt from somewhere.

> Besides retelling a story is fair use, right?

Actually, most of the time, it is not.

The Supreme Court has not ruled on this issue. An appeal of a lower court's ruling on this issue was appealed to the Supreme Court but the Supreme Court declined to accept the case.

The Supreme Court has "original jurisdiction" over some types of cases, which means if someone brings such a case to them they have to accept it and rule on it, and they have "discretionary jurisdiction" over many more types of cases, which means if someone brings one of those they can choose whether or not they have to accept it. AI copyright cases are discretionary jurisdiction cases.

You generally cannot reliable infer what the Supreme Court thinks of the merits of the case when they decline to accept it, because they are often thinking big picture and longer term.

They might think a particular ruling is needed, but the particular case being appealed is not a good case to make that ruling on. They tend to want cases where the important issue is not tangled up in many other things, and where multiple lower appeals courts have hashed out the arguments pro and con.

When the Supreme Court declines the result is that the law in each part of the country where an appeals court has ruled on the issue is whatever that appeals court ruled. In parts of the country where no appeals court has ruled, it will be decided when an appeal reaches their appeals courts.

If appeals courts in different areas go in different directions, the Supreme Court will then be much more likely to accept an appeal from one of those in order to make the law uniform.

But this means code generated by snippet expanders or any sort of templates is non-copyrightable.

IANAL but I was under the impression that Supreme Court ruling was very specific to the AI itself copyrighting its own produced code. Once a human is involved, it gets a lot more complicated and rests on whether the human's contribution was substantial enough to make it copyrightable under their person.

A fun exercise: When Supreme Court has not ruled on an open legal question of interest, let's ask AI what would be a likely ruling by Supreme Court.

I think SCOTUS might in fact use AI to get a set of possible interpretations of the law, before they come up with their decision. AI might give them good reasons for pros and cons.

> AI might give them good reasons for pros and cons.

This is what lawyers do, in their briefs and oral arguments before the court.

True. But if I was a judge I might want to consult AI to get a "neutral" opinion.

AI "neutrality" is a mirage. Hopefully the Supreme Court justices are smart enough to know that.

Hopefully. If they are smart they know that everybody can be wrong, therefore it is good to hear differing opinions and argumentation from multiple sources, in important matters.

There's two ways of thinking about tests:

A) They let you verify that implementation passes its spec, more or less.

B) They are a (trustworthy) description of how the system behaves, they allow you to understand the system better.

I try to use "_" instead of whitespace in filenames. Means no need to URI-encode them ever. If you have a space you don't know whether it's a tab or space. Or maybe two spaces. Also when you tell somebody what the file-name is, you don't prnounce spaces.

Depending on the font, when you have an underlined name (as is common for hyperlinks) you don’t know if it’s an underscore or a space either. And underscores are super wide in proportional fonts, so quite ugly typographically there. I therefore prefer to use dashes instead.

I agree dash is a better choice if the phrase is a "hyphenated compound". Such as "long-term". But if it is two words say in a proper noun like "New York", then dash might be a bit misleading.

> Or maybe two spaces.

Nitpicking, "__" and "____" are difficult to distinguish.

Good nit. Still, when you pronounce the name in your head, or aloud, you quite automatically don't pronounce the space, but more likely would pronounce an underscore.

I inhaled Lord of the Rings on first reading. I lived inside it. And it had no illustrations except maps, right? But later when the movies came out they were a big disappointment for ne, they were not the world I had visited. And they were boring. Had I not read the books before, they might have been just fine.

Yeah, the (Peter Jackson) movies were basically LotR seen through the lens of decades of D&D and Warhammer Fantasy, a peculiar aesthetic which of course grew off LotR itself.

I'm guessing that Tolkien would have deeply hated it all with a burning passion.

Couldn't AI write the commit-message based on the prompts-history up till the commit thus making it easier to understand for any future reviewers what lead to and what is in a specific commit?