SCOTUS declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material (opens in new tab)

> If SCOTUS is saying that AI works, even those co-authored by humans, are not eligible for copyright/patenting;

They aren't.

The copyright office isn't either.

Everybody is very explictly saying that if you use say Sora to generate an image and you apply for a copyright with "Sora" as the author it'll be denied.

Same as if you apply for a copyright with "My Dog" as the author.

Authors must be humans and if you do not fill the author field out with a human it's denied. This has nothing to do with the tool used to create the art work.

> Doesn't that mean any code-base that uses AI generated code does not have an implicit copyright holder? And thus even the human constructor does not have the right to apply any license [closed/open] onto it whatsoever?

besides copyright, source code also can be protected as a trade secret.

Given how the models were trained for coding, every single code base that uses any code generated by an LLM should be required to be open sourced, or at least source available.

I'm not saying there is currently a legal president to enforce this, I'm saying ethically it make sense.

This would only apply if the codebase were 100% vibe coded. If there is human input - as there is in code, with the role of the software engineer, then it falls into another category for the sake of copyright arguments. And the way it works is copyright is granted automatically and only revoked/denied through litigation.

There's going to be a spectrum here, but for some of these new pilot projects like vinext where the claim is primary AI authorship I would expect the resulting works not to be copyrighted.

What does that mean? I don't know. They are claiming copyright over vinext and licensing it under MIT, a copyright-based license. So the license and the copyright both get swept away in the flood there and what's left is a formerly-copyrighted software duplicated as a work [in the public domain?] [that nobody can legally use?] [that the author can legally use but not legally license?]

Choose your own adventure, now with copyright law!

That's the position I came to based on these rulings, or lack thereof. I think of all the reasons open source shouldn't accept AI created code is that it can't be protected, and that has the potential to threaten the whole project.

OpenClaw, for instance has an MIT license [0], but, per the creators own words, they didn't even review the code. OpenClaw isn't MIT licensed, the MIT license relies on copyright, and because there was not even human review of the majority of the code, no substantial human input, that code base can't be copyrighted.

No need to steal AI code, it doesn't belong to anyone.

[0] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw?tab=MIT-1-ov-file#readm...

Hopefully.

What it generally means is that the lower court ruling stands and serves as precedent nationwide. Binding precedent in the circuit that handed down the ruling. But another circuit may make a different ruling sometime, and then the Supremes practically have to hear the case to resolve the conflict.

Or that the law is already settled… the ape selfie determined already authors must be human