According to this guy...
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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I guess some lawyers have that nailed shut. But a guy can dream, right?
This reminds me of that scene in Breaking Bad where the two morons were talking about how if you ask an undercover cop if they're cop they legally have to tell you the truth
Not how copyright works. Adding something with creative height together with something without leaves the combined work with ownership only of the part with creative height with the rest unprotected.
(bots can not achieve creative height by definition in law)
Ooh, free trash code!
SCO would like a word
The conversation around ownership and AI is less about absolutes and more about clarity and accountability.
Stick to the GPL licensencing of your code whenever possible and the garbage EEE can't subdue you. (Embrace extend exthinguish.)
If they plagiarize it they kinda ow you the honor.
Hower, plagiarism is still plagiarism, so you better actually write some of your code by hand.
Sure they can. Because what are you going to do financially ruin yourself in a lawsuit you're going to lose against Microsoft or some other mega Corp who doesn't give a shit about GPL licencing?
If it's not enforced with teeth then it doesn't matter anymore.
The the greatest intellectual property theft and laundering scheme in human history
That sounds like complete bullshit to me. Even if the logic is sound, which I seriously doubt, if you use someone's code and you claim their license isn't valid because some part of the codebase is AI generated, I'm pretty sure you'll have to prove that. Good luck.
I work for a large enterprise firm, our corporate lawyer has told be about this exact scenario so I'm inclined to believe it's real.
That being said, for established projects it won't be that hard to prove the non-AI bit because you have a long commit history that predates the tooling.
Even if you were to assume that all commits after a certain date were AI generated, the OP is slightly off in their attestation that any AI code suddenly makes the whole thing public domain, it would only be if a majority of the codebase was AI coded (and provably so).
So yes all the vibe coded shite is a lost cause, but stuff like Windows isn't in any danger.
I'll stay sceptical until there is court cases supporting this logic as a precedent.
I think that's actually quite sensible, our lawyer wasn't flagging some clear cut legal certainty, he was flagging risk.
Risk can be mitigated, even if the chance of it panning out is slim.
A bit besides the point, but it is pretty crazy to me that we're moving towards a world where if you create by yourself, you're outcompeted, but if you use AI like everyone else, you own nothing.
There was a case in which a monkey took a picture and the owner of the camera wanted to publish the photo. Peta sued and lost because an animal can't hold any copyright as an human author is required for copyright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
As you also find in the wikipedia article, this case is used to argue that ai generated content is not by an human author and consequently not copyrightable.
I'd argue that this is a different scenario, as AI is a tool, not a being. At least at this point.
A complex tool, but really just a tool. Without the human input, it can't do shit.
There's already rulings on this holding that the prompt for all LLM or image generator isn't enough to count the result as the human's expression, thus no copyright (both in USA and other places)
You need both human expression and creative height to get copyright protection
I'd argue that it is wildly different to vide coding.
Exactly. If I use online Photoshop or whatever, and I use the red eye removal tool, I have copyright on that picture. Same if I create a picture from scratch. Just because someone like OpenAI hosts a more complex generator doesn't mean a whole new class of rules applies.
Whomever uses a tool, regardless of the complexity, is both responsible and benificiary of the result.
Not quite how copyright law works. Photoshop and similar gives you copyright because it captures your expression.
An LLM is more like work-for-hire but unlike a human artist it doesn't qualify for copyright protection and therefore neither does you
Well, not how USA copyright works, but point well taken. It seems I was too naïve in my understanding of copyright.
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This whole post has a strong 'Sovereign Citizen' vibe.
I do not give Facebook or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages, or posts, both past and future.
The Windows FOSS part, sure, but unenforceable copyright seems quite possible, but probably not court-tested. I mean, AI basically ignored copyright to train in the first place, and there is precedent for animals not getting copyright for taking pictures.
If it's not court tested, I'm guessing we can assume a legal theory that breaks all software licensing will not hold up.
Like, maybe the code snippets that are AI-made themselves can be stolen, but not different parts of the project.
That seems a more likely outcome.
As much as I wish this was true, I don't really think it is.
It's just unsettled law, and the link is basically an opinion piece. But guess who wins major legal battles like this - yep, the big corps. There's only one way this is going to go for AI generated code
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That's not what that research document says. Pretty early on it talks about rote mechanical processes with no human input. By the logic they employ there's no difference between LLM code and a photographer using Photoshop.
That's not even remotely true....
The law is very clear that non-human generated content cannot hold copyright.
That monkey that took a picture of itself is a famous example.
But yes, the OP is missing some context. If a human was involved, say in editing the code, then that edited code can be subject to copyright. The unedited code likely cannot.
Human written code cannot be stripped of copyright protection regardless of how much AI garbage you shove in.
Still, all of this is meaningless until a few court cases happen.
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As it should. All the idiots calling themselves programmers, because they tell crappy chatbot what to write, based on stolen knowledge. What warms my heart a little is the fact that I poisoned everything I ever wrote on StackOverflow just enough to screw with AI slopbots. I hope I contributed my grain of sand into making this shit little worse.
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Aren't you all forgetting the core meaning of open source? The source code is not openly accessible, thus it can't be FOSS or even OSS
This just means microslop can't enforce their licenses, making it legal to pirate that shit
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By that same logic LLMs themselves (by now some AI bro had to vibe code something there) & their trained datapoints (which were on stolen data anyway) should be public domain.
What revolutionary force can legislate and enforce this?? Pls!?
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I think, to punish Micro$lop for its collaboration with fascists and its monopolistic behavior, the whole Windows codebase should be made public domain.
does the public really want more garbage than they already has?
Do you not want all the hardware support Linux is missing to suddenly become available?
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Counterpoint: how do you even prove that any part of the code was AI generated.
Also, i made a script years ago that algorithmically generates python code from user input. Is it now considered AI-generated too?
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Stallman: "Oh man, not like this."
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