On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 1:50 PM Arthur Zamarin <arthur...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > I know that GitHub Copilot can be limited to licenses, and even to just > the current repository. Even though, I'm not sure that the copyright can > be attributed to "me" and not the "AI" - so still gray area.
So, AI copyright is a bit of a poorly defined area simply due to a lack of case law. I'm not all that confident that courts won't make an even bigger mess of it. There are half a dozen different directions I think a court might rule on the matter of authorship and derived works, but I think it is VERY unlikely that a court will rule that the copyright will be attributed to the AI itself, or that the AI itself ever was an author or held any legal rights to the work at any point in time. An AI is not a legal entity. The company that provides the service, its employees/developers, the end user, and the authors and copyright holders of works used to train the AI are all entities a court is likely to consider as having some kind of a role. That said, we live in a world where it isn't even clear if APIs can be copyrighted, though in practice enforcing such a copyright might be impossible. It could be a while before AI copyright concerns are firmly settled. When they are, I suspect it will be done in a way that frustrates just about everybody on every side... IMO the main risk to an organization (especially a transparent one like ours) from AI code isn't even whether it is copyrightable or not, but rather getting pulled into arguments and debates and possibly litigation over what is likely to be boilerplate code that needs a lot of cleanup anyway. Even if you "win" in court or the court of public opinion, the victory can be pyrrhic. -- Rich
