Human authorship?

Posted Jul 1, 2025 18:37 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Human authorship? by paulj
Parent article: Supporting kernel development with large language models

It's likely that only non-trivial _prompts_ will be copyrighted.

I can see that in future source code repos will have the LLM-generated source code along with the list of prompts that resulted in it. And then lawyers will argue where exactly the copyright protection is going to stop. E.g. if a prompt "a website with the list of issues extracted from Bugzilla" is creative enough or if it's just a statement of requirements.

Human authorship?

Posted Jul 2, 2025 13:43 UTC (Wed) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (2 responses)

> It's likely that only non-trivial _prompts_ will be copyrighted.

If the prompt is copyrightable, then the output is too. An LLM is just a tool. Photos don't lose copyright by feeding them through a tool, so why would an LLM be any different? You'd have to somehow argue that an LLM is somehow a fundamentally different kind of tool than anything else you use to process text, which I don't think is a supportable idea.

Human authorship?

Posted Jul 2, 2025 14:24 UTC (Wed) by jani (subscriber, #74547) [Link]

> If the prompt is copyrightable, then the output is too.

It's just not that clear cut: https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/02/cop...

Human authorship?

Posted Jul 2, 2025 18:55 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

But _where_ does the copyright start? A prompt may be copyrightable if it's specific enough. And edits made by humans to the generated code are likely to be copyrightable.

But suppose we have this case, you build a web service to track sleep times using an LLM. And then I build a service to track the blood sugar data using an LLM.

The source code for them ends up 95% identical, just because there are so many ways to generate a simple CRUD app and we both used the same LLM version. And if you had looked at these two code bases 15 years ago, it would have been a clear-cut case of copyright infringement.

But clearly, this can't be the case anymore. Mere similarity of the code can't be used as an argument when LLMs are at play.