I think you should interpret it like this:
You cannot copyright the alphabet, but you can copyright the way letters are put together.
Now, with AI the abstraction level goes from individual letters to functions, classes, and maybe even entire files.
You can't copyright those (when written using AI), but you __can__ copyright the way they are put together.
> You can't copyright those anymore (when written using AI), but you __can__ copyright the way they are put together.
Sort of, but not really. Copyright usually applies to a specific work. You can copyright Harry Potter. But you can't copyright the general class of "Wizard boy goes to wizard school". Copyrights generally can't be applied to classes of works. Only one specific work. (Direct copies - eg made with a photocopier - are still considered the same work.)
Patterns (of all sorts) usually fall under patent law, not copyright law. Patents have some additional requirements - notably including that a patent must be novel and non-obvious. I broadly think software patents are a bad idea. Software is usually obvious. Patents stifle innovation.
Is an AI "copy" a copy like a photocopier would make? Or is it a novel work? It seems more like the latter to me. An AI copy of a program (via a spec) won't be a copy of the original code. It'll be programmed differently. Thats why "clean room reimplementations" are a thing - because doing that process means you can't just copy the code itself. But what do I know, I'm not a lawyer or a judge. I think we'll have to wait for this stuff to shake out before anyone really knows what the rules will end up being.
Weird variants of a lot of this stuff have been tested in court. Eg the Google v Oracle case from a few years ago.
You have good points regarding how copyright works.
> Software is usually obvious.
Hardware and mechanical designs are usually described in CAD programs nowadays, so it comes pretty close to software; it's just that LLMs are not the right tool to "GenAI" them but I've seen plenty of these kinds of design that I know for sure that they are often not any less obvious than a lot of software. Treating software as "obvious therefore not patentable" is not accurate and not fair and is probably not going to help the profession in the AI age. But I agree that patents are bad for innovation.
It is also not fair to claim that an AI-copy is fundamentally different from photocopying.
I mean, in both cases it is like you are picking the worst case interpretation for the field of software engineering.
> I think we'll have to wait for this stuff to shake out before anyone really knows what the rules will end up being.
Yes, but it will help if we think deeply about this stuff ourselves because what law-makers come up with may not be what the profession needs.
> It is also not fair to claim that an AI-copy is fundamentally different from photocopying.
If you clean-room copy it, I think it is different. Eg, first get one agent to make a complete spec of what the program does. And a list of all the correctness guarantees it meets. Then feed that spec into another AI model to generate a program which meets that spec.
The second program will not be based on any of the code in the first program. They'll be as different as any two implementations of the same idea are. I don't think the second program should be copyrighted. If it should, why shouldn't one C compiler should be able to own a copyright over all C compilers? Why doesn't the first JSON parsing library own JSON parsing? These seem the same to me. I don't see how AI models change anything, other than taking human effort out of the porting process.
The output will still be dependent on the input. And it is still copying even if you first lift the input to a different abstraction level.
Finally, even if your rationale is 99% correct, then there is still that 1% that makes the result a mechanistic copy.
And I see no way in which most people would 100% agree with your view.
If you write program A that does something, and I look at what your program does and write program B that does the same thing, have I copied your program? So long as I didn’t copy any of the lines of code in program A directly, no. At least, not according to copyright law. A copyright on Netscape navigator doesn’t apply to internet explorer or chrome. They’re all “copies” of Netscape navigator. But copyright applies to the work. New work? New copyright. I really don’t see how an LLM being involved changes any of that.
If you want to protect the idea or the design, get a patent. A patent on one h264 encoder applies to all h264 encoders.
There is a chance the courts or the legislature will decide differently. But until then, we should assume the existing law of the land holds.