> 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.