>it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input.
If you provided a human contractor with the specifications for the code you want, the courts have repeatedly made clear you have not provided the creative input from a copyright perspective, and the contractor needs to explicitly assign those rights to you if want to own the copyright on the code.
Let's say we didn't have assemblers, but instead we would have three professions:
- Specifiers, who make the specification for the system
- Programmers, who write C code
- Machine encoders, that take that C code and write machine code for a CPU
Would it be that the copyright would then belong to programmers, if no other explicit assignments would be made?
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Thinking about it, probably yes: copyright of the spec belongs to specifies, copyright of the C belong to programmers, and copyright of machine code to machine encoders. Or would it depend on the amount of optimizations the machine encoders would do, i.e. is it creative or not? And then does this relate to the task and copyrightability of C compiler output, where optimizations can sometimes surprise the developer?
LLMs aren’t human.