I doubt that much software is entirely AI-generated with no human review or testing, it’s probably more like integrating some public domain snippets you found online into your code (which doesn’t invalidate copyright on the rest of it, or the way it’s put together) or having some files auto-generated by a script (like a C header containing a lookup table for a simple mathematical function, the table isn’t copyrightable itself maybe but the software as a whole still is)

I'm not sure this is really true, since copyright applies to distribution.

If you have a substantial amount of backend code (as with most SaaS projects) you're never actually distributing the code, and copyright is never at play. Computer generated artifacts are already in this boat and are protected by virtue of being trade secrets not by copyright.

This could maybe be true of shipping javascript to the browser, which presumably is not going to qualify as a trande secret, but I don't think that's where most companies derive value.

>If that’s how the court interpreted it, then the software industry is hosed, since that’d mean none of the generated code running in production right now is under any sort of copyright or otherwise protection, lol.

Correct, the jurisprudence there hasn't changed.

“I can stop on an ant, and I can stomp on a flower, so look out, elephants”