alt Hacker NewsJust remember that "reviewed" is not enough to not be considered public domain.
It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts.
Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored.
I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".
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Meanwhile I expect that intellectual property protections for software are completely unenforceable and effectively useless now. If something does not exist as MIT, an LLM will create it.
The playing field is level now, and corpo moats no longer exist. I happily take that trade.
> Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored.
As far as I know that has only been decided in US so far, which is far from the whole world.
So, how are you gonna prove I didn't write some code?
How am I gonna prove I did?
In what jurisdiction?!
It’s weird how people on HN state legal opinion as fact… e.g if someone in the Philippines vibecodes an app and a person in Equador vibecodes a 100% copy of the source, what now?
I don't think modified by a human is enough. If you take licensed text (code or otherwise) and manually replace every word with a synonym, it does not remove the license. If you manually change every loop into a map/filter, it does not remove the license. I don't think any amount of mechanical transformation, regardless if done by a human or machine erases it.
There's a threshold where you modify it enough, it is no longer recognizable as being a modification of the original and you might get away with it, unless you confess what process you used to create it.
This is different to learning from the original and then building something equivalent from scratch using only your memory without constantly looking back and forth between your copy and the original.
This is how some companies do "clear room reimplementations" - one team looks at the original and writes a spec, another team which has never seen the original code implements an entirely standalone version.
And of course there are people who claim this can be automated now[0]. This one is satire (read the blog) but it is possible if the law is interpreted the way LLM companies work and there are reports the website works as advertised by people who were willing to spend money to test it.
[0]: https://malus.sh/
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For those who might wonder how accurate this is, there is advice from the Federal Register to this effect. [0] Its quite comprehensive, and covers pretty much every question that might be asked about "What about...?"
> In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself.
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...