alt Hacker NewsHas anybody thought through the legal aspects of this, regarding code ownership?
As far as I understand the situation in the US (sorry, no idea where he is located), output from LLMs, once published, is essentially in the Public Domain, since there isn't any human who owns it.
However, in some sense, this is also a machine-assisted translation from one computer language into another, so one could argue that the ownership of the original code base still applies to the new one.
Which one is it? Is there any way to find out before a similar case goes to court?
Replies
Gigachad • today at 10:13 AM
AI rewrite one of the Microsoft source code leaks to Rust and publish it as open source on GitHub. We will soon find out what the answer is.
> output from LLMs, once published, is essentially in the Public Domain, since there isn't any human who owns it
That’s not what the court case in question was about: https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-de...
If I ask an LLM to come up with an entirely new story on its own, the output is not copyrightable.
But if I feed an LLM a Tom Clancy novel and ask it to regurgitate that same novel, I cannot legally then put the output on a website for anyone to download.