Over the past few months it’s become clear that coding agents are extraordinarily good at building a weird version of a “clean room” implementation of code. The most famous version …
My understanding of copyright law, I hate the cliche, but I am not a lawyer, is that things computers make aren’t covered by copyright. Now whether courts will decide if AI agents operating alongside user prompts counts as something a computer generated “itself” versus something the human made by using the computer as a tool, who really knows. But the idea of sending an AI agent to remake some proprietary code and have it be part of the public domain is interesting. Though, sadly it would go both ways, corporations could make public domain versions of copyleft code.
My understanding of copyright law, I hate the cliche, but I am not a lawyer, is that things computers make aren’t covered by copyright. Now whether courts will decide if AI agents operating alongside user prompts counts as something a computer generated “itself” versus something the human made by using the computer as a tool, who really knows. But the idea of sending an AI agent to remake some proprietary code and have it be part of the public domain is interesting. Though, sadly it would go both ways, corporations could make public domain versions of copyleft code.