They constantly love to talk about Claude Code being "100%" being vibe coded...and the US legal system is leaning towards that not being copyrightable.
It could still be a trade secret, but that doesn't fall under a DMCA take down.
IIUC, a person can only claim copyright if they have significantly transformed the output. Unaltered LLM output is not copyrightable per US court decisions.
The whole thing is a legal mess. How do you know the LLM did not reproduce existing code? There is an ongoing legal battle in German between GEMA and OpenAI because ChatGPT reproduced parts of existing song lyrics. A court in Munich has found that this violates German copyright law.
I think you're misunderstanding copyright and ownership.
A copyright over code means that ONLY you can use that code, and nobody else; otherwise, you can sue them. For example, if you are an arist, you want to protect your IP this way.
Yes, AI generated code is not copyrightable but so is most code in general. It is very hard to truly get a copyright for a piece of code. But just because you don't have copyright to something doesn't mean it's not your property.
For example, you can buy several movies on DVD and those DVDs will still be your property even though you don't have copyright and if someone does steal those DVDs, it will be considered theft of your property. Similarly, just because the code is AI-generated/not copyrightable, doesn't mean others can just steal it.
Think about it - so many codebases are not legally protected as copyrighted material but are absolutely protected by IP laws and enforced by the companies that own them.
Huh? Normal property law is plainly not applicable to a non-rival good like information (unlike for instance a physical DVD: if someone takes a DVD from me, I don’t have it anymore). “Intellectual property” is, but it is not so much a legal regime as confusing shorthand for a number of distinct ones:
- Trademark law, which applies to markings on copies rather than copies themselves;
- Trade secret law, which stops applying when the information escapes into the wild through the secret-holder’s own actions;
- Patent law, which definitionally only applies to public knowledge as an incentive to not keep it secret instead;
- Publicity rights, which only apply to depictions or discussions of natural persons;
- Moral rights, which are mostly about being recognized as the author and even in their strongest incarnations do not restrict unmodified copies;
- Database right, which isn’t applicable as we’re not talking about a compendium of things, and anyway does not exist in the US and most other places outside the EU;
- Copyright, which you’ve conceded is not applicable here.
There’s no “intellectual property” distinct from these things, and none of them are relevant.
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the concepts of copyright and licensing.
> but so is most code in general.
That's definitely not true. All the code I write has my copyright, unless I waive that right to some other entity. If there was no copyright, there would no licensing. How else could you license your code, if you were not the copyright holder?
Have you never seen "Copyright (c) <Authors> 2025" in source code files?
The very fact that your code has your copyright is also the reason for things like CLAs.
> For example, you can buy several movies on DVD and those DVDs will still be your property even though you don't have copyright
That's because artistic works are distributed under a license. Just like software. Licenses have terms under which circumstances a work can be used, modified and (re)distributed. In the case of DVDs, you are generally not allowed to make your own copies and then sell them. In the case of software, that's why you have the various software licenses (proprietory or open-source).
> Similarly, just because the code is AI-generated/not copyrightable, doesn't mean others can just steal it.
You can't set licensing terms for something that is not copyrightable.
This is even worse. My Claude Code instance can theoretically write the same code as your instance for a similar prompt. Why should one of us be able to have the copyright?
No the human cannot hold the copyright also. They can own the property rights to the code and protect it. It's not like the rule is "AI cannot copyright stuff but humans can" but rather code is rarely copyrighted and in its case, ownership is much more important.
If your code was generated by you and you store it in your system and have property rights over it, you can enforce legal actions even without holding a copyright over the code.
In general, it is kind of weird to want to copyright code. How do you patent a for-loop for example
You can definitely copyright code. I think the English term "copyright" is a bit misleading. In German it is "Urheberrecht" (= author's right), which I think is much clearer.
If you author something, you have the sole copyright. In fact, in Germany you can't even waive your copyright away. However, you can grant licenses for the use of your work.
The difference between copyright and licenses is crucial! By licensing your work, you do not waive your copyright. You still remain the owner. If you publish your code under the GPL and you are the sole author, you can always relicense your code or issue commercial licenses under different terms.
> In general, it is kind of weird to want to copyright code. How do you patent a for-loop for example
There is a fundamental difference between copyright and patents! Patents require a novel technical contribution and they must be granted by a patent office.
I've worked on a three letter sports orgs (one of NFL, NBA, NHL, etc) Android app.
I always joke that we could probably tell you what color and type your underwear is on any random day with how much data is siphoned off your phone.
As for loading random JS, yeah also seen that done that before. "Partner A wants to integrate their SDK in our webviews." -> "Partner A" SDK is just loading a JS chunk in that can do whatever they want in webviews, including load more files.
Don't get me started on the sports betting SDKs...
Though we do have a Security team constantly scanning SDKs and the endpoints for changes in situations like this.
> As for loading random JS, yeah also seen that done that before.
Partner A is not random JS. The assumption there is 1) you have some official signed agreement with them and 2) you've done your due diligence to ensure you can use them in this way.
It's not just some person's GH repo who can freely change that file to whatever they want.
Hotlinking is as old as the internet, and a well-worn security threat.
Waymo drives 4 million miles every week (500k+ miles each day). Vast majority of those collisions are when Waymos were stationary (they don’t redact narrative in crash reports like Tesla does, so you know what happened). That is an incredible safety record.
Is this the same time or the same miles driven? I think the former, and of course I get that's what you wrote, but I'm trying to understand what to take away from your comment.
What dataset? Isn't the article clearly specified a different number?
Your context sucks, and it's good as a lie.
>Waymo reports 51 incidents in Austin alone in this same NHTSA database, but its fleet has driven orders of magnitude more miles in the city than Tesla’s supervised “
you are talking about 5 incidents, this is not statistics. Its just a fluctuation of random numbers, and random events like bus hits the taxi while idle. It's already 20% of your data is incorrect lol , since it's 1 out of 5.
So far , you can clearly tell :
1. tesla works decent in a limited environment, no crazy patterns
2. It's a limited env that means nothing. Scale is still not there. They ned to prove themself.
One of my earlier experiences with codex was actually reverse engineering, far before it was good at actual coding.
It was able to decompile a react native app (Tesla Android app), and fully trace from a "How does X UI display?" down to a network call with a payload for me to intercept.
Granted it did it by splitting the binary into a billion txt files with each one being a single function and then rging through it, but it worked.
I heard about this and tried quite a bit to reverse engineer a decompiled binary from a big game to find struct/schema information but could never get anything useful.
Working on reproducible test runs to catch quality issues from LLM providers.
My main goal is not just a "the model made code, yay!" setup, but verifiable outputs that can show degradation as percentages.
i.e. have the model make something like a connect 4 engine, and then run it through a lot of tests to see how "valid" it's solution is. Then score that solution as NN/100% accurate. Then do many runs of the same test at a fixed interval.
I have ~10 tests like this so far, working on more.
It takes 20mins to fet from base houseing to the gate, lord k ows what traffic is like by the causeways, its an hour of driving before you're anywhere worth being and then its a coin flip if its exciting, so its either the ft. Walton beach strip clubs or onbase recreation.
No wonder eglin is addicted hahaha.
But in all seriousness, there are teams of people on the data crunch side of things that seems like a pedestrian insight
Waymo's remote drivers have literally caused accidents and we only know about it because journalists did digging. Waymo simply removed all details of the remote ops roles in it in the NHTSA reporting.
In January, an incident took place where a Waymo robotaxi incorrectly went through a red light due to an incorrect command from a remote operator, as reported by Waymo. A moped started coming through the intersection. The moped driver, presumably reacting to the Waymo, lost control, fell and slid, but did not hit the Waymo and there are no reports of injuries. There may have been minor damage to the moped.
While the description in the official report to the NHTSA is (ID: 30270-6981)
On January [XXX], 2024 at 10:52AM PT a rider of a moped lost control of the moped they were operating and fell and slid in front of a Waymo Autonomous Vehicle (Waymo AV) operating in San Francisco, California on [XXX] at [XXX] neither the moped nor its driver made contact with the Waymo AV.
The Waymo AV was stopped on northbound [XXX] at the intersection with [XXX] when it started to proceed forward while facing a red traffic light. As the Waymo AV entered the intersection, it detected a moped traveling on eastbound [XXX] and braked. As the Waymo AV braked to a stop, the rider of the moped braked then fell on the wet roadway before sliding to a stop in front of the stationary Waymo AV. There was no contact between the moped or its rider and the Waymo AV. The Waymo AVs Level 4 ADS was engaged in autonomous mode.
Waymo is reporting this crash under Request No. 1 of Standing General Order 2021-01 because a passenger of the Waymo AV reported that the moped may have been damaged. Waymo may supplement or correct its reporting with additional information as it may become available.
They constantly love to talk about Claude Code being "100%" being vibe coded...and the US legal system is leaning towards that not being copyrightable.
It could still be a trade secret, but that doesn't fall under a DMCA take down.
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