A recipe isn't copyrightable but is still protected under trade secret law. I imagine that the same would apply. I think the major difference with software copyright is that I can just decompile your binary or copy a binary and give it to other people. For SAAS companies that don't distribute binaries, I imagine they basically have the same protections against rogue employees.
replyTo look at it another way, just because some code I work on at my job is derived from open source MIT-licensed code doesn't mean I personally have the right to distribute it if my company doesn't want me to. I'd guess this comes under some generic "confidential information" clause in the employment contract.
replyHmm your example is different: if you manually write code, there is a copyright for it whether it is derived from an MIT-licence or not. If you don't own that copyright (because your employer does), then you don't have the right to distribute it because it is not your code.
replyIf you generate the same code with AI, now it does not have a copyright. If it depends on an MIT library, then the MIT library has a copyright and you have to honour the licence. But the code you produced does not have a copyright (because it was generated by an AI). And therefore nobody "owns" it. My question is: can your employer prevent you from distributing something they don't own?
This is a very long-standing and AFAIK never explicitly decided copyright and human rights question: If something is Public Domain, are contracts restricting distribution valid? Is our right to information or knowledge a fundamental human right that is not permissible to take from others, such that restrictions greater than those imposed directly by the State are invalid? In a healthy society, "I have created an extraction machine and your actions are hindering my extraction" is not a valid argument. So at the very least contracts restricting rights to public dmoain works should be allowed only with heavy restrictions as to when, how, and for how long they are binding - much like the legality of non-competes have has steadily reduced in many places in recent years.
replyCC0 came about in part because of this ambiguity. To deal with it, part of CC0 basically says - even if there would still be restrictions to this if it were only in the public domain, I renounce those theoretical rights.
Outside the underdeveloped legal framework, I believe knowledge and truth is like life, and human society has some continued philosophical growth required here.
That is exactly the right question and the answer is genuinely strange. Uncopyrightable work falls into the public domain, which means anyone can use it, copy it, or build on it freely. The employer can still call it a trade secret and protect it through confidentiality obligations in employment contracts, but that protection is contractual rather than property-based. A trade secret loses protection the moment it is disclosed. So the employer's claim over purely AI-generated code is essentially: "you cannot share this" rather than "we own this." Those are meaningfully different legal positions, and most companies have not thought through which one they actually have.
replyYes, and if the same come ends up in someone else's hands, they can state "we didn't steal it, a GenAI generated it for us, the same as it did for you".
Given the non-deterministic operation of current GenAI systems (a major difference from compilers), it would probably be hard to prove either position.
replySo employees are not allowed to distribute the code, but if it leaks, then it is public and the company cannot do anything about it. Correct? That's what happened to Anthropic I think?
replyPresumably company policy would be implicated here, not copyright law. Whether or not it's copyrightable, what you create using AI is work product.
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