I live in the UK, and most US law is based upon English common law, it's not some immutable code given to us from above. It's based upon assumptions and capabilities of the entities participating in the system at the time the law was codified. It can and should change to make more sense if those assumptions and capabilities shift massively.
If they have only the rights that their human creators have, then access to them cannot be sold, in the exact same way that I cannot sell you a database that I have collected filled with copyrighted material. The "humans do training too" argument only holds if you imbue LLMs with similar rights to humans.
I am allowed to sell myself (in a very limited capacity) to others for them to exploit my training, even if that training was on protected material, which is a privilege humans should have, but machines should not.
However, because it is an issue with (at least historical) goals of copyright law, the common pattern that is evolving is that AI is not granted copyright of any work it generates, making it a bit of poison pill for some of the egregious ideas of corporate abuse. Not sure if the weights will be considered copyrightable either.
The nature of the source material matters though. Training a model on open source software seems perfectly fair - it has explicitly been released to the public, and learning from the code has never been a contested use.
IMO the questions around coding models should be seen as less about LLMs and more as a subset of the conversation about large companies driving immense profits from the work of volunteers on open-source projects, i.e. it's more about open source than AI.
I can't imagine it really justifiable to say that training off data is the same as "stealing", when that same claim, that learned information that a person could retain and reproduce constitutes copyright infringement is the subject of many dystopian narratives, like this one, where once your brain is uploaded to the cloud you have to pay royalties based on every media product you remember.
When it picks out a rare bit of code, it will be simply copying that code, illegally, and presenting it without attribution or any licenses which is in fact breaking the law but AI companies are too important for the law to apply to them.
There's been instances where models have spat out comments in code that mention original authors, etc., effectively outing itself as a copyright thief.
There's nothing anyone can do about it, but the suspicion is that the big companies have taken everyone's code on GitHub, without consent, and trained on it.
And now are spitting out big chunks of copyrighted code and presented it as somehow transformed even though all they've actually done is change a few variable names.
It is copyright theft, but because programmers are little people, not Disney, we don't have any recourse.
It's pretty likely that I've done the same thing. I mean, I've written enough CRUD functions in my life, for example, that in all likelihood I'm regurgitating stuff that's a copy, for all practical purposes, of stuff I've done before as work-for-hire for my employer. I'm not stealing intentionally or consciously, but it seems quite likely that it's happening. And that's probably true for many of you, at least that have been in the industry for a while.
I asked agent X what is the source of training data it generated code from, it couldn’t say. Then I asked why the code implementation is exactly the same as the output of agent Y. It said they were trained on the same ‘high-quality library’, and still couldn’t say which one.
So I guess that’s fine because everyone is doing it.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-...
When I write fizzbuzz do I owe royalties to the inventor of fizzbuzz? Is my brain copyright thieving because I can write out the song lyrics from memory?
Few people ever actually read open source code, but I'd like to think on the rare occasions they do, they share a connection with the author. I know when I read somebody else's code, for me to understand it I have to be thinking about the problem the same way they were when they wrote it. I feel empathy with them and can sometimes picture the struggle, backtracking, and eureka moments they went through to come up with their solution.
Somehow I don't get the same warm fuzzy feelings about a machine powered by investor money ingesting my work automatically, in milliseconds, and coldly compressing it down to a few nudges on a few weights out of trillions of parameters. All so the machine can produce outputs on-demand for lazy users who will never know of me or appreciate my little contribution, and ultimately for the financial benefit of some billionaires who see me as an obsolete waste of space.
I guess I'm just irrational that way.
And so does well-crafted bespoke software.
The engineers who built the foundation for the industrial expansion of our forefathers went through the same exact thing we're going through now. They look at what existed, and use it to inform their efforts. This is what LLMs do.
I'm not attempting to moralize here, just comment on the parallels. Do I agree that a craftman's work is consumed by the juggernauts and no second thought is given? No. I think its a shame. But I also think the output will never match the artisans that practice now. By the very nature of the machines we employ, we cannot match the skill or thought that goes into bespoke code.
If I spend 2 hours designing the domain model, 1 hour slopping out a rough implementation, and 5 hours polishing it with a combo of handwritten and vibed refactorings, I will get a better result than if I spent 8 hours writing everything by hand.
So my point is not that vibe software is lower quality, as my experience has shown the opposite. It is simply that the spirit of sharing my work was done with the idea that I was sharing it with others who toiled in the same craft, not sharing for consumption by machine. Not that I ever contributed anything very important to the open source world, that anybody depended on. Just personal projects I thought were neat or educational.
In hindsight I would probably still have open sourced what I did, because I think it's valuable to have on record that I competently programmed stuff before AI even existed, like pre-atomic steel. But I don't know if I will open source any personal code going forward.
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To put it more succinctly: if somebody "ripped off" my open source code in 2018, I wasn't mad about that. Even if they didn't bother to attribute me, well, at least they saw my stuff, had a human brain cell light up appreciating it, and thought it was worth stealing. I'm flattered. But with LLMs my work can be reappropriated without a single human ever directly knowing or caring about it.
It turns out that's false. We know that genes are patentable; remember back during the Human Genome Project, when there was such a rush to patent them? So genes are IP. (This seems bizarre to me, since they're patenting something that was found just sitting there, but this is what the system says right now.)
Well, two other humans (aka mom and dad) did create me, based on those patentable genes (and most likely including some genes that were, in fact, patented).
I'm not sure what to conclude from all of that, but I do think that it invalidates your argument.
You are presumably human. We have granted humans specific exemptions in copyright law. We have not granted that to LLMs. Why are we so eager to?
We gave certain temporary monopoly on certain uses to humans under rules little understood by laymen even if their livelihood depends on it.
Are you telling me that I can use the thing, but I can't use it if I process it through an LLM? It get slippery, fast.
If I write a story, I can put it online. That doesn't mean it's ok to take that story and publish it in an anthology.
There's also a TON of irony here. What an about face it is, for the community at large* to switch from "information wants to be free, we support copyleft and FOSS" to leaning so heavily on an incredibly conservative reading of IP law.
It doesn't need to. Laws are for humans.
Laws don't give rights to chainsaws. Or lawnmowers. Or kitchen knives, hammers, screwdrivers, and spades.
You can't use any of those to commit a crime and then claim that the law specifically did not exclude those tools.
Why are you seemingly in favour of carving out an exemption for LLMs?
Laws are for humans.
Arguing that the law did not specifically address "intentionally killing a person by tickling them till they died" means that you found a loophole which can be used to kill people is...
well, it's in the "not even wrong" category...
If we take the point of view that LLMs are tools (I agree), then people need to be absolutely certain that these tools don't contain (compressed) representations of copyrighted works.
People seem not to want to do that. And they argue that the LLMs have "learned" or "been inspired" by the copyrighted works, which is OK for humans.
This is the problem. People can't even agree on which of two mutually exclusive defenses to appeal to! Are LLMs tools which we have to ensure aren't used to reproduce copyrighted work without permission, or are they entities that can be granted exemptions like humans can? It can't be both!
> There's also a TON of irony here. What an about face it is, for the community at large* to switch from "information wants to be free, we support copyleft and FOSS" to leaning so heavily on an incredibly conservative reading of IP law.
True. While IP-owning companies like Microsoft now say "it's online, so we can use it".
It's bizarre.
I'll tell you what: I'll drop my conservative stance in defense if FOSS when Windows and the latest Hollywood movie are "fair use" for consumption by whatever LLM I cook up.