It'll be interesting to see what happens when a company pisses off an employee to the point where that person creates a public repo containing all the company's AI-generated code. I guarantee what's AI-generated and what's human-written isn't called out anywhere in the code, meaning the entire codebase becomes public domain.

While the company may have recourse based on the employment agreement (which varies in enforceability by state), I doubt there'd be any on the basis of copyright.

FWIW I'm not a lawyer and I'm not recommending that you do this. 😄 Even if companies have no legal standing on copyright, their legal team will try it. It *will* cost you money.

But man, oh man, I'm gonna have popcorn ready for when someone inevitably pulls this move.

@jamie

The post takes real legal uncertainty and cranks it up to maximum alarm. The actual state of things is more nuanced and still evolving — courts are working through these questions case by case, and the Copyright Office indicated that a future may arise in which prompts could "sufficiently control expressive elements in AI-generated outputs to reflect human authorship."

So it's worth being thoughtful about this stuff, but "your vibe-coded repo is public domain" is not an accurate summary of the law.

@jamie

You're attempting to say " If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*

I'll be gracious and say that's not what the law says, and if you want, I can be a jackass about this because it's not true and the last thing this place needs is yet another Chicken Little making absurd claims.

@tuban_muzuru You find that alarming? I meant it like "Holy shit, this is an interesting thing I hadn't considered."

And it's not an absurd claim. It's pretty much exactly what someone will say in court.

@jamie

Holy shit, dude, get a subscription to Claude and be thereby instructed. If you're a competent programmer, you will be asking the LLM for spec. If you're a dumbass, you'll be asking for implementation.