Ariadne Conill 🐰
so anthropic's coding thing leaked, and they are using DMCA to get it taken down.
but if it is all vibecoded and everything generated by LLM is not copyrightable...
Michael Weiss@ariadne it's not *all* vibecoded. And DMCA requires honoring the takedown request. Of course, the request can be disputed, and the whole thing can go to court, and Anthropic can produce evidence about which parts of the code were human produced.
But the answer isn't as simple as "it's all GenAI so none of it is copyrightable".
It would be more fun if it were, though.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Two things:
As I recall, from the recent ruling, if you do not clearly identify which bits of a work you wish to assert copyright on are generated mechanically, you cannot claim copyright on the whole. I was surprised by that bit.
You are almost correct on the DMCA. When you receive a DMCA takedown notice, you must take down the work, but when you receive a counter notice you may restore it. At this point, you are no longer liable for infringement. Unfortunately, that asymmetry means that most companies interpret it as taking down the work with a DMCA notice and then ignoring the counter notice.
But this is where it get’s fun. The only barrier to abuse of DMCA notices is that they include a sworn statement under penalty of perjury that you own the copyrighted work (and clearly identify the work). This leads to a lot of spurious notices because you don’t need to swear that you have any kind of good-faith evidence that it constitutes infringement, so it’s fine to send DMCA notices for things that are clearly fair use. What should happen then is that the person who posted it says ‘nope, fair use’, you restore it and then they have to take the uploaded to court. But see the aforementioned asymmetry. In this case, it’s likely that Anthropic is claiming, under penalty of perjury, that they own the copyright on work that is not eligible for copyright. If you receive one of these notices, please keep and share it, it may be the evidence that leads to jail time for some Anthropic folks.