There’s nothing to do with public domain about this. Copyright requires sufficient human creativity.
The comic book Zarya of the Dawn is copyrighted, but its art is not because of this: the author has written a story and a composition, but the imagery itself isn’t protected.
Under the Copyright Act, a compilation is a “work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship. The term compilation includes collective works” 17 U.S.C. 101. This gives the compilation a separate copyright from any of the individual pieces within it. An author who creates a compilation owns the copyright of the compilation but not of the component parts.
First of all, this isn’t a settled issue. Some people would argue Zarya of the Dawn is owned by everyone who created a copyrighted work that was used to train Midjourney. I hope these people are wrong, but it’s a legal grey area right now.
The copyright office wants nothing to do with this issue. They don’t have nearly enough funding to figure it out.
Second - if your code is so simple that you can just ask an LLM to write the entire thing for you… then who cares if it’s copyrighted? Anyone else in the world can just ask the LLM to write it separately for them. Why would they risk a lawsuit by copying your work? They’ll get a better end product by using the latest version of the LLM anyway.
If you combine enough of that code in a creative way, the work will be copyrightable. Unlike the GPL, public domain isn’t viral.
There’s nothing to do with public domain about this. Copyright requires sufficient human creativity.
The comic book Zarya of the Dawn is copyrighted, but its art is not because of this: the author has written a story and a composition, but the imagery itself isn’t protected.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/compilation
First of all, this isn’t a settled issue. Some people would argue Zarya of the Dawn is owned by everyone who created a copyrighted work that was used to train Midjourney. I hope these people are wrong, but it’s a legal grey area right now.
The copyright office wants nothing to do with this issue. They don’t have nearly enough funding to figure it out.
Second - if your code is so simple that you can just ask an LLM to write the entire thing for you… then who cares if it’s copyrighted? Anyone else in the world can just ask the LLM to write it separately for them. Why would they risk a lawsuit by copying your work? They’ll get a better end product by using the latest version of the LLM anyway.