this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Programming
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Can Open Source defend against copyright claims for AI contributions?
If I submit code to ReactOS that was trained on leaked Microsoft Windows code, what are the legal implications?
It would be so fucking nice if we could use AI to bypass copyright claims.
"No officer, i did not write this code. I trained AI on copyright material and it wrote the code. So im innocent"
None. There is a good chance that leaked MS code found its way into training data, anyway.
I am not sure how you arrived at “none” from your second sentence. The second sentence is exactly my point.
Alternatively then, can I just use the Microsoft source code and claim that I got it from AI? That seems to be your point here.
No. If it's a copy, then it falls under copyright regardless of how the copy is made. The question wasn't about copying, though.
Be aware that copyright only covers the creative elements; ie things that other people would do differently. It also doesn't cover ideas, methods, and the like. It also doesn't cover very short or obvious creations. So, copyright on code comes from UI design, comments, names, even the ordering of lines, functions, splitting the code into files, using shorthand or not, and so on. Snippets and even short functions are typically not copyrightable. If you have some short program that anyone would write that way, then that's not copyrightable, beyond comments and maybe names.