If code generated by LLMs turns out to be effectively public domain, that could seriously water down the legal standing of copyleft licenses. Fortunately there is still enough human-authored code that long-standing projects as a whole are not at risk of losing all copyright control, but as more LLM-generated code is incorporated, and human authored code is deleted, the copyright slowly gets washed away.
Having said that, I suspect the big AI companies have enough lobbying power to influence the legal system and lawmaking in the future.
The thing that makes this argument ring hollow to me is that all of the tech giants have the same interest in their code being protected by copyright, and afaik no big tech giants haven’t adopted coding agents en masse. Presumably they have very expensive lawyers who they asked about this before paying 9 or 10 figures to OAI or Ant for tokens.
What is the purpose of copyleft when there are tools that can generate equivalent code? Copyleft keeps software free by using copyright to protect the effort of human creators. If tools can create the code is it is in the public domain then it has accomplished the same thing. Code is not under the control of large corporations.
"...prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output." [https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10...]
If code generated by LLMs turns out to be effectively public domain, that could seriously water down the legal standing of copyleft licenses. Fortunately there is still enough human-authored code that long-standing projects as a whole are not at risk of losing all copyright control, but as more LLM-generated code is incorporated, and human authored code is deleted, the copyright slowly gets washed away.
Having said that, I suspect the big AI companies have enough lobbying power to influence the legal system and lawmaking in the future.