> After being laid off, a programmer becomes a welder. One day while working, he suddenly muttered to himself, "It's been so long, I've even forgotten how to solve three sum". A coworker next to him quietly replied, "Two pointers".
Won't they just be able to identify the traffic at his local internet provider as being suitable for a VPN usage match and send 'law enforcement' over?
To some extent yes. Your output at work is based on a combination of inputs from others in your organization, and is being paid for by your employer, so the organization owns the copyright on what you make for them.
I think from this view it makes sense that an LLM is a tool, and the operator of that tool (or their employer) can own the output.
The tricky part is when you squint and view an LLM with training input and prompted output as a machine that launders copyrighted input into customized output that is now copyrighted by a new owner.
A machine that vacuums up film reels and splices them according to a set of instructions by the user to create a compilation of recent animated Disney movies with the Shrek soundtrack superimposed would probably not pass legal challenges if the user of the tool attempted to claim full copyright on the output.
his prompt might be the result of human creativity but even in that case it's more than likely not to be a copyrightable expression of human creativity.
a copyrightable expression of human creativity in that case would need to be substantial enough in size to carry an imprint exlusive to your boss.
"why'd the chicken cross the road? to get to the other side" is not copyrightable. you can dress it up all you want, "why didst thy chickencock traverseth thee highway?..." etc would not qualify as something that would be exclusively yours/your bosses, because that trick is still rote.
BUT:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways I like to see you work.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height and number of your pull requests
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight of your overnight toils
For the ends of being and ideal grace you provide me when you ship!
that would be copyrightable if it was original to your boss.
The law and interpretation of the law does not have the tidy and necessary obsession with fencepost errors and corner cases. It deals with them by stepping back and saying "what would an ordinary person think should be copyrightable vs what would be more akin to the wordgames that clever nerds on the playground get beat up for?
David Huffman too, made some very complex paper folding models from relatively abstract mathematics, although apparently did not like them being likened to origami.
> After being laid off, a programmer becomes a welder. One day while working, he suddenly muttered to himself, "It's been so long, I've even forgotten how to solve three sum". A coworker next to him quietly replied, "Two pointers".
reply