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Comment by reachableceo | Hacker News Reader

So a binary created by a compiler isn’t copyrighted ?

Last I checked , that’s not the case. Otherwise the entire proprietary software universe would collapse (not that having that outcome isn’t desirable per se )

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A binary created by a compiler is not machine-generated (for copyright purposes). A human wrote the program. The compiler just translated it.

A binary created by a compiler is exactly as much a deterministic result of the input and choice of compiler and settings without additional human creativity as, say, an image created by a prompt and a diffusion model, and the logic of the Copyright Office determination that prompt (if sufficiently a work of authorship) but not the output in the latter case is subject to copyright would, if applied consistently, seem to apply to the former case equally.

I agree.

I'm a little confused by the responses I'm getting to my comment. People seem to be thinking that I'm saying that copyright cannot apply to AI produced output. I said no such thing.

What I am saying is that this is not a legally settled matter. It will certainly end up in a courtroom, and will then become a settled matter. That day isn't here yet.

If the level of determinism is truly the same then I think that might play into the argument that AI output is indeed a statistical collage. And yes, human output might be as well but the burden of proof would be on the other side of the court. I'd really be careful with the parallels because I think we can agree that compilers don't work like LLMs. The output of a compiler isn't related to the previous programs it compiled in form of training data - so there is no fair use or not fair use question here. Dealing with something without precedence means we can't point to something else and expect an exact match.

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