Right - I see the other topic has been locked / author hasn’t returned to follow community rules.
Here’s the original topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
and a measured (IMHO) response to it. (BTW, do your self a favour and change tabs with that site open :)
https://マリウス.com/i-regret-migrating-to-codeberg/
It’s a tough spot, Codeberg has found themselves in and I wish them luck. But beyond that, this is (yet) another reminder that in 2026, if you don’t self host it, the cloud is just someone else computer
That is wishful thinking. Copyright was originally designed to protect human creativity, and a lot of the laws and precedence cases involve human effort specifically to distinguish between plagiats and original works.
As long as courts don’t start to rule otherwise, LLM generated code is not considered to be copyrightable itself, thus it can not be original work as defined under copyright laws. This in turn lowers the threashold for such code to be considered a derivative regardless of if there is a clear pathway from one to the other. All it takes is someone to claim that it is derivative, and the burden of proof that it isn’t largly falls onto the person accused. And if the code is functionally identical and with no significant human involvement, that is very hard to proove.
IANAL of course.
The IP law is purely a function of economic power, so we know how that will go. To the maximum benefit of the plutocrats that rule our global civilization.
But the more interesting part is the philosophical discovery: If a piece of code can be generated from scratch by a machine that is not creative, then any comparable piece of code is also not creative. In other words, only the very first time a new type of code or algorithm is written can there be creativity - if one follows your argument that LLM machines cannot be creative. This essentially raises the bar for copyright, and makes an objective test of what is copyrightable or not possible. If you can describe something in a prompt, and get a result of comparable function and quality to a human written version, that code is not creative either, therefor not copyrightable.
Obviously we’re not quite there yet, but the more LLMs improve, the less code becomes copyrightable.
Coding becomes pure craftsmanship, like cutting and sanding some lumber and nailing it together to build a shed.
So if we were a rational and logical species, the overwhelming amount of copyright would be deleted and become public domain. Because it is now worth only the cheap solar power needed to generate it.
It is not my argument, but the official stance of the US copyright office and some other similar bodies around the world.
But yes, it poses some interesting philosophical questions, but those are not of very high relevance to copyright law.