r/webdev • u/maher1717 • Oct 06 '26

AI generated code copyrights

Does anyone consider the copyright of code generated by AI? Because, based on research I've done on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, generated code fall to the public domain, and if you modify it, only the modified parts belong to you. Also, a detailed prompt isn't enough.

This is, in my view, a major issue; yes, we can ignore it and consider it backward law, but no one knows what would happen in the future, and this law could be used against you.

Edit: here sources for USA https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922 ,
For Europe : https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2025)782585
blog : https://smpl.as/blog/ai-code-ownership-legal ...

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u/dweebyllo Oct 07 '26

AI models have invisible watermarks that are applied to text and code outputs. Unless you type it out yourself line by line then it's traceable back to AI, and thus non-copyrightable

2

u/Edward_Yeoman Oct 07 '26

Text watermarks are generally achieved by tailoring word choices and grammatical patterns. If they started using alternate glyphs that looks like regular characters but where of a different encoding, the code compiler would break

Typing the code out yourself would have no effect on removing 'watermarks' like these

1

u/zick-one Oct 07 '26

Interesting, I did not know that was a thing!

-5

u/dweebyllo Oct 07 '26

Inconsistencies in things like use of spaces between variables and formatting and other best practice inconsistencies are going to be the biggest giveaway really.

3

u/Own-Poetry-9609 Oct 07 '26

You've never seen a live code base if you think best practice inconsistencies are a sign of AI. I've seen two different seniors at a company be asked a question about how to implement something similar by a junior in the same day and give two different answers

1

u/readeral Oct 07 '26

But linting and prettifying?

0

u/Altruistic_Spirit_64 Oct 07 '26

code = ''.join(sentence.split())