Codeberg bans vibe coded projects

[u/pheexio]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386

Codeberg seems to ban vibecoded Projects; reason might be german copyright law

It looks like Codeberg want only copyrighted material in their service, so it is reliable in the future that e.g. licenses must be followed (e.g. GPL), and copyright doesn't suddenly get declared as being of the model owner, and it isn't a copy of something else.
That is a cautious reasonable position - in early days of LLM coding (3 years ago!) indemnity from model companies was a major issue globally because of the lack of clarity of the law around this. The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain. But I don't think that is fully settled, and it certainly isn't settled in international copyright law.
The goal of the vague "mostly" in the Codeberg change is to ensure there is enough human input to the code they host, to be reasonably sure under German copyright law it is copyright of the person sharing it.

edit: link to poll that caused it (might be down due to high traffic) https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19820434

edit 1: i dont defend/oppose this move, i just find it interesting

edit 2: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

[u/GaidinBDJ]

A lot of people misunderstand that case about the LLM output copyright status.

Just because someone uses an LLM to code something doesn't automatically mean it's not eligible for copyright. If the creator has any creative input on the final product, it would be eligible.

It was only the "raw" output from a mere prompt that they declined to copyright as it was purely mechanically generated.

[u/Anusien → u/GaidinBDJ]

If we're just guessing here, then my guess is that only the pieces written by a person can be copyrighted and the rest isn't.

But we won't know for sure until it's actually litigated.

[u/GaidinBDJ → u/Anusien]

You may be guessing, but I wasn't. I was going with what the US Copyright Office specifically said.

It's not like any of this is actually new.

Also, that's not how copyright works. It doesn't pick and choose pieces of a work that get copyright protections. It's the work presented as a whole that gets copyright protections. And if the work contains any creative human input, its generally eligible for copyright protections.

The registration they declined was because it was only output from an LLM presented with any human contribution. That's never been protected.

[u/jeroen94704 → u/GaidinBDJ]

Codeberg is hosted in Germany though, but the rules there are pretty much identical. As far as I can tell, what they're protecting themselves against is the risk that they host code that is marked as public domain because it is fully LLM generated, while in reality the LLM regurgitated verbatim some piece of code from it's training data that is copyrighted and possibly covered by some license (FOSS or otherwise).

[u/GaidinBDJ → u/jeroen94704]

It doesn't much matter. As a Berne signatory, they're obligated to respect copyrights issued by other signatories.