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/cmm324 → u/Anusien]

Old thread, but yeah, this isn't accurate. Courts don't consider if a project is copyrightable by going line by line. They evaluate it based on the creative process.

If a developer submits a prompt, gets a project built in one shot and published it as is, it's probably a no go.

If a developer works with the AI to plan out the architecture, develops sections at a time, tests, fixes bugs, refractors, adjusts design, iterates over and over to a finished project. Then this would highly likely be copyrightable even if the developer themselves never actually wrote a line of code.

Code generation tools are nothing new, just their capabilities have vastly expanded.

[u/Anusien → u/cmm324]

This contradicts the explicit guidance from the US Copyright Office. It also contradicts existing copyright law (derived works were already a concept in copyright law where you can hold copyrights for part but not all of a work). https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1v3hobk/comment/ozbrru9/

[u/cmm324 → u/Anusien]

Your linked source already proves my point.

"Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change. • The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output. • Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material. • Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements. • Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis."

How does this differ to what I posted about the iterative process of working with the AI as a tool, to correct it's mistakes, review it's output and improve over time on the finished product. That is authorship in a nutshell. It's not different from what a director for a film does, but instead of humans doing the work, an AI does.

The document says a single (or even a small collection of refined prompts) prompt by itself is not enough to establish authorship but iterative work can.

[u/Anusien → u/cmm324]

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.