REAPER developer Justin Frankel, recently used AI to do all tedious work of studying the Ffmpeg API, AI gave code suggestions but some were wrong and he tweaked it. So per your logic, that code is public domain and Justin don't own that aspect of REAPER. Funny!
I don't think that's a correct assertion; if I asked it to modify some existing code that I owned the copyright for, that would not make the resulting modified version entirely public domain; the changes made would be, but the underlying code would still be subject to copyright protection. Additionally, if I modified its changes, then my modifications would also be copyrighted.
Perhaps a better way to look at it would be this: if you asked a LLM to write some new code according to a spec, then the resulting code (assuming it didn't directly copy some existing code which was copyrighted, which is hard to know) would be public domain. If a human then modifies that public domain code, then those modifications are subject to copyright, but the code prior to human edits is still public domain. So if someone were to copy the per-human-edit code, they could freely use it as it is public domain. Of course this doesn't address the fact that the LLM almost certainly ripped off some copyrighted (which could be copylefted for that matter) code.
Edit: Reading the original post -- re MAGDA -- the combined program linked with JUCE is GPL. The code made by Claude, in isolation, are arguably public domain (caveat LLMs rip off code etc). So you could in theory take those Claude contributions, and rewrite everything else, and make it not GPL. I imagine that would be so much work that it wouldn't be worth anybody's time, though.
Comments:
Posted by Opinion (154.161.226.x) on May 11 2026, 5:54pm:
Great. So I'm summary: 1. Pure AI code (public domain) 2. Edited AI code (edited part copyrightable) 3. Pure AI code used as a reference and re-written entirely by human (copyrightable). So is the first point a USA thing, as one was arguing that there is no worldwide law on this matter of pure AI code being automatically public domain?
Posted by Opinion (154.161.226.x) on May 11 2026, 5:56pm:
Also, if you have released a closed-source software like REAPER, and later added pure AI code, how is the license of the whole product going to be now? Because software usually come with one license. So the developer is obliged to release the pure AI code to the public??
Posted by Opinion (154.161.226.x) on May 11 2026, 6:08pm:
Lastly, as you mentioned, no one can really know for certain whether a code is purely AI-generated or AI-generated with human modifications, right? So that means AI-generated code for a software, whether modified or not, can be presented as a human work and receive copyright protection, right? If yes, then the whole thing now boils down to honesty on the part of the developers, right?