The legal standards in the United States for software copyrights are Jaslow and Altai, known to Federal courts as SSO [0] and AFC [1], respectively.
These standards consider the overall structure of code as being copyrightable. This means that you can't just rename a bunch of variables and class names. The overall organization of the code is considered an arbitrary expression. Someone would be infringing on copyright if they took your Java code and converted it to Python with different class, variable and function names but kept the same relationships between classes and the same general structure.
So what does this have to do with LLMs? Well, if the author directed the code to be structured in a certain way, directed to create specific APIs, etc, then there is a legal argument that the author has at least copyright over the arbitrary and expressive decisions that were made while building a software system.
The legal standards in the United States for software copyrights are Jaslow and Altai, known to Federal courts as SSO [0] and AFC [1], respectively.
These standards consider the overall structure of code as being copyrightable. This means that you can't just rename a bunch of variables and class names. The overall organization of the code is considered an arbitrary expression. Someone would be infringing on copyright if they took your Java code and converted it to Python with different class, variable and function names but kept the same relationships between classes and the same general structure.
So what does this have to do with LLMs? Well, if the author directed the code to be structured in a certain way, directed to create specific APIs, etc, then there is a legal argument that the author has at least copyright over the arbitrary and expressive decisions that were made while building a software system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari...