"AI has no copyright"? A law blogger says the software industry proves otherwise
technollama · x · 2026-11-01
Tech law blogger Andres Guadamud (TechnoLlama) pushes back on the increasingly common claim that AI-generated content carries no copyright, so anyone may freely "steal" and reuse it.
His core argument: the software industry is a decades-long counterexample — software heavily recombines existing code and patterns, yet its copyright regime has worked fine, and nobody denies software copyright merely because it is combinatorial. Citing recent cases like the viral AI artist Antrofrog video taken down over a character-resemblance claim, he argues "no copyright" conflates copyright protection with attribution, plagiarism, and community norms — and is not a license to freely appropriate AI works.
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