Generated Code Has No Owner, and That's Not the Problem

The worry that started this: an agent writes a Sieve interpreter with me, and the agent's model has almost certainly seen the only other Rust implementation, which is AGPL. Could that code end up in ours?

Before answering, a detour that looked like it might dissolve the question: if machine output isn't copyrightable anyway, does licensing even apply? It turns out the detour answers a different question, and knowing which one is the point of this note.

Two directions

There are two copyright questions in any generated codebase, and they are independent:

1. Outbound. Do we hold rights in what we produce? Can we license it at all?
2. Inbound. Did the output carry in expression that belongs to someone else?

The "machine output isn't protectable" argument speaks to the first. It says nothing about the second.

Outbound: machine output is not protectable

The German statute is one sentence. § 2 Abs. 2 UrhG:

"Werke im Sinne dieses Gesetzes sind nur persönliche geistige Schöpfungen."

For software specifically, § 69a Abs. 3 UrhG:

"Computerprogramme werden geschützt, wenn sie individuelle Werke in dem Sinne darstellen, daß sie das Ergebnis der eigenen geistigen Schöpfung ihres Urhebers sind."

Persönlich and Urheber both presuppose a person. Output with no human creative contribution isn't a Werk in the statute's sense, so there is nothing to license.

The US position was stated at length by the Copyright Office in its report Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability (January 2025). From its executive summary, verbatim:

"Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements."

"Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control."

And the D.C. Circuit in Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 23-5233, decided 2025-03-18 (Millett, J.):

"The Creativity Machine cannot be the recognized author of a copyrighted work because the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being."

The court stopped there on purpose: "Given that holding, we need not address the Copyright Office's argument that the Constitution itself requires human authorship of all copyrighted material." Reports say the Supreme Court declined to review the case in March 2026; I have only seen the headline, not the order.

So: what the agent generates on its own is public domain in effect. Not "unlicensable" as some kind of restriction. Free for everyone, including us, because nobody can withhold it.

Outbound, second half: humans still get their share

The same sources are equally clear that using a machine doesn't strip a human of authorship. The Copyright Office again:

"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."

"Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs."

A project like ours is a mix. Architecture decisions, the design book, hand-edited code, the selection of what survives review: human, protectable. Boilerplate the agent produced from a one-line instruction: not. Nobody will draw that line file by file, and for a project that wants a permissive licence anyway, nobody needs to. A permissive licence still does real work on the human-authored parts and is a harmless no-op on the rest. What it should say is that the codebase is agent-assisted, so nobody downstream is surprised by which part is which.

Inbound: the part the detour doesn't touch

None of the above changes the status of code that was somebody else's before the model ever saw it. If the agent reproduces a distinctive passage from an AGPL project, that passage is still that project's work, under that project's licence, inside our tree. Our own rights being thin or absent is irrelevant to their rights being intact.

That is the risk with teeth, and it is the only one in this picture that can actually hurt: a licence conflict we didn't choose, discoverable by anyone with a diff tool.

One thing narrows it. Ideas, algorithms and interfaces are outside copyright, in the statute's own words, § 69a Abs. 2 UrhG:

"Ideen und Grundsätze, die einem Element eines Computerprogramms zugrunde liegen, einschließlich der den Schnittstellen zugrundeliegenden Ideen und Grundsätze, sind nicht geschützt."

An interpreter for an RFC-defined language will resemble every other interpreter for that language in structure, because the RFC dictates the structure. That resemblance is not infringement. What would be is the expression: names, comments, the particular shape of a non-obvious trick, a paragraph of code carried over intact.

So the practical question isn't "is our code ours". It's "how do we keep somebody else's expression out". That's a process question, and it has a process answer: Clean-Room Reimplementation With an Agent.

What this note does not settle

• Whether the human contribution in our project would clear the bar in a dispute. Unlikely to matter for a permissively licensed codebase, but not examined.
• The EU-level case law on "author's own intellectual creation". The German statute was enough for the purpose here.
• Whether any of this would look different in a jurisdiction that isn't Germany or the US.

A related misreading, that the model vendor might own the output because it offers to defend you over it, gets its own note: Indemnity Is Not Ownership.