In the Twilight of Copyright
07-12, 12:00–12:50 (US/Eastern), Marillac Auditorium

In the two years since generative AI became publicly available, the U.S. Copyright Office has definitively concluded that AI-generated work cannot be copyrighted. But that simple conclusion has complex implications for software ownership. How does it apply to automatically generated code? As code-completion and code-assistance become more prevalent, how do those tools affect the author's ability to control the final product? What are the implications for open source software, when licenses like the GPL are built on top of copyright ownership? Ed will look at how software copyright works and how generative AI plays a role in software development - and will try to predict the future of software.

Ed Ryan is a New York intellectual property attorney specializing in patents, with a background in physics. Ed's practice deals heavily with machine learning technologies.