"the office said copyright protection depends on whether AI's contributions are "the result of mechanical reproduction," such as in response to text prompts, or if they reflect the author's "own mental conception.""
So if we take that into software development, the text input that the developer gave copilot may be protected under copyright but the output of copilot may not.
If the developer arrange or modify the output, then those arrangements and modifications can also be protected under copyright.
To me that means that during copyright cases there will be a much bigger burden on the plaintiff to prove that they own copyright in any specific situation, and that the infringement is done on those parts that is covered by copyright and not just the output of the copilot algorithm. Simply claiming authorship to all the code will no longer be enough.
I don't think there's any precedent for copyright to be applied partially, with some of a work covered and some not. Are you proposing that copyright will change to be line-by-lien, with each one covered (or not) depending on how it was generated?
What the copyright office describe was AI generated images, and a book where such images was included. Those images can't be copyrighted, but the prompt that produced the images may, and the arrangement inside the book may also be copyrighted. People can however take out those images from the book and reproduce them, since those images themselves are not covered under copyright.
So if we apply that to software development, some portions of the code could be copyrightable while other portions will not, and the arrangement of the whole thing can be covered under copyright.
So let say you write a piece of software and I copy a portion of that code into my software. Is that portion that I copied covered under copyright? Maybe, maybe not. It will depend, and depending on how the legal precedence fall it may be up to the author to prove that they really are the author.
If I apply this in an fictional game developer, we could image them ask an AI to generate the image assets for a wooden table. Then they ask the AI to create the 3d mesh of a wooden table. Then they ask the AI to write a function that places the table with image assets onto a 3d plane. Each step here would produce content that historically would be copyrightable independently, but which is not copyrightable if done through an AI. The big unanswered question is at what time the work becomes copyrightable, and what happens if someone takes assets and portions of that work and uses that in something else.
