Vibe Coding Authorship

Copyright law faces seismic disruptions caused by artificial intelligence (AI). "Vibe coding"-or a person's use of natural-language prompts to an AI generator for it to write the actual lines of computer code-has led to a copyright contraction. Under the restrictive view of "human authorship" adopted by the U.S. Copyright Office, both the availability and the scope of copyright for computer programs have dramatically narrowed with the greater adoption of vibe coding by both businesses and individuals to create computer programs. Vibe-coded programs are but one example of a much larger phenomenon of copyright contraction affecting a wide array of promptengineered works, including textual works, visual works, audiovisual works and motion pictures, and music. The Copyright Office's restrictive approach has disqualified these works as uncopyrightable if they were created by a person's "prompts alone." And the Office has imposed a duty on applicants for registration of a work they created to disclaim any AI-generated element.&nbsp; <br><br>This Essay is one of the first in legal scholarship to analyze the growing problem of copyright contraction for computer programs that few in the software and tech industries even recognize. As an alternative to the Copyright Office's restrictive approach, the Essay offers a proposal for how courts should analyze the copyrightability of vibe-coded computer programs. Under the courts' longstanding precedents, people who make an original selection and arrangement of elements through vibe codingincluding in structuring the modules or architecture of computer programs, or in the visual or audiovisual displays from the program-qualify as authors. But, if authorship is based on selection and arrangement, the scope of copyright is thin, protecting only against near identical copies of the respective works. And, to the extent this thin copyright protection is inadequate, Congress should consider enacting a limited sui generis protection for vibe-coded computer programs. This Essay's proposal serves the constitutional goal of promoting progress and incentivizing people to create works for the public's benefit. And it incentivizes businesses to employ human creators instead of seeking to completely automate the production of computer programs by AI agents.