Does that mean that all code generated by the OpenClaw agents, can't be "open source"? (because it's not eligible for copyright at all) What about reports/code/etc generated autonomously by LLM agents? Can any company claim code as an asset in an acquisition if the code itself isn't own-able (because it's public domain according to the copyright office)?
I confess to being surprised at the repeated "coding agents wrote 90% of our code last quarter" statements from CEOs...those sound like court-admissible statements that they don't own copyright on their own code.
It can be open source depending on the license. Public domain is open source. BSD and MIT are open source and (aside from attribution clauses) do not rely on copyright. On the other hand, more restrictive licenses like GPL require copyright to be enforceable.