So "my" improvements to ob-sml are causing a problem -- is what this sounds like, right? If I had simply said, "Hey guys, me and a friend have done a new version ob-sml..." there would have been no problem?
On Thu, Mar 5, 2026 at 6:52 PM Jim Porter <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3/5/2026 3:53 PM, Greg Troxel wrote: > > Jim Porter <[email protected]> writes: > > > >> The US Supreme Court has recently affirmed that the outputs of > >> generative AI aren't copyrightable; the "author" is held to be the > >> computer, but copyright is only applicable to creative works authored > >> by humans. The result is that the gen-AI outputs are public domain. > > > > That's the US, and Free Software rests on a shared understanding of > > copyright that applies broadly (across Berne Convention countries). > > > > Did they really say that so precisely? I can certainly see that there > > can be no original copyright in LLM output, lacking a human, but I don't > > see how copyrighted input works are laundered of their copyrights. > > Specifically, the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in Thaler > v. Perlmutter[1], where the plaintiff argued that he should be allowed > to copyright an AI-generated image. As far as I know, the court didn't > address the question of whether it's legal to use copyrighted works as > inputs to train the models in the first place. (Or what happens if an > end-user prompts a model to regenerate an approximation of one of its > copyrighted inputs.) > > I probably overstated matters when I said that gen-AI outputs are public > domain without any additional qualifications. I suppose that only > applies if the work isn't infringing copyright in the first place. > > [1] > > https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-declines-hear-dispute-over-copyrights-ai-generated-material-2026-03-02/ > -- ⨽ Lawrence Bottorff Grand Marais, MN, USA [email protected]
