On 5/26/26 16:09, Jean Louis wrote:
Your statement "The US Copyright Office declared that LLM output is non-
copyrightable." is wrong, it is in the wrong context and without the
context!
In Part II of the report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence,
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/
it concludes with the observation that LLM output, and AI output in
general, is ineligible for copyrights unless that output is modified by
a human for the purposes of creative expression:
"As described above, in many circumstances these outputs
will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is
used as a tool, and where a human has been able to
determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts
alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy
those requirements."
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf
For further clarification, there are written guidelines on the scope of
copyright in the context of slop which has been handled meaningfully by
humans:
"Consistent with the Office’s policies described above,
applicants have a duty to disclose the inclusion of
AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration
and to provide a brief explanation of the human author’s
contributions to the work"
However, slop which has not been handled meaningfully by humans remains
ineligible for copyright:
"... a work “autonomously created by artificial intelligence
without any creative contribution from a human actor” was
“ineligible for registration”.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf
Thus the problem raised in Andy's original message, that LLMs can be and
are being misused to strip licensing (and attribution) from projects'
code bases. The code goes into the large language model with a license
and a copyright holder. Calling that infringement a training set
doesn't change its nature. Then the code comes back out of the model as
slop, and while slop in general is ineligible for copyright status the
original code remains strongly protected by copyright, whether
plagiarized by an LLM or not.
And, again, as mentioned in an earlier reply, there is the further
problem of the LLMs separating users from projects and vice versa. That
is a whole other discussion about duplicated effort, missing
communications, and general lost opportunities.
/Lars
PS. COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) writes the following:
"COPE joins organisations, such as WAME and the JAMA
Network among others, to state that AI tools cannot
be listed as an author of a paper."
https://publicationethics.org/guidance/cope-position/authorship-and-ai-tools
It would not be a stretch to apply a similar conclusion to code which
has been mangled by an LLM.
_______________________________________________
libreplanet-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
