Ask HN: Why aren't maintainers worried about the Copyright status of LLM output?

4 points·qtqtqt··2 comments

LLM output, according to court rulings IIUC, cannot be copyrighted. This should worry both proprietary software companies and open source projects alike (because you can't put a license on something you don't hold the rights for). Yet, even Linux is accepting LLM-generated code. Do they (not just Linux) have a plan?

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tl;dr

- linux situation has not changed much because projects have always been a mix

- keep putting a license anyway, we can always change them, and it shows the project owners intent, even if some provisions are later struck down in a case (like "as is, no liability")

- projects that are mostly/completely generated represent a new category

A few sources from a quick search and read for these points

- https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/ai-assisted-development-and-o...

- https://legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com/copyright-blog/open-sou...

- https://allthingsopen.org/articles/copyright-problem-ai-gene...

- https://opensource.org/ai/webinars/copyright-right-answer-fo...

I use a permissionless license (MIT/Apache-2), so I'm personally not that worried about it. Do what you want with my creations.

I'm having the same doubt, it really sounds like nobody cares anymore. maybe we are witnessing the dead of the copyright for software? I mean, it doesn't have even sense if you can just ask an agent to reimplement something with slight variations or even a totally different language.

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