Copyright should be removed, but DRM and providing binaries without source code should also be made illegal.

<small>Also why is your post language set to de?</small>

@bkuhn @ossguy @richardfontana

Very true, Denver Gingerich. People do things despite rules saying not to. You are very smart. Quick question: do you keep your house's door locked despite people being able to break in anyway? Maybe you should stop locking your door.

This puts me at odds with some other copyleft advocates. I see copyleft as useful because it "turns the teeth of the machine against itself". If you have copyright, then great, we will use it to have a way to force the commons to stay open.

But it would be better to have no copyright at all, and if we could give it up, I would give it up.

But it's a far-fetched dream that it could happen. Maybe it will. I am not so sure. If it truly is possible to "copyright launder" any work through an LLM, we'd be as close to it as we ever could be.

But again, whatever scenario, in my view, has to be equitable. If it's possible to do that to GPL'ed software, it's only just to be possible to do it to any proprietary software, including reverse engineering binaries.

Indeed, big tech know full well the FLOSS / indie creators don't have the legal funds to defend. Their IP either.

- Without knowing the legal status of accepting LLM contributions, we're potentially polluting our codebases with stuff that we are going to have a HELL of a time cleaning up later
- The idea of a copyleft-only LLM is a joke and we should not rely on it
- We really only have two realistic scenarios: either FOSS projects cannot accept LLM based contributions legally from an international perspective, or everything is effectively in the public domain as outputted from these machines, but at least in the latter scenario we get to weaken copyright for everyone.

That's leaving out a lot of other considerations about LLMs and the ethics of using them, which I think most of the other replies were focused on, I largely focused on the copyright implications aspects in this subthread. Because yes, I agree, it can be important to focus a conversation.

But we can't ignore this right now.

We're putting FOSS codebases at risk.

And yup, unfortunately, that would mean copyright-laundering of FOSS codebases through LLMs would be possible to strip copyleft.

It would also mean the same for proprietary codebases.

Frankly I think it would kind of rule if we stabbed copyright in the gut that badly, but there's so much vested interest from various copyright holding corporations, I don't think we're likely to get that. Do you?

And even if it did, there are several problems:

- Nobody is using that *now*, and contributors are facing contributions *now*, and there is legal uncertainty about accepting those contributions *right now*.
- It is unlikely that the "copyleft LLM" would be very useful. The way people use these tools is conversational in a way that requires them to effectively have to be trained on the entire internet to be functional. Not just copyleft codebases.

The copyleft LLM dream is a joke.

It feels fine, when you were a contributor to the Wikipedia project.

It feels a lot less fine when you are a contributor to a specific project, to have everything just sucked up into "the generic LLM". Claude did it! Claude did it all by itself.

Let's now look at the LLM trained on CC0 and CC BY. Because it's the BY aspect that makes everything complicated.

There is *NO WAY* in current LLM technology, nor I believe from studying how neural networks work, any viable computationally performant LLM, that they can track provenance. The BY clause cannot be upheld.

This isn't a theoretical concern for me; someone built another vibecoded Scheme-to-WASM-GC compiler that looks an awful lot like Spritely's own Hoot compiler in places. They didn't attribute us. They probably didn't know. But like many FOSS licenses, Apache v2 does require certain levels of attribution to be upheld. Most FOSS projects do.

You can't uphold the CC BY requirement, as far as I can tell.

Now, of course, the problem is that we don't have to just worry about the US, we have to worry *internationally*. When considered from this angle, that FOSS is an international endeavour, this hope that things are in the public domain feels a lot dicier.

The assumption is that then this effectively leads to the output being under the terms of CC BY-SA. This is fine, great even, right?! Because effectively everything is share-alike (Bradley I don't wanna get into whether BY-SA is copyleft or something weaker). We slap CC BY-SA on the output, it's fine. Right??????

I would fully agree that no matter the law and legal case law passed and established, the CC0 based input LLM is clearly effectively in the public domain, or like CC0 itself, equivalent to it. This one is relatively simple.

Let's make things more complicated.

- CC0's public domain declaration w/ minimal fallback license
- CC BY
- CC BY-SA

Imagine for a moment an LLM trained entirely on the above three licenses, and then one that's CC BY and CC0, and then one that's just CC0.

Let's look at both extremes and then we'll find out the real dangers come from observing the middle.

The previous Conservancy post, which @bkuhn linked upthread, indicates that Conservancy does indeed consider the matter unsettled.

Current LLMs wouldn't "default to copyleft", since they also include all-rights-reserved mixed in there. If the result of output of these systems is a slurry of inputs which carry their licensing somehow, their default licensing output situation is one of a hazard.

I note that @bkuhn and @ossguy seem to be hinting at hoping a "copyleft based LLM" with all-copyleft output it a winning scenario. I'm going to state plainly: I believe that's an impossible outcome.

@richardfontana

Meanwhile, a friend of mine who works in films has said that he keeps hearing rumors that OpenAI would like a cut of stuff made with their stuff. We should presume tthat true.

Regardless, I'm sure everyone on this thread wants an *equitable* situation for proprietary and FOSS licensing. I'll expand on that more in a moment though.

Now clearly, many projects are: the Linux kernel most famously is, and their recent policy document says effectively, "You can contribute AI generated code, but the onus is on you whether or not you legally could have".

Which is not very helpful of a handwave, I would say, since few contributors are equipped to assess such a thing. I've left myself and three others addressed in this portion of the thread, and all of us *have* done licensing work, and my suspicion is, *especially* based on what's been written, that none of us could confidently project where things are going to go.

I am sympathetic to choosing to narrow a topic. However, the post, in implying that we should start accepting partially AIgen contributions, inherently pulls in the topic of whether or not that is legally safe.

Yes, I have read the previous Conservancy post about the existing cases. This partly contributes to my surprise and confusion about the post.

Acknowledging that the plan is to have continued conversations and meetings about this, I still feel it is important to lay down my current concerns, even before such a meeting. I am leaving the "quality of contributions" and many other details out of here, and instead focusing on whether of not it is *safe to accept* contributions on copyright grounds at the moment, and what the implications of thinking on that are.

(cotd)

I keep thinking it's the very reasonable first one, which I don't think is up for debate. But you and Bradley keep implying it's the second, which *is* up for debate.