How to check copyright?

How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 2, 2025 15:18 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: How to check copyright? by stefanha
Parent article: Fedora floats AI-assisted contributions policy

There's at least two cases where "knowing whether the LLM output is under copyright or not" is completely irrelevant:

1. You don't know how to solve the problem; you ask an LLM to explain how to solve this problem, and then you manually write the code yourself, based on the LLM's explanation. This is an existing problem - it's the same as reading a book or a paper that explains how to solve this problem - and the answer is to "assume it's covered by copyright, but write your own solution, don't just copy blindly. That applies whether "the text" is a book, a paper, or some LLM generated work.
2. The parts of the contribution copied from the LLM's output is one that you've inspected, and confirmed would be covered by an exception to copyright law even if the work they are taken from is under copyright. In this case, the copyright status of the LLM's output is irrelevant, since the part you're using is one you can use even if it's under copyright. Again, this is a pre-existing problem; if I read (say) IEEE 1003.1-2024 (or one of the many things that's copied text from it verbatim, like this Linux man page), and copy part of it into my contribution, that's copying from a document under copyright and licensed under restrictive terms, but because it doesn't rise to the point where my copying creates a derived work, copyright status is irrelevant.

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