How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 2, 2025 17:16 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: How to check copyright? by farnz
Parent article: Fedora floats AI-assisted contributions policy

> The trouble is that your argument depends on the LLM's output being a derived work of its training data; this is not necessarily true, even if you can demonstrate that the training data is present in some form inside the LLM's weights (not least because literal copying is not necessarily a derived work).

It also "conveniently forgets" that any developer worth their salt is exposed to a lot of code for which they do not hold the copyright, and may not even be aware of the fact that they are recalling verbatim chunks of code they memorised at Uni / another place of work / a friend showed it to them.

So all this complaining about AI-generated code could also be applied pretty much the same to developer-generated code, it's just that we don't think it's a problem if it's a developer, some people think it is if it's an AI.

Personally, I'd be quite to happy to ingest AI-generated code into my brain, and then regurgitate the gist of it (suitably modified for corporate guidelines/whatever). By the time you've managed to explain in excruciating detail to the AI what you want, it's probably better to give it a simple explanation and rewrite the result.

Okay, that end result may not be "clean room" copyright compliant, but given the propensity for developers to remember code fragments, I expect very little code is.

We have a problem with musicians suing each other for copying fragments of songs (which the "copier" was probably unaware of - which the copyright *holder* probably copied as well without being aware of it!!!), how can we keep that out of computer programming? We can't, and that's assuming AI had no hand in it!

Cheers,
Wol

How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 3, 2025 13:20 UTC (Fri) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

I went through this many moons ago when one of the start-ups I worked at was working on an emulation layer. The lawyer made a distinction between "retained knowledge" (i.e. what was in our heads) and copying verbatim from either the files or notes. I had to hand in all my notebooks when I left the company but assuming no reference I could implement something the roughly the same way I had before. There is a lot of code which isn't copyrightable because it is either the only way to it or its "obvious".

Patents where a separate legal rabbit hole.

How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 3, 2025 15:12 UTC (Fri) by stefanha (subscriber, #55072) [Link] (5 responses)

I am not claiming that all AI output is covered by the copyright of its training data. It seems reasonable that generated output is treated in the same way as when humans who have been exposed to copyrighted content create something.

In the original comment I linked to a paper about extracting copyrighted content from LLMs. A web search brings up a bunch more in this field that I haven't read. Here is one explicitly about generated code (https://arxiv.org/html/2408.02487v3) that says "we evaluate 14 popular LLMs, finding that even top-performing LLMs produce a non-negligible proportion (0.88% to 2.01%) of code strikingly similar to existing open-source implementations".

I think AI policies are getting ahead of themselves when they assume that a contributor can vouch for license compliance. There needs to be some kind of lawyer-approved solution to this so that the open source community is protected from a copyright mess.

How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 3, 2025 15:25 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (4 responses)

There's a critical piece of data missing - what proportion of human-written code is strikingly similar to existing open-source implementations?

We know that humans accidentally and unknowingly infringe, too. Why can't we reuse the existing lawyer-approved solution to that problem for LLM output?

How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 3, 2025 16:47 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

And another thing - how much copyright violation is being blamed on the LLM, when the query being *sent* to the LLM itself is a pretty blatant copyright violation? At which point we're seriously into "unclean hands", and if the querier is not the copyright holder, they could easily find themselves named as a co-defendant (quite likely the more culpable defendant!) even if they're not the deeper pocket.

If I had an LLM and found myself sued like that, I'd certainly want to drag the querier into it ...

Cheers,
Wol

How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 6, 2025 14:24 UTC (Mon) by stefanha (subscriber, #55072) [Link] (2 responses)

> If I had an LLM and found myself sued like that, I'd certainly want to drag the querier into it ...

Hence why contributors need a way to check copyright compliance.

How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 6, 2025 14:29 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

TBF, you also need such a mechanism to check copyright compliance of any code you've written yourself - you are also quite capable of accidental infringement (where having seen a particular way to write code before, you copy it unintentionally), and to defend yourself or the project you contribute to, you have to prove either that you never saw the original code that you're alleged to have copied (the clean room route) or that this code is on the "idea" side of the idea-expression distinction (however that's expressed in local law).

How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 6, 2025 14:36 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Hence why contributors need a way to check copyright compliance.

This is a legal problem, and cannot be solved via (purely, or even mostly) technical means.