How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 2, 2025 21:17 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428)
In reply to: How to check copyright? by pizza
Parent article: Fedora floats AI-assisted contributions policy

>Legally, there's a huge distinction between the two.

Interesting.
Can you back this up with some actual legal text or descriptions from lawyers?
I'd really be interested in learning what lawyers think the differences are.

How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 3, 2025 0:16 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Can you back this up with some actual legal text or descriptions from lawyers?

Only stuff created by a human is eligible for copyright protection.

See https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightab... section 307.

Doesn't get any simpler than that.

How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 3, 2025 7:01 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

> Only stuff created by a human is eligible for copyright protection.

That is a completely different topic, though.
This is about *re*-producing existing actually copyrighted content.

How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 3, 2025 11:16 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I can't point you to the law(s) themselves, but the European position - IN LAW - is that there is no difference between an AI reading and learning, and a person reading and learning.

So I guess (and this is not clear) that there is no difference between an AI regurgitating what it's learnt, and a person regurgitating what it's learnt.

So it basically comes down to the question "how close is the output to the input, and was the output obvious and not worthy of copyright protection?"

Given the tendency of AI to hallucinate, I guess the output of an AI is LESS likely to violate copyright than that of a human. Of course, the corollary becomes the output of a human is more valuable :-)

Cheers,
Wol