Is it free software? [LWN.net]

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 16:42 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Is it free software? by farnz
Parent article: The Book of Remind

The third option is the one the AI vendors want, because it's good for them: AI can't obey copyright law by itself, so isn't responsible for doing so, but also is sufficiently transformative of the input that the output of an AI tool is a new work, not a derivative of any past work and thus the AI user cannot lose a large sum of money to a court judgement.

I don't think that's going to work out. There are really two separate question: is the AI itself a derivative work, and is the output of the AI a derivative work. This is how considering the parallel situation of a human being doing the same thing is instructive. A human being is allowed to learn from existing copyrighted works without problems, but there are standard legal tests to determine if their work is infringing. The same thing should be true of AI. The AI itself is almost certainly sufficiently transformative that it isn't a derivative of its training corpus, but individual outputs can infringe copyright depending on any of the standard tests. One minor wrinkle is that some of the standard tests are easier to prove if the alleged copier had access to the work they're accused of infringing, and that's probably going to be easier to prove with AI than a human. I wouldn't be surprised if AI companies just stipulate their AI had access to avoid having to divulge all their training material.

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Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 16:49 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I agree that it's the least likely to work out - that's why it's a non-answer to the question I posed of "whether the current round of AIs should be responsible for obeying copyright law on their own, or whether they should be treated as tools like text editors and Napster".

It's instead an option that they'd like, but that basically says "the question doesn't need answering, because it's neither a tool nor responsible for obeying the law". In practice, I think the models and weights will be deemed non-infringing (by legislative fiat if needed), but the outputs will be potentially infringing, and the law will have to find an equilibrium.