Parts of Debian dismiss AI-contributions policy

Bear in mind that a LOT of people don't have a clue how copyright works. Unfortunately, it's now hard to navigate because it's a cobwebsite, but take a look at Groklaw.

But to give you a wonderful example of people making all sorts of outrageous claims about copyright, there was quite a fuss a good few years back about "how Terry Pratchett ripped off Hogwarts to create Unseen University".

Well, yes, they're both "Schools for Wizards". They are actually pretty similar. But the complaints are complete nonsense because I don't know whether J K Rowling had read Terry before she created Hogwarts, but Terry couldn't have read J K without a time-machine to hand!

And just like West Side Story, schools for wizards have been around in the literature for ages, so trying to imagine a link from Hogwarts to UU ignores the existence of a myriad of links to other similar stories, any one of which could have been the inspiration for either UU or Hogwarts.

Notice that the GPL makes *absolutely* *no* *attempt* *whatsoever* to define "derivative work". Because it has nothing to do with computing, AI, all that stuff. It's a legal "term of art", and if you don't speak legalese you WILL make an idiot of yourself.

So as far as the definition of "derivative work" is concerned, whether it's an AI or not is completely irrelevant. What IS relevant is whether the *OUTPUT* is Public Domain or not. My nsho is that if the output is sufficiently close that "a practitioner skilled in the arts" can identify the source, then the output is a legal "derived work", and the input copyright applies to the output. If the source is not identifiable, then the output is a new work, but AI is incapable of creativity, so the output is Public Domain.

And then - hopefully - a human comes along, proof-reads the output to remove hallucinations and mistakes, at which point (because this is *creative* input) they then acquire a copyright over the final work. Such work could also remove all references to the existing source, thereby removing the original copyrights (or it could fail to do so, and fail to remove the original copyrights).

Cheers,
Wol