Parts of Debian dismiss AI-contributions policy

Posted May 13, 2024 13:26 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: Parts of Debian dismiss AI-contributions policy by anselm
Parent article: Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy

> Elsewhere in copyright law, the general premise is that copyright is only available for works which are the “personal mental creation” of a human being. Speciesism aside, something that comes out of an LLM is obviously not the personal mental creation of anyone, and that seems to take care of that, even without the EU pronouncing on it in the context of training AI models.

LLMs are prompted, they don't produce output out of thin air. Therefore the output is the creation of the human that triggered the prompt. Now whether that person was pressing buttons on a device that sent network packets to a server that processed all those keystrokes into a block of text to be sent to an LLM in the cloud is irrelevant. Somewhere along the way a human decided to invoke the LLM and controlled which input to send to it and what to do with the output. That human being is responsible for respecting copyright. Whether the output is copyrightable depends mostly on how original the prompt is.

The idea that LLM output cannot be copyrighted is silly. That would be like claiming that documents produced by a human typing into LibreOffice cannot be "the personal mental creation of anyone". LLMs, like LibreOffice, are tools, nothing more. There's a human at the keyboard who is responsible. Sure, most of the output of an LLM isn't going to be original enough to be copyrightable, but that's quite different from saying *all* output from LLMs is not copyrightable.

As with legal things in general, it depends.

Parts of Debian dismiss AI-contributions policy

Posted May 13, 2024 13:54 UTC (Mon) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

>LLMs are prompted, they don't produce output out of thin air.
>Therefore the output is the creation of the human that triggered the prompt.

Ok, so if I enter wget into my shell prompt to download some copyrighted music, it makes me the creator?

Parts of Debian dismiss AI-contributions policy

Posted May 13, 2024 14:18 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

You are the creator of that copy, and in as far as there is anything copyrightable in creating that copy, you own that copyright.

However, that copy is (in most cases) either an exact copy of an existing work, or a derived work of an existing work; if it's an exact copy, then there is nothing copyrightable in the creation of the copy, so you own nothing.

If it's a derived work, then you own copyright in the final work thanks to the creative expression you put in to create the copy, but doing things with that work infringes the copyright in the original work unless you have appropriate permission from the copyright holder on the original work, or a suitable exception in copyright law.

Parts of Debian dismiss AI-contributions policy

Posted May 13, 2024 21:51 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (1 responses)

😹😹😹

> LLMs are prompted, they don't produce output out of thin air. Therefore the output is the creation of the human that triggered the prompt.

This is ridiculous. The “prompt” is merely a tiny parametrisation of a query that extracts from the huge database of (copyrighted) works.

Do read the links I listed in https://lwn.net/Comments/973578/

> The idea that LLM output cannot be copyrighted is silly.

😹😹😹😹😹😹😹

You’re silly.

This is literally enshrined into copyright law. For example:

> Werke im Sinne dieses Gesetzes sind nur persönliche geistige Schöpfungen.

“Works as defined by this [copyright] law are only personal intellectual creations that pass threshold of originality.” (UrhG §2(2))

Wikipedia explains the “personal” part of this following general jurisprudence:

> Persönliches Schaffen: setzt „ein Handlungsergebnis, das durch den gestaltenden, formprägenden Einfluß eines Menschen geschaffen wurde“ voraus. Maschinelle Produktionen oder von Tieren erzeugte Gegenstände und Darbietungen erfüllen dieses Kriterium nicht. Der Schaffungsprozeß ist Realakt und bedarf nicht der Geschäftsfähigkeit des Schaffenden.

“demands the result of an act from the creative, form-shaping influence of a human: mechanical production or things or acts produced by animals do not fulfill this criterium (but legal competence is not necessary).” (<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urheberrecht_(Deutschland)#Schutzgegenstand_des_Urheberrechts:_Das_Werk>)

So, yes, LLM output cannot be copyrighted (as a new work/edition) in ipso.

And to create an adaption of LLM output, the human doing so must not only invest significant *creativity* (not just effort / sweat of brow!) to pass threshold of originality, but they also must have the permission of the copyright (exploitation rights, to be precise) holders of the original works to do so (and, in droit d’auteur, may not deface, so the authors even if not holders of exploitation rights also have something to say).

This has gone on for a while

Posted May 13, 2024 22:24 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

While this discussion can be seen as on-topic for LWN, I would also point out that we are not copyright lawyers, and that there may not be a lot of value in continuing to go around in circles here. Perhaps it's time to wind it down?