Parts of Debian dismiss AI-contributions policy

Posted May 13, 2024 16:58 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Parts of Debian dismiss AI-contributions policy by mb
Parent article: Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy

The output from the LLM is almost certainly GPLed in as far as the output from the LLM is (per copyright law) a derived work of the GPLed input. The complexity is that not all LLM outputs will be a derived work as far as copyright law is concerned, and where they are not derived works, there is no copyright, hence there is nothing to be GPLed.

And that's the key issue - the algorithm between "read a work as input" and "write a work as output" is completely and utterly irrelevant to the question of "does the output infringe on the copyright applicable to the input?". That depends on whether the output is, using something like an abstraction-filtration-comparison test, substantially the same as the input, or not.

For example, I can copy if (!ret) { if (ret == 1) ret = 0; goto cleanup; } directly from the kernel source code into another program, and that has no GPL implications at all, even though it's a literal copy-and-paste of 5 lines of kernel code that I received under the GPL. However, if I copy a different 5 lines of kernel code, I am plausibly creating a derived work, because I'm copying something relatively expressive.

This is why both can be true; as a matter of law, not all copying is copyright infringement, and thus not all copying has GPL implications when the input was GPLed code.