Mastodawn

I have what may be a very ignorant question: if model-generated code may not be copyrighted due to a requirement of human authorship (current US Copyright Office policy), does it therefore follow that model-generated code may not be licensed under any terms whatsoever? Meaning anything from MIT to GPLv3?

I recognize no answers here would constitute legal advice, but I would love to hear from legal experts on this.

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fhekland 11h ago

@mttaggart https://www.copyrighted.com/blog/licensing-vs-copyright#frequently-asked-questions

Licensing vs Copyright: Key Differences Creators Must Know

Understand the distinctions between licensing vs copyright. This article explores how licensing agreements affect copyright ownership and usage rights.

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Taggart 11h ago

@fhekland

Can you license something without owning the copyright?

No, you need to own the copyright or have permission from the copyright holder to license the work.

So if no copyright is possible, no license is possible?

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fhekland

@mttaggart (Un)fortunately I'm no lawyer, but it seems odd to me if it was possible to licence something you don't hold the copyrights to.
Moreover, if it originates from an LLM where the training data is a diverse mix of different licenses, how close to the training data can the output be before it's considered derivative work? When seeing how some have almost cloned books in verbatim from LLM's, it would be reasonable to think that this could happen to source code as well.