@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?

@fhekland Hey @cwebber ☝️ this was really bothering me. If the current precedent stands, it's absolutely the case that no open source license is enforceable on generative code, as the copyright is a prerequisite for any license.

I imagine there's a test of amount still, like if most of the code is human-authored, you could still claim copyright. But for example, the tool I just made with Claude Code as an experiment? Full public domain, no terms available to me.

@mttaggart @fhekland @cwebber This is accurate, yes. Illicitly acquired code works the same way: you don’t hold the copyright, so you don’t have the ability to license it to others.

There is an open question of what happens when the LLM emits a verbatim chunk of code against that code’s license terms. For example, if you told an LLM to implement ZFS’ spa_activate, it’s extremely likely to emit verbatim chunks of CDDL code without the attribution required by the license. A tool can’t be liable for the infringement, but does the liability rest with the company which included CDDL code in the training corpus, or does it rest with the user who didn’t verify that the output doesn’t infringe preexisting copyright?