@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 Well, that's right, you can't *license* it, but the public domain is compatible with nearly every FOSS license

The problem is, *not every place has the public domain* and *we don't know that AI generated output will be considered in the public domain everywhere*

This was the motivation that lead to CC0, a public domain declaration with permissive fallback license

We simply *don't know* yet what the legal status of AIgen output is, sufficiently. If it was "public domain worldwide", you'd effectively be mixing its output with yours and contributing that, and it wouldn't likely be tthat big of a deal. For instance, it just might weaken some of the eligibility for coverage under copyleft, but not copyleft compatibility... same with propriettary licenses.

But we *don't know yet*!