On Monday, the US Supreme Court declined an appeal against a decision that AI-produced art could not be copyrighted. The earlier decision stands. [Reuters] This should be no surprise at all. This w…
  • NaibofTabrEnglish
    42·
    2 days ago

    No no, see the GNU GPL is copyleft:

    The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

    So if (stressing the if) output from an AI that was trained on GPL code is considered a derivative work, then it must also be licensed as GNU GPL. That makes it open source, but not unlicensed.

    GNU GPL is intentionally insidious this way, it prevents corporate profiteering from GPL projects because any derivative work must use the same license.

    The question is whether a court decision would uphold that AI generated code based on GPL code training counts as a derivative work. This decision regarding generated art seems like it might set a precedent for that.

    • John@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      The GPL is based on rights from copyRIGHT law. It’s the author’s copyright that allows them to determine how to license it, and the GPL is one of many licenses.

      So if something is not able to be copyrighted, then it’s not possible to put a copyright license like the GPL on it. The work is in the public domain, no license at all, different rules about derivative works.

      If machines generated works (like code) cannot be copyrighted, then they can’t be licensed. Is the output of an LLM trained on GPL a derivative work, but can’t be copyrighted?

      It’s a crazy decision, it’s going to do a lot of weird stuff, at least in the US. It might invalidate a bunch of the IP treaties that the US negotiated with much of the world since 2000.