Post #4095777

2026-07-25 09:42 UTC

> LLM output has very unclear legal status: it may be possible to copyright on its own merits, or not; it may be affected by all of the licenses and copyrights in the training data, or not. Debian Policy and the DFSG require absolute clarity for licensing and copyright. Software and other contributions written conventionally by humans with unclear copyright or license status are not allowed in Debian; LLM output should not have a special exception to this… (2/3)

Replies (4)

@jocelyn_etienne@scicomm.xyz 2026-07-25 17:11

@hywan@floss.social This + the final statement of proposal A : " Debian is not here to generate as much code as possible requiring manual review by a shrinking number of human volunteers, or to package every piece of software, or to rush new features, but these are what LLMs are used for. " could readily be applied e.g. to scientific research. "/Universities/ are not here to generate as much /papers/ as possible requiring manual review by a shrinking number of /human researchers/" ...! #AI #MastodonScience #AIinResearch #LLM

Open ##4095776
@hywan@floss.social 2026-07-25 09:42

> LLM companies directly hurt the free software community as whole by scraping the whole web for training data without any regard for license, copyright, or even established conventions such as robots.txt. (3/3)

Open ##4097757
@BoydStephenSmithJr@hachyderm.io 2026-07-26 17:38

@hywan@floss.social Quotes from U.S. Copyright guidelines affirming this unclear status: https://hachyderm.io/@BoydStephenSmithJr/116964500365807149

Open ##4133728
@lambert@rheinneckar.social 2026-07-27 12:12

@hywan@floss.social IANAL, but I took away from a commercial training on #AI and copyright that AI-generated works (code or other) can _never_ claim copyright on their own merits, because intellectual property is something that (current) legislation world wide can only assign to human persons. If it's not created by a human, it cannot be copyrighted. Hope I didn't get that wrong.

Open ##4188345