Posted by senaevren 1 day ago
Anthropic "solved" this by intermingling the texts extracted from pirated books (illegal) with texts extracted from the physical books they bought and destroyed (legal), so no one can clearly say if the copyrighted material it spits out came from a legal source or not. Everyone rejoiced.
For example:
No Generative AI Training Use
For avoidance of doubt, Author reserves the rights, and grants no rights to, reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for purposes of training artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies to generate text, text to speech, voice, or audio including without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as the Work, unless individual or entity obtains Author’s specific and express permission to do so. Nor does any individual or entity have the right to sublicense others to reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for the purposes of training artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies to generate text, text to speech, voice, or audio without Author’s specific and express permission.
They're only legal if training is fair use - and even I don't think it's immediately clear what would be the legal status of verbatim regurgitation of code in copyright, or code protected by patents?
AFAIK I (as a human developer) can't assume that I can go and copy code out of a text book, and then assume copyright and charge for a license to it?
The judge seems to have said it's because they "transformed" the books (destroying them after digitalizing) in the process, that made it legal.
> Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative. - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
LLMs don't make decisions. Their output is completely determined by an algorithm using the human prompt, fixed weights, and a random seed. No different than the many effects humans use in image or audio editors. Nobody ever questioned whether art made using only those effects on a blank canvas was subject to copyright.
The fact that it inferred those basis functions from studying copyrighted works doesn't seem relevant. Nor does the fact that the "Fourier sums" sometimes coincide with larger fragments of works that are copyrighted. How weird would it be if that didn't happen?
If I painstakingly recreate A New Hope frame by frame, pixel by pixel, that's infringement. Even if I technically used 0 content from the original.
In any case, if the copyright mafia insists on butting heads with AI, they'll find that the fight doesn't quite play out the way it has in the past.
Is there any citation for this "legal consensus"? I was not aware there was any evidence backed stances on this topic as of yet
CC does not need LGPL code. There's more than enough BSD and Apache code to go around.
And they can generate synthetic data that is better than LGPL for their training.
It's also a problem that does not seem feasible to meaningfully enforce.
It's easy to generate CC code and lie and say you didn't. It would be hard to prove that you did, especially if you took any precautions to make it even slightly difficult that you did.
However, even if the BSD/Apache/MIT licensed code can be incorporated freely in your application, you still have no right to remove the copyright notices from it and/or to claim that you own the copyright for it.
Therefore, unless the AI model has been trained only on non-copyrighted public-domain code, incorporating the generated code in your application means that you have removed the copyright notices from it, which is not allowed by the original licenses.
There is absolutely no doubt that using an AI coding assistant works around the copyright laws, but it is still equivalent with doing copy and paste with fragments from copyrighted works into your source code.
I consider that copyright should not be applicable to program sources, at least not in its current form, so reusing parts from other programs should be fair use, but only if human programmers would be allowed to do the same.
I can't speak for all licenses, but I'm familiar with at least one BSD license. That's almost the entire point of it...
You cannot take their literal code and call it your own. You can derive code from it and call it your own. That's what LLMs primarily do.
If some GPL-licensed group were to sue some commercial software project that they do not have the source code for, what would even give it away? But they throw $1 million at a lawyer who can at least get it to the discovery phase somehow, and the source code is provided. It looks to be shit, but maybe an expert witness would come along and say "that looks inspired by the open source project". Where does it go from there? The model is a black box, but maybe you've got a superhero lawyer who manages to rope in Anthropic or OpenAI, and you can see how it produced the code given those prompts. What now? Are there any expert witnesses who both could say and would say that it was "bulk copying-pasting code". And if it were, what jury is going to go for that theory of the crime? Copying-and-pasting, but the code doesn't match, except in short little strings that any code might match. This isn't a slamdunk, and it's not going to proceed very far unless it's another Google-vs-Oracle shitfest.
LLMs really change nothing about this.
The logging point is sharper than it might appear. In a copyright dispute over AI-assisted code, interaction logs could cut both ways. A plaintiff trying to establish human authorship would want the logs to show substantial architectural redirection, multiple rejections of Claude output, and documented reasoning for structural decisions. A defendant challenging that authorship claim would subpoena the same logs to show verbatim acceptance of output without modification.
The practical implication i guess here,that the developers who want to preserve a copyright claim over AI-assisted code should treat their prompt history as a legal document from the start. It seems all over the world the logs are the evidence. Whether they help or hurt depends entirely on what they show.
I use my own computer, I pay for my own subscription and I build my open source projects then the code belongs to me.
If I use my company's computer, they pay for my subscription and we work on the company's projects then the code belongs to the company.
In any step of the way if some copy-left or any other form of exotic open source license is violated, who pays for discovery? Is it someone in Russia who created a popular OSS library that is now owed? How will it be enforced?
Except if it happens to regurgitate a significant excerpt of some existing work, then the authors of that can assert their copyright; i.e. claim that it infringes.