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BREAKING: Today, the US Supreme Court affirmed that workslop created by AI systems can not be copyrighted.
Question for the lawyers here: If a work (original or derived) is not copyrightable, is there any route for it to be releasable under a FOSS license?
#OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS #FLOSS #AI #ArtificialIntelligence
@downey
Isn't FOSS a way to grant exemption to the default state of protection - which this doesn't have? Thus even an MIT licence may be more *restrictive* than the terms it's currently bound by?
@zbrown
My not-a-lawyer answer would be that there are no protections for this code to prevent anyone from doing so - but having done that, it would not be enforceable.
Also Microsoft & copilot have been caught grabbing ALL the code from GitHub, regardless of licence. Yes, even code without permissive licence.
@downey
@viq Yes... (Or if one prefers, "additional permissions")
@downey
Is "this code is in public domain with no copyright protections, due to not having been created by a human" a valid FOSS licence?
Or did I misunderstand and you're asking about the opposite, "is it feasible to add generated code to a project operating under a FOSS licence?" ? In which case, I think like in some projects, a marking is necessary that certain files are under a different licence / have different permissions/protections
@downey
On the other hand, I have no idea about legal status of a human created derivative work based on non-copyrighted material, and what level of modification is "significant"
@viq AFAIK in the US, a work must be copyrightable before it can be deeded to the public domain. So it's more akin to work by US government officials, etc.
https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/works-not-covered-copyright
@downey
I'm so uneducated in the area that I try to use those terms interchangeably 🤷
