Makes sense. The G in GCC is for GNU right, GNU as in Stallman-style Free Software. The GPL operates based on copyright licenses. If LLM output can not be copyrightable (as the courts seem to assert), then it can not be a significant part of Free Software.

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Cthulhu_ 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or if LLM output is copyrighted or sourced from copyrighted code - they can't take that risk, lest they face another "Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.". I think that lawsuit caused huge waves in the open source communities.

	▲	ethin 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To be clear, that case did not decide copyrightability of APIs, just fair use in Google's specific circumstances. I wish the court had ruled that APIs themselves could not be copyrightable (after all, they are declarations of something, not the implementation) but it did what it loves to do and kicked the can down the road

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overgard an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know why this take is buried -- this is exactly the pertinent point to all of this.

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NooneAtAll3 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

courts assert LLM can't HOLD copyright, as in it is not an entity that can own something and go to court over such ownership

nothing is said about you the user holding copyright over result of tool use

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marginalia_nu 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That is to the extent of my understanding, not correct. At least in the EU,

"Given this framework, it follows that purely AI-generated outputs—those created automatically by an AI system without substantial human intervention—are not eligible for copyright protection in the EU. Such outputs are considered to fall into the public domain, making them freely available for anyone to use, reproduce, or adapt without seeking permission or providing attribution. The legal and commercial implications of this are significant. For creators and companies investing in AI systems that generate music, art, or text, there is no proprietary right over the final output unless a human has contributed in a way that meets the “intellectual creation” standard."

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/7740...

The courts are AFAICT still undecided in the US regarding this.

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somenameforme 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The last I read it's the exact same in the US. It requires 'substantial human intervention' which is going to be quite open to interpretation. The monkey selfie [1] issue is relevant. Setting up the gear to enable monkeys to take selfies was ruled ineligible for copyright: "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

	▲	microtherion 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe the human profession of the future is some sort of “Shabbos Dev”, providing enough human intervention in the coding to make the code copyrightable.

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mgulick 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The GPL relies on copyright ownership for its effectiveness, and copyright ownership of LLM output is a legal gray area right now.

"...prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output." [https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10...]

If code generated by LLMs turns out to be effectively public domain, that could seriously water down the legal standing of copyleft licenses. Fortunately there is still enough human-authored code that long-standing projects as a whole are not at risk of losing all copyright control, but as more LLM-generated code is incorporated, and human authored code is deleted, the copyright slowly gets washed away.

Having said that, I suspect the big AI companies have enough lobbying power to influence the legal system and lawmaking in the future.