* Josh Boyer: > On Fri, Jul 18, 2025, 6:45 AM Florian Weimer <fwei...@redhat.com> wrote: > > * Josh Boyer: > >>> Do you have a reference to a court in another region that has stated >>> an opposite view? Or perhaps some proposed legislation from >>> somewhere? > >> No legislation is required because creators' rights do not derive >> from an Act of Congress in most parts of the world. The U.S. notion >> that copyright serves purpose to promote progress is completely alien >> to other jurisdictions. If they recognize the right to personal >> property at all, they view the right to intellectual property as a >> basic human right, growing from exactly the same source as other >> property rights. > > I find that all well and good for works created by humans. AI is not > a human so it is not obvious to me how the concept of "property" or > "rights" apply to output generated by a machine.
The issue is not just the output. The way models are built, they necessarily embed the creators' works along with their rights. The U.S. legal consensus may indeed be that creators' rights do not matter because Congress has not decided they do, but that's not how things work elsewhere. But that won't fly elsewhere because of the way intellectual property rights work there. If someone listens to a piece of music, transcribes it to musical notation, and they or someone else interpret and re-record it from the sheet music they produced, the composer still has rights in the recording. From what I can tell, this process is more complex and transformative than what training and inference with large language models accomplish. And yet few would argue that the composer loses their rights along the way. If we view the effect of large language models differently, that's because we've been conditioned by commercial interests (and perhaps to a lesser degree by the anti-copyright folks) to do so. The most likely outcome is that models will be treated like editing software: you can use them to create novel content, or to re-create content that others have produced. Even with traditional editors, it's possible that you intend to create something novel, but you subconsciously or deliberately reproduce someone else's work. Subconscious reproduction may not be much of an issue for code today (at least not for copyright purposes), but it already exists for other types of content as a very real problem. Use of models simply exposes this challenge to more creators. I find it very unlikely that there will be consensus that these new editors cannot produce infringing content due to the way they work. Thanks, Florian -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
