Jim Porter <[email protected]> writes:

> The US Supreme Court has recently affirmed that the outputs of 
> generative AI aren't copyrightable; the "author" is held to be the 
> computer, but copyright is only applicable to creative works authored by 
> humans. The result is that the gen-AI outputs are public domain.

Note that public domain code is not disallowed in GNU projects. But LLMs
indeed pose a new challenge to the existing practice - the amount of
public domain code in GNU projects is usually very small.

> Since the GPL uses copyright law as a way of guaranteeing the four 
> freedoms, the inclusion of legally-significant amounts of public domain 
> work would undermine this. Any public domain code could be relicensed 
> under a more-permissive license like BSD, or even extracted and used in 
> proprietary software.

No, public domain code cannot be re-licensed. It is already public
domain. You cannot put restrictions. The other question is whether it
can spoil GPL license of the *other parts of the code*. But that
question is to be answered by lawyers (GNU is on it).

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode maintainer,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
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