Re: Is Packaging Copyrightable

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:21:04 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.project
Organization	Debian
Message-ID	<3508444.OBFZWjSADL@soren-desktop>
On Monday, February 2, 2026 2:19:30 PM Mountain Standard Time Tollef Fog Heen 
wrote:
> ]] Soren Stoutner
> 
> > From time to time I hear people make the argument that Debian
> > packaging is not copyrightable.  I personally disagree with that
> > assessment.  Among all the other possible factors for considering that
> > packaging *is* copyrightable, I think the effort argument is the
> > easiest to understand.
> 
> Depending on your jurisdiction, «Effort», is not, as I understand it,
> relevant to whether something is copyrightable or not.  It's not
> relevant in the US (per
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_States), in the
> EU you get concept like database rights (which I don't think are
> particularly relevant to Debian packaging).

It is more nuanced than that, because there is a distinction between “creative 
work” and “non-creative work”.  Quoting the Wikipidia page you linked to about 
the idea that “non-creative work” could be copyrightable (known as the “sweat 
of the brow” doctrine):

"Sweat of the brow is a copyright law doctrine. According to this doctrine, an 
author gains rights through simple diligence during the creation of a work, 
such as a database, or a directory. Substantial creativity or "originality" is 
not required."

And, further down:

"The United States rejected this doctrine in the 1991 United States Supreme 
Court case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service;[4] until then it had 
been upheld in a number of US copyright cases.[5][6]"

"Under the Feist ruling in the US, mere collections of facts are considered 
unoriginal and thus not protected by copyright, no matter how much work went 
into collating them. The arrangement and presentation of a collection may be 
original, but not if it is "simple and obvious" such as a list in alphabetical 
or chronological order.”

Therefore, *non-creative work* is not a measure of copyrightability, like 
compiling a list of every phone number in a city and putting them in a phone 
book, but, *creating work* is.  I think it is fairly easy to argue that Debian 
packaging involves a large amount of *creative work*, and is thus 
copyrightable.  One way of measuring that is if two people were to 
independently do the work, would the output be identical.  For a phone book, 
the answer is probably yes.  For Debian packaging, based on my experience with 
collaborative maintenance, the answer would be never.

(We can’t even agree on what the names of the branches should be in the 
packaging repository, let alone what the actual *contents* of the debian 
directory should be.  And even when we do agree, there are many different, 
creative ways to implement what we agree on.)

> > When I consider the hours and hours and hours it often takes to get
> > the contents of debian/* into good shape for proper packaging, I think
> > it is impossible to argue that so little effort is required, or that
> > Debian packaging is such an obvious task, or that the results are just
> > a set of default values that don’t represent any actual labor.  That
> > fact that Debian packaging done well requires so much effort, and that
> > it takes so long for new packagers to become good at it, is a strong
> > indication that it is copyrightable.
> 
> Out of interest, do you think that the output of large language models
> is copyrightable?

In the US it is not, because US copyright law requires that the copyrighted 
material be created by a human being.  So, the output of a LLM is not 
copyrightable.

"306 The Human Authorship Requirement

"The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, 
provided that the work was created by a human being.

"The copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are 
founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 
(1879). Because copyright law is limited to “original intellectual conceptions 
of the author,” the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines 
that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. 
Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). For representative examples of works that do 
not satisfy this requirement, see Section 313.2 below.”

https://copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]
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