Re: Ballot option: Allow AI-Assisted Contributions

Stefano Zacchiroli <[email protected]> Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:44:37 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID <xfmdfaa7jlxoyuevdw5nib2euh7vpckier5hlpzublspjjxzqc@imibd4sauean>
On Fri, Jul 24, 2026 at 10:41:10PM +0300, Aigars Mahinovs wrote:
> AFAIK Bartz v. Anthropic is one such landmark case - [2] https://legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com/copyright-blog/the-bartz-v-anthropic-settlement-understanding-americas-largest-copyright-settlement/ has some analysis and background, for example.
> 
> The key finding, for our case was the ruling from last year: "that Anthropic's use of legally acquired books for AI training was
> "quintessentially transformative" and protected as fair use".
> 
> This basically is a bedrock decision that established that copyright of the training materials do NOT survive the transformation inherent
> in the learning process and thus the output of an LLM is NOT a derivative work of the training material in the legal sense.

While very important in many ways, that court decision is strictly about the impact of copyright on the *training* part of modern LLM-gen-AI systems, and does establish what you quoted in the second paragraph above.
But, AFAIU, it does not establish anything about the copyrightability of / potential copyright infringement in the *output* of LLMs --- I was already aware of this, but the summary you quote above says so too: "Limited scope: Crucially, this settlement […] does not: […] Cover claims based on AI outputs that might infringe copyrights."

Cheers