Re: Ballot option: Allow AI-Assisted Contributions

On Wed, Aug 05, 2026 at 10:59:27AM -0500, Gerardo Ballabio wrote:
> 
> As I understand it, the problem with copyright isn't that AI providers
> might claim copyright. It's that *someone else* might claim copyright
> because the AI scraped and regurgitated their code. That's still an
> open legal question AFAIK.

A copyright owner (for example, such as the New York Times) might have
a copyright claim against an AI provider (for example, such as
Microsoft and Perplexity).  But even if they win *that* lawsuit, it
doesn't follow that they could then sue the *users* of that AI
provider's LLM.

Consider if a compiler company (such as say, Green Hills Software) was
sued for taking code from GCC (this is a hypothetical; there is no
evidence of this, although Green Hills *did* lose a lawsuitf in 2007
for copying Express Logic's Threads library).  But even if it *was*
shown that they had copying code into their compiler, it doesn't
follow that the Free Software Foundation would have a copyright claim
against all of Green Hills Software's users of their compiler.

So it's a lot more complicated than that.  For example, even if it is
a court decides that it wasn't fair use to scrape New York Times to
train the Perplexity's or Microsoft's LLM, it doesn't follow that the
New York Times could sue an open source project under a copyright
claim --- what is the likelihood that some of New York Times
intellectual property would end up in some project's C code if they
used Perplexity's LLM?

So depending on your definition of "Open Question", perhaps.  But it
reminds me of tobacco companies claiming it was a "open question"
whether tobacco is causing cancer.  It may not be 100% settled, but
sometimes you have to make a decision before everyone agrees about
something is asserted as an "open question".  After all, there are
some people who *stil* believe that mankind never landed on the moon,,,

Cheers,

						- Ted