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dzaimayesterday at 11:45 PM0 repliesview on HN

> That's simply not correct within the applicable meaning of "derives" as understood in copyright law.

Would be rather hard to write a definition that handles it properly back when LLMs didn't exist; not that laws particularly have anything to do with intent/desires behind FOSS anyway - intent is clearly there: you get code, under the condition that if you use it for anything, I get credited; else, you get nothing.

> In fact, data per se is not even within the scope of copyright protection in the first place: specific published works are copyrighted, but the underlying ideas and facts that they convey are not.

Luckily, FOSS is specific published works, and unless LLMs actually reasonably-provably do such decomposing into ideas/facts (good luck reasoning about that), that part is also irrelevant.

> If you applied the principle you're proposing here to human developers, you'd conclude that any code written by someone who learned to program by studying techniques used in FOSS software would in turn be a derivative work of that software. No one has ever regarded this to be the case.

Depending on intent, that very much can happen, it's called plagiarism. Good luck proving an LLMs intent. (not to mention the obvious differentiating factor of LLMs having arbitrarily-good memory unlike humans)