this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
44 points (76.8% liked)
Technology
86745 readers
2599 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hasn't the output from LLM already been ruled ineligible for copyright protection?
No idea. The whole copyright topic is a clusterfuck when it comes to LLMs. The matter of the fact is: most AI companies steal data to train their models and they don't care about licenses or copyrights.
Copyright should not exist
Are you for real?
Copyright exists so that corporations can extract profit from their "intellectual property" by restricting other people's free creative expression.
Do you know any artists trying to make a living?
Copyright started out in the USA at 14 years plus another optional 14 year extension. I am going by my memory here.
The purpose of the law was to balance public and private interests.
The public benefits from uninhibited copying. Private interests benefit from a monopoly on copying. The law at first recognized both of those interests as legitimate, which is why copyrights were relatively short at first.
Then the rich companies like Disney lobbied the govrnment to change all that.
Now copyright is something like lifetime of an author (who can be a corporation and does not even need to be a human) plus something like 150 years, plus/minus.
Basically the interests of the public were tossed out the window.
The public libraries were and still are the bullwark providing free access to copies, but the private interests hate the libraries too.
I don't want the artists to starve. Right now the biggest holders, abusers and beneficiaries of the heinously immoral (as it currently stands) copyright regime are the giant gorporations, not the starving artists.
Plus, now a new crop of giant corporations decided to ignore copyright that was recently serving primarily other giant corporations. I hate all of them, and all of IT. Fuck them all.
Copyright law needs a reform now.
So in summary, center the human author, and balance the public and the private iterests.
And while we wait, harrrr, harrr, harrr, sail the high seas.
P.S. Fashion is one form of creative output not covered by any monopoly protection. The fashion industry is doing fine.
"The whole copyright topic is a clusterfuck", full stop.
Except for use in llm
In most countries, the output of a single prompt will not be copyrightable. However, once someone starts arranging the output into something more, then copyright can be applied.
Overall, it depends on the country, but in some they are asking their legislators for clarification. Many are trying to apply pre-existing copyright laws to LLMs.
The U.S. Copyright Office wrote up a report about this and included a list of how other countries are handling it.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf
Yes, as the other commenter said, in most jurisdictions (i think China is the only exception?), generative AI outputs (this covers more than LLMs, like diffusers and other modern image generators) are not eligible for copyright. However, while a human made arrangement of the outputs gets copyright protection, in the US at least, it is a very narrow scope of protection, literally only a direct copy/paste of large swaths, and doesn't extend to the individual AI generated components.