Considering calling slop-infected projects "nonfree," as copyright-laundered code (in my opinion) isn't licensable under whatever actually-free license the project claims.

Is there any substance to this? Anyone else feel the same?

I am European, so specifically interested in non-US laws/examples. US has ruled that slop is public domain (despite being copyright-laundered…), but I understand that should not apply here.

@allpurposemat If you're talking about the Thaler v. Perlmutter case, the interpretation that they ruled AI output as "public domain" is a serious misunderstanding, widely reported by sensationalist media.

All the courts did was decline to register copyright in the name of an AI "author". However:

- Copyright registration is optional, copyright itself is enforceable without registration.
- They didn't say anything about the status of the works in question, and definitely not that they're public domain.
- It's my reading that this was thrown out on a technicality, because Thaler tried to have the AI be the legal copyright holder, which the law does not permit (it must be a human). It's very possible that the slop would have been copyright-registered had Thaler put himself as the author.

In my view, the jury is still very much out on this, and I would caution against using LLM-created code as if it were public domain.

@muvlon Interesting! I did indeed only see media reporting on it, but did not read the actual case.

Will read up on (I guess) [this document](https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2025/03/23-5233.pdf) to get a better understanding. Though I hold that EU should not be subject to US rulings, it is helpful to see how other jurisdictions interpret it as a hint of how EU might handle it.

Either way, my personal belief is still that LLM output is subject to the copyright of its training material, and thus 99% unfree.

@allpurposemat Oh yes, EU is different still and I don't know of any ruling in any particular direction there yet. All I wanted to say was that even in the US, it's not clear yet.

I think it should also be noted that in the Thaler case, there was no LLM or other modern "genAI" involved. He initially submitted his request in 2019, years before GPT-3 was released and started the current AI craze.

Thaler just developed a generative algorithm that outputs art, AFAICT it doesn't even use a transformer architecture or massive amounts of stolen training data. In my layperson opinion, this is pretty squarely classic "computer aided art", not slop, and thus copyrightable. He just messed up by trying to attribute it to the algorithm instead of himself.

@allpurposemat In the UK it is copyrightable and the copyright holder is whoever prompted it (assuming it doesn't plagiarise anything, of course, which it does)