The GNU Compiler Collection will reject copyright-significant contributions derived from LLM output, with limited exceptions for trivial changes and test cases.
I’m not a lawyer but I’m really unsure if there’s even some safe guess like two lines. E.g. if you look at lyrics, I think people have been sued less - not that I would know for sure, though, and no idea if that allows any conclusions for code…
Well, depends on what the line is, right? Like, you’d have a hard time copyrighting
int i = 0;
because millions of people write that line of code.
But if it’s something unique and, say, identifiably Microsoft’s code, then yes, you probably would not have legal grounds to stand on.
In the context of the OP, of course, if you’re using an LLM just to write int i = 0; then you might be stupid. But possibly if you’re using LLMs to do tedious tasks like writing unit tests then you might be able to argue that they’re generic enough to not infringe copyright even if the legal situation is resolved in favour of LLM output belonging to the IP holders of the training data. It’s just a legal grey area, which is presumably why so many projects are concerned about merging LLM output.
The point I was making was rather, there is no guaranteed safe length and you probably don’t want to make that call as a maintainer. Unless you’re a lawyer that happens to do FOSS, I guess.
I’m not a lawyer but I’m really unsure if there’s even some safe guess like two lines. E.g. if you look at lyrics, I think people have been sued less - not that I would know for sure, though, and no idea if that allows any conclusions for code…
Well, depends on what the line is, right? Like, you’d have a hard time copyrighting
int i = 0;because millions of people write that line of code.
But if it’s something unique and, say, identifiably Microsoft’s code, then yes, you probably would not have legal grounds to stand on.
In the context of the OP, of course, if you’re using an LLM just to write
int i = 0;then you might be stupid. But possibly if you’re using LLMs to do tedious tasks like writing unit tests then you might be able to argue that they’re generic enough to not infringe copyright even if the legal situation is resolved in favour of LLM output belonging to the IP holders of the training data. It’s just a legal grey area, which is presumably why so many projects are concerned about merging LLM output.The point I was making was rather, there is no guaranteed safe length and you probably don’t want to make that call as a maintainer. Unless you’re a lawyer that happens to do FOSS, I guess.