The thing they want is clear legal standing. If your submission is majority LLM generated, you can't really confirm that "your" code isn't a copy of something in the training set that has an incompatible license (or a clear copyright violation). That might not be a big deal for some projects, but being this is GNU and their entire identity is centered around free software and licensing, it's kind of a big deal to them.
That's just not an issue in practice. All major AI labs match generated code against their training data to prevent outputting verbatim copies. They're so confident they won't output copyrighted code that they offer copyright indemnification to paid users.
They do? Last I remember microsoft's license for copilot was saying that any copyright violation is on the user and they were disclaiming all responsibility (which would probably not hold up in court).
> Specifically, if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products.
> Under the updated terms, we will defend our customers from any copyright infringement claim made against them for their authorized use of our services or their outputs, and we will pay for any approved settlements or judgments that result.
> Output indemnity. OpenAI’s indemnification obligations to Enterprise customers under the Agreement include claims that Customer’s use or distribution of Output infringes a third party’s intellectual property right.
Wow, I didn't know that. Never seen a corporation do anything like it. Usually it's just "we guarantee nothing and you agree to fully idemnify us for any damages" legal boilerplate.
My understanding is that "one shotting" a C compiler from a single prompt would not be covered by copyright, but a large project like GCC containing thousands of individual contributions which each require human input most likely would (even if some of the code is LLM generated).
Also, it's worth noting that the USCO does not actually have the final say here. It's possible to register works that don't hold up in court or to fail to register works that do hold up. It's the courts that ultimately decide what the law is.
