Here is Oracle / OpenJDK's stance on the copyright aspect:
https://openjdk.org/legal/ai
> The Oracle Contributor Agreement (OCA) requires that a contributor
own the intellectual property rights in each contribution and be able to
grant those rights to Oracle, without restriction. Most generative AI
tools, however, are trained on copyrighted and licensed content, and
their output can include content that infringes those copyrights and
licenses, so contributing such content would violate the OCA. Whether a
user of a generative AI tool has IP rights in content generated by the
tool is the subject of active litigation.
Now, I immensely dislike Oracle because they are a lawsuit mill before
being a software company, but one has to admit that they have some
experience in understanding copyright law (and winning their lawsuits,
frivolous as they are).
Le 31/07/2026 à 10:09, damiancoding--- via ghc-devs a écrit :
Dear all,
I have thus far been perusing the LLM policy discussion from the bleachers. A
lot of conversation has been had about the ethical and practical reasons to
support or abolish LLM use for GHC.
However, one really important point seems to have been all but omitted from the
conversation, and that is the legal aspect.
GHC, like any other project using any licensing at all, enjoys protections
based in the legal system of every country it is being used and developed in.
That is no small thing and is essentially what allows GHC to exist in the legal
sense. A body of work untethered from this is like a person without citizenship
- no one will advocate for it, and no government will back up legitimate claims
around it by enforcing laws and regulations.
It is the contention of some legal scholars that having a significant (not
large or overwhelming, merely significant) amount of AI based contributions in
a body of work can lead to lack of recognition of its copyright in court. This
opinion is already backed up by case law relating to art:
https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-copyright
Such a status would put the project's protections in danger legally and could
turn to foil the efforts of GHC contributors over the past numerous years.
Of course, art is not code, and I would say many people's code is not art...
but absence of proof is not proof of absence. This is merely legal limbo, not
legal certainty, and early indications suggest the tree may fall on the house.
In fact, who is to say that at least in some jurisdictions, AI companies
couldn't go rogue and turn around and say anything that's been generated does
not belong to you intellectually - it belongs to the model, and therefore to
its owner, the AI company? Of course, there are explainers and assurances, but
none of this is legally tested. As someone who has advised on, joined, and
started lawsuits in more than a handful different legal systems, I can tell you
that they are all very idiosyncratic and there is no common-sense to any of
them. Local law can be extremely surprising and in fact one place's laws can
contradict another place's laws.
There are also secondary effects as well. For example, can you get public
funding for such a project? Can you be recommended by government entities and
various organizations? Can you use or contribute to such work as a university
employee, researcher, or student? This last one is particularly important for a
project that lives and dies by the ability of researchers to contribute to it.
I may have simply missed it in the deluge, but I have found that there has been little to
no discussion of the effect of LLM contributions on the copyright of GHC. Perhaps before
entering this "Brave New World", we should see if the ice is too thin to walk
on.
Especially during war time, there has been a multitude of legal documents that
were proof of citizenship to one area or another. Sometimes they looked like
the blue British passport that is all the rage these days, sometimes they were
a tattered piece of paper in an envelope of you were lucky, with nothing more
to certify its authenticity than a stamp, and a block-letter name written by
someone who barely ever held a pen, at an outpost in the deep forest. This may
have been all that a person, coming from a country that may not even exist
anymore due to changes in war, has to go on for legal recognition as a citizen
of any country. Many times such documents were ad-hoc or provisional and there
wasn't even a way to check them for authenticity or correctness, if the
checking was being done by a person a thousand miles away from the document's
origin and who is not even able to read the alphabet let alone the language.
Very often such documents would not be recognized; it was as much dep
endent on the politics of the day (does the Soviet Union recognize the
Croatians?) as on whether you had a pack of cigarettes to share with the
militia man patrolling the path you were on. A solid passport from a powerful
country got you out of trouble.
The legal system around LLM contributions is changing. Very little of it is
proven and what has been proven so far shows that they enjoy no protection. For
better or worse whatever imaginary lines on the ground we imagine and agree
upon within our little tribe will be completely disregarded and obliterated by
the machine of war that sets out the order as the legal system solidifies. To
understand how this can lead to disappointment, just ask people in Finland
whether they are nostalgic for their lost territory.
I believe the integration of LLM based output into GHC is an issue that requires prudence far beyond
"community consensus", "robust conversations", and "good proposals". It can
clearly have ramifications of legal, compliance, civic, policy, and otherwise government-related nature,
should be treated seriously as such, and therefore the project should source informed analysis and
recommendation from those whose job it is to do so. This in particular means we should be hiring and
listening to impartial professionals and not sounding off as developers who don't know the first thing about
such matters.
I say all this as someone who uses AI on the daily and has worked at a frontier
AI lab that has been acquired by interests related to the US government. I
think GHC is more important than being able to work on it with specific
techniques. Everyone employing asbestos had the best intentions and could never
have known where it would lead, but out of this period in history we have
learned to be careful about employing new technology. Currently, the only
people talking about this on this list are asbestos users and carpenters, and
no one's thought to ask the doctors or physicists.
With best regards,
Damian
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