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If I understand correctly, this means that any text with the "watermark" is legally uncopyrightable, including code.

Relevant comment from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49203613

Not an copyright attorney, but color printers have watermarks. That's never been an obstacle.

AI generated content is not copyrightable, as far as I understood. A reliable watermark is a reliable indicator that a work does not fall under copyright.

For a repo, I don't know what that means. Only the AI generated lines are public domain?

what if the output is downstream from copyrightable work? wouldn't the LLM touching it wash that off if this was the metric used?

Well, all major LLMs have been trained on copyrighted material, so effectively all LLM output is downstream of copyrighted work.

I guess it's a bit weird. An LLM can recite copyrighted material verbatim from training data (they had to work hard to get them to stop doing that, and they haven't been entirely successful). But LLM outputs are public domain. (Except when they are a verbatim reproduction of a copyrighted work.) I'm not sure where you draw that line when it's not verbatim...

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