[exploderate]

They are a non-profit with a mission to support free software:

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws....

However, they do this because of copyright status and harmful code:

"7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5). "

[aveao]

German court rulings on copyrightability of AI content, as far as I understand, so far have made it so that the person owning the copyright is a) the author, if there's enough creative input b) no one. A lets the author license it as if they wrote it, and B is just public domain, which is in line with their goals still.

Their concern of "what if the license goes to model providers" is bonkers, and is completely out of line with their decision to ban projects that are mostly written by LLMs. I'm pretty sure it'd be violating copyright for me to upload a project that is 40% leaked Microsoft code and 60% my own, so what's the difference if it ends up that Anthropic owns 40% and I own 60%?

It's clear that this is just them disliking LLMs for coding and trying to ban it in some way, and that's fine, but they should say it as it is and ban it fully, instead of going for this half-solution with a nonsense justification to go with it. If they don't actually dislike LLMs and are just concerned about copyright, then they should revert this change.

[FinnKuhn]

> Their concern of "what if the license goes to model providers" is bonkers, and is completely out of line with their decision to ban projects that are mostly written by LLMs.

Under German copyright law, this concern is unfounded. Copyright protection requires a "personal intellectual creation" (persönliche geistige Schöpfung) — a threshold that the provider of an AI model cannot meet, since they merely supply the tool, not the creative act itself. Fearing that a model provider owns the output is like fearing Microsoft owns code written in Visual Studio Code.

Moreover, German copyright can only vest in a natural person, never in a company. So even setting the "personal intellectual creation" issue aside, a corporate model provider is categorically ineligible to hold copyright in the first place.

[aveao]

Perhaps you mean that the copyrighted content can only be originally created by a natural person, but companies do very much have Urheberrecht for content they get copyright transferred for (often through employment contracts and implicitly through work relationships). Otherwise you're right though.

[FinnKuhn]

No, in Germany you can not transfer the copyright itself, only a license. That license can however transfer exclusive usage rights, so in practice it ends up mostly similar, with some niche differences only. For example the creator has a right to attribution.

[jorisw]

So 'mostly' is the clearest they get here. Meaning more than 50% of lines of code? At any given time?

[tempfile]

They are unable to be more clear, because the law is unclear. The safe assumption would be "if the code would be copyrightable, had it been written by a human, then it must have been written by a human". It is impossible to be more clear than this, because "copyrightable" is a legal term of art decided by judges.

[lionkor]

This makes sense from a copyright perspective -- as long as you maintain 50% or more actual human authorship, in case of a conflict with future copyright laws around LLM generated code, you can at least claim that a majority of the code is human-authored.