[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.