On Mon, 11 May 2026 at 11:18, Marvin W. via Standards <standards(a)xmpp.org> wrote: I agree with this analysis. However I would note that "recent case law" is specific to each jurisdiction and subject to change. I would also note to all members that it's tempting to extrapolate from "AI generated content can not be copyrighted" that such content is outside copyright law and therefore cannot then violate copyright law. However, this is not an accepted fact. These two aspects are independent. Due to the evolving relationship between "AI" and the law, I think we must require disclosure, at a minimum, regardless of whether Board decides to permit such contributions. Having this on record ensures there are no nasty surprises down the road, which is the primary purpose of the IPR policy in the first place. For various reasons, I would very happily forbid use of LLMs and similar tools in spec development. However, similar to the recent debate about use of "real names", this is basically unenforceable. Drawing clear lines between the extremes of "I only used it for grammar checking" and "it wrote the whole document" is practically impossible, especially at the rate such models are being integrated into everyday tools and services — there is simply no way to prove someone did or did not use them. Regards, Matthew

On Mon, 11 May 2026 at 15:14, Jonas Schäfer <jonas(a)wielicki.name> wrote: Fair enough, but we already do rely on it for all cases other than AI. By saying we won't rely on it for AI, doesn't that weaken our position for non-AI as well? And if not, then why not? Dave.

On Mon, 11 May 2026 at 13:40, Ralph Meijer <ralphm(a)ik.nu> wrote: TL;DR: Yes. We drift, somewhat, from the topic of the thread... But: For those who are unaware, or who have forgotten, or don't care and wish we weren't discussing this on standards, any IETF Activity begins by having the Note Well text appear on a screen somewhere. If you join a mailing list (and possibly on the mailman password reminders and similar), you'll get a copy, and if you're at a physical or virtual meeting it is (or should be) the first slide you'll see. As I understand it, the IETF's Note Well operates as a "click through licence" - "By participating here, your contributions falls under the IPR", very loosely. However, the IETF's IPR is one based on licence (ignoring the patents area for the moment, though that is important too for the XSF). I can licence stuff to you (or anyone) just by saying I do; it's a unilateral action, and so is quite convenient, legally. It's why the GPL was created as a copyright licence, rather than a contract, despite it having some fairly contractual-looking clauses in. They're broadly handled by all jurisdictions where the Berne Convention is a thing - which is nearly the entire globe. The XSF operates on copyright assignment, however. Copyright assignments are different in as much as under at least some jurisdictions (like the UK, but also others) need a written, signed assignment. In some, assigning copyright in advance of creation of the work has additional hoops to jump through. The best way of handling assignments is by contract (for which a consideration is required) or by a deed (which is the one with witnessed signatures). We definitely don't want to do deeds, they're a pain. As such, doing an assignment on click-through might work in some jurisdictions - it looks to me like Germany, Italy, and France might all be problematic, but the UK, US, and others might be OK. The ideal would be to collect actual signed documents from participants, and gate participation on having that document. We could do online signing to make that simpler, obviously. It's not clear to me which jurisdiction we actually operate in, for this, so it makes sense (to me) to make things as rock solid as we can without getting in people's way too much. But the advantage of an explicit, signed (equivalent) IPR agreement from all participants is that not only is our copyright status rock-solid, but we can properly address patents, which our policy is quite weak on - loosely, it says that if we find any we'll hand-wave our way to a replacement XEP. I'd rather see the IETF's policy or something similar, saying that as particpants we will notify the XSF if we believe any IPR claim affects a XEP, and that the XSF will distribute such notifications but takes no view on their validity. This protects against stumbling onto patents, but much more importantly it protects against "submarine patents", where a participant deliberately introduces patent-protected concepts into a XEP and keeps quiet about it. It's possible all this is either wishful thinking, or simply too much work to manage. But it'd be nice if we did it, I think. Dave.

Hi Jonas, Le lundi 11 mai 2026, 17:59:05 heure d’été d’Europe centrale Jonas Schäfer a écrit : The full sentence is: That reads "1. and 2. are OK if we put aside ethical and ecological concerns", which are relevant in general, but not directly in the question raised here (which is more about legality and how XSF should handle AI in contributions). Best, Goffi1

On Tue, 12 May 2026 at 19:24, Guus der Kinderen <guus.der.kinderen(a)gmail.com> wrote: "AI-assisted" falls under entirely different existing law than "AI-generated", at least in all jurisdictions I've looked at outside of the UK - we should be careful about which terms we're using here. In the US, something that is *entirely* AI-generated (ie, with no human assistance) would seem to be covered by the Thaler case. But that case hinged on the fact that Dr Thaler explicitly disclaimed authorship of the work. My gut feeling is that this was a deliberate test case, actually, since Dr Thaler had, after all, created the generative AI which in turn created the artwork, and could have quite reasonably claimed to be the author, but that wasn't the argument advanced. The US Copyright authority - I forget the name - has also rejected copyright claims for images generated (presumably from a single prompt) by Midjourney, an image generation tool, though this has not been tested in the US Courts. Based on this, so far, I would expect that a XEP produced from a single prompt, especially a trivial one, would not be copyrightable in the United States... But I also don't think it's possible to produce a XEP of sufficient quality that way. On the other hand, I think the two viable cases of LLM usage would be copyrightable here - again, I'm not a lawyer, but I have researched this quite heavily: 1) Use of an LLM to generate the initial skeleton of a XEP - filling in title, boilerplate, and some introductory paragraphs - the XEP would then have significant human editing. 2) Use of an LLM on a submission to tidy it up - cleaning up grammar, fixing inconsistent examples, even adding additional explanatory paragraphs. I think either of these or even both in combination would be copyrightable. The Thaler case depended on whether "human creativity" had been involved, and not whether AI had been. Dr Thaler insisted that human creativity had not been involved. (Since someone's bound to ask, and I accept this is all contentious, I write all my specs myself, but do find LLM reviews quite helpful to spot errors - which I correct manually. But I *like* writing, and I'm writing in my native language, I certainly won't judge others for using whatever tools make their lives easier) Note that it is entirely possible that the "additional explanatory paragraphs" I note above would be uncopyrightable in isolation - though that is definitely not clear from case law. But incorporating those into another work that *is* itself copyrightable would yield a work which is copyrightable - there is substantial case law to back that one up. The additional explanatory paragraphs - the pure AI generated text - could still be extracted without copyright, but the author need not identify which those are. Moreover, the slightest edit to those paragraphs turns them into a derivative work, and makes them (independently) copyrightable independently. However - and I think this is key from a purely legal perspective - none of this is an issue about AI, it's an issue about uncopyrightable text. If you want to research this, don't ask about AI - ask about Shakespeare, which is out of copyright. Just as well we don't use any of *that* in our specifications... I think this is a very good point - what's the outcome of the XSF publishing something that is entirely uncopyrightable (and, as I say, this is very hypothetical)? We publish XEPs widely, under a highly permissive licence, that allows essentially any use. The only restriction we have is, in fact, our copyright. Claiming a copyright that one does not in fact possess carries a legal risk, though honestly I have no idea what the recourse would be here. There's almost nothing that would change, really, so I'd argue our legal exposure is very low. But I think it's avoidable. Peter Saint-Andre has argued before that we should simply disclaim copyright (and require submissions to do the same) - this would eliminate the problem entirely. We could quite conceivably do something in the middle. If a submitter has to say something along the lines of: "In as much as copyright exists in this contribution, the submitter asserts and warrants they have permission granted by all copyright holders to assign it in perpetuity to the XSF; furthermore it is hereby assigned to the XSF" ... you need more than this but you get the idea hopefully - and the XSF publishes XEPs with, in Appendix C's Section "Copyright": "To the extent that Copyright may be asserted, this XMPP Extension Protocol is copyright © 1999 – 2024 by the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF)." Then that might be sufficient to allow for entirely uncopyrightable XEPs to be published safely. I'm not sure the second bit - the XSF copyright statement change - needs to happen, in fact. Simply publishing a Submission is, I think, enough to make it copyrightable even if all the text in it isn't. Note two things: 1) I don't think uncopyrightable XEPs can exist from AI, at the very least for the foreseeable future. 2) Nevertheless, this covers cases such as the original author putting a spec in the public domain, and then submitting it (or someone else doing so). That's a much more practical and legally clear way to get into this situation. Legal advice should be sought on this, though, obviously. Dave.

On Thu, 14 May 2026 at 23:25, Matija Šuklje <matija(a)suklje.email> wrote: Thanks so much, this is amazingly useful.