[HN Gopher] Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation...
___________________________________________________________________
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the
erosion of copyleft
Author : dahlia
Score : 262 points
Date : 2026-03-09 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (writings.hongminhee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (writings.hongminhee.org)
| wccrawford wrote:
| "Antirez closes his careful legal analysis as though it settles
| the matter. Ronacher acknowledges that "there is an obvious moral
| question here, but that isn't necessarily what I'm interested
| in." Both pieces treat legal permissibility as a proxy for social
| legitimacy. "
|
| This whole article is just complaining that other people didn't
| have the discussion he wanted.
|
| Ronacher even acknowledged that it's a different discussion, and
| not one they were trying to have at the moment.
|
| If you want to have it, have it. Don't blast others for _not_
| having it for you.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Having this discussion _involves_ blasting others for not
| considering it. Consider the rest of the paragraph you quoted:
|
| > But law only says what conduct it will not prevent--it does
| not certify that conduct as right. Aggressive tax minimization
| that never crosses into illegality may still be widely regarded
| as antisocial. A pharmaceutical company that legally acquires a
| patent on a long-generic drug and raises the price a
| hundredfold has not done something legal and therefore fine.
| Legality is a necessary condition; it is not a sufficient one.
| amarant wrote:
| If the discussion inherently cannot be had without blasting
| innocent bystanders, I don't think it's a discussion worth
| having.
|
| It might even be morally abhorrent to have such a discussion
| in the first place!
| ordu wrote:
| I believe it is a narrow view of the situation. If we take a look
| into the history, into the reasons for inventing GPL, we'll see
| that it was an attempt to fight copyrights with copyrights. The
| very name 'copyleft' is trying to convey the idea.
|
| What AI are eroding is copyright. You can re-implement not just a
| GPL program, but to reverse engineer and re-implement a closed
| source program too, people have demonstrated it already, there
| were stories here on HN about it.
|
| AI is eroding copyright, so there may no longer be a need for the
| GPL. GNU should stop and rethink its stance, chuck away the GPL
| as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and embrace
| LLM as the main weapon.
| stebalien wrote:
| Copyleft is a mirror of copyright, not a way to fight
| copyright. It grants rights to the consumer where copyright
| grants rights to the creator. Importantly, it gives the end-
| user the right to modify the software running on their devices.
|
| Unfortunately, there are cases where you simply can't just "re-
| implement" something. E.g., because doing so requires access to
| restricted tools, keys, or proprietary specifications.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| > It grants rights to the consumer where copyright grants
| rights to the creator.
|
| It also grants one major right/feature to the creator, the
| ability to spread their work while keeping it as open as they
| intend.
| ordu wrote:
| These are words of Stallman:
|
| _" So, I looked for a way to stop that from happening. The
| method I came up with is called "copyleft." It's called
| copyleft because it's sort of like taking copyright and
| flipping it over. [Laughter] Legally, copyleft works based on
| copyright. We use the existing copyright law, but we use it
| to achieve a very different goal."_
|
| https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/
| sarchertech wrote:
| That's not a rebuttal of the OP's point. None of that says
| anything about fighting copyright. It literally says he
| flipped it which is wha the OP said when they said it's a
| mirror.
| dathinab wrote:
| > flipping it over.
|
| i.e. mirroring it
|
| > use it to achieve a very different goal."
|
| "very different goal" isn't the same as "fundamentally
| destroying copyright"
|
| the very different goal include to protect public code to
| stay public, be properly attributed, prevent companies from
| just "sizing" , motivate other to make their code public
| too etc.
|
| and even if his goals where not like that, it wouldn't make
| a difference as this is what many people try to archive
| with using such licenses
|
| this kind of AI usage is very much not in line with this
| goals,
|
| and in general way cheaper to do software cloning isn't
| sufficient to fix many of the issues the FOSS movement
| tried to fix, especially not when looking at the current
| ecosystem most people are interacting with (i.e. Phones)
|
| ---
|
| ("sizing"): As in the typical MS embrace, extend and
| extinguish strategy of first embracing the code then giving
| it proprietary but available extensions/changes/bug
| fixes/security patches to then make them no longer
| available if you don't pay them/play by their rules.
|
| ---
|
| Through in the end using AI as a "fancy complicated"
| photocopier for code is as much removing copyright as using
| a photocopier for code would. It doesn't matter if you use
| the photocopier blind folded and never looked at the thing
| you copied.
| sjunot wrote:
| > We use the existing copyright law, but we use it to
| achieve a very different goal.
|
| For the right goal, he should have called it "rightcopy".
| davidw wrote:
| > LLM as the main weapon
|
| LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures
| to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift
| in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of
| open source where you could do innovative work on your own
| computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS.
|
| I don't think that's an exciting idea for the Free Software
| Foundation.
|
| Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are
| 'good enough', but we're not there yet.
|
| There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have
| been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work
| and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega
| corporations.
|
| Edit: I guess the conclusion I come to is that LLM's are good
| for 'getting things done', but the context in which they are
| operating is one where the balance of power is heavily tilted
| towards capital, and open source is perhaps less interesting to
| participate in if the machines are just going to slurp it up
| and people don't have to respect the license or even
| acknowledge your work.
| ordu wrote:
| _> LLM 's - to date - seem to require massive capital
| expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a
| monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away
| from the world of open source_
|
| Yeah, a bit of a conundrum. But I don't think that fighting
| for copyright now can bring any benefits for FOSS. GNU should
| bring Stallman back and see whether he can come with any new
| ideas and a new strategy. Alternatively they could try
| without Stallman. But the point is: they should stop and
| think again. Maybe they will find a way forward, maybe they
| won't but it means that either they could continue their
| fight for a freedom meaningfully, or they could just stop
| fighting and find some other things to do. Both options are
| better then fighting for copyright.
|
| _> There 's also an ethical/moral question that these things
| have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer
| work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega
| corporations._
|
| I want a clarify this statement a bit. The thing with LLM
| relying on work of others are not against GPU philosophy as I
| understand it: algorithms have to be free. Nothing wrong with
| training LLMs on them or on programs implementing them.
| Nothing wrong with using these LLMs to write new (free)
| programs. What is wrong are corporations reaping all the
| benefits now and locking down new algorithms later.
|
| I think it is important, because copyright is deemed to be an
| ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a
| deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is
| ethical), but not for GNU.
| balamatom wrote:
| >Yeah, a bit of a conundrum.
|
| IMO the primary significant trend in AI. Doesn't get talked
| about nearly enough. Means the AI is working, I guess.
|
| >GNU should bring Stallman back ... Alternatively they
| could try without Stallman.
|
| Leave Britney alone >:(
|
| >copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I
| think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the
| law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical)
|
| I've busted out "intellectual property is a crime against
| humanity" at layfolk to see if that shortcuts through that
| entire little politico-philosophical minefield. They emote
| the requisite mild shock when such things as crimes against
| humanity are mentioned; as well as at someone making such a
| radical statement which seems to come from no familiar
| species of echo chamber; and then a moment later they begin
| to very much look like they see where I'm coming from.
| Serenacula wrote:
| How do you even argue such a thing? I've had no such
| luck, I've met many people who seem to view copyright and
| a person owning their ideas and work as a sort of
| inherent moral.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Not saying this gets through to people, but copyright is
| purely about the legal ability to restrict what other
| people do. Whereas property rights are about not allowing
| others to restrict what you do (e.g. by taking your
| stuff).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital
| expenditures to have the highest quality ones
|
| There are near-SOTA LLM's available under permissive
| licenses. Even running them doesn't require prohibitive
| expenses on hardware unless you insist on realtime use.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> running them doesn 't require prohibitive expenses on
| hardware_
|
| What async tasks could a local LLM accomplish on Intel 11th
| gen CPU with 32GB RAM?
| jacquesm wrote:
| > There's also an ethical/moral question that these things
| have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer
| work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega
| corporations.
|
| This was already the case and it just got worse, not better.
| davidw wrote:
| At a certain point, I think we had reached a kind of
| equilibrium where some corporations were decent open source
| citizens. They understood that they could open source
| things like infrastructure or libraries and keep their
| 'crown jewels' closed. And while Stallman types might not
| have been happy with that, it seemed to work out for
| people.
|
| Now they've just hoovered up all the free stuff into
| machines that can mix it up enough to spit it out in a way
| that doesn't even require attribution, and you have to pay
| to use their machine.
| jacquesm wrote:
| AI essentially gatekeeps all of open source to companies
| to pluck from to their hearts content. And individual
| contributors using these tools and freely mixing it with
| their own - usual minor - contributions are another step
| of whitewashing because they're definitely not going to
| own up to writing only 5% of the stuff they got paid for.
|
| Before we had RedHat and Ubuntu, who at least were
| contributing back, now we have Microsoft, Anthropic and
| OpenAI who are racing to lock the barn door around their
| new captive sheep. It's just a massive IP laundromat.
| thenewnewguy wrote:
| Is massive capital expenditure not also required to enforce
| the GPL? If some company steals your GPLed code and doesn't
| follow the license, you will have to sue them and somebody
| will have to pay the lawyers.
| davidw wrote:
| > Is massive capital expenditure not also required to
| enforce the GPL?
|
| It's nowhere near the order of magnitude of the kind of
| spending they're sinking into LLM's. The FSF and other
| groups were reasonably successful at enforcing the GPL,
| operating on a budget 1000's of times smaller than that of
| AI companies.
| cloverich wrote:
| Right but LLM companies are building frontier models with
| frontier talent while trying to sock up demand with a
| loss leader strategy, on top of an historic
| infrastructure build out.
|
| Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i
| think, not a high priced endeavor for an org (compared to
| an individual).
|
| IMO the proposition is little fishy, but its not totally
| without merit and imo deserves investigation. If we are
| all worried about our jobs, even via building custom for
| sale software, there is likely something there that may
| obviate the need at least for end user applications.
| Again, im deeply skeptical, but it is interesting.
| overfeed wrote:
| > Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i
| think, not a high priced endeavor for an org
|
| Running proprietary model would make you subject to
| whatever ToS the LLM companies choose on a particular
| day, and what you can produce with them, which circles
| back to the raison d'etre for the GPL and GNU.
|
| Until all software copyright is dead and buried, there is
| no need for copyleft to change tack. Otherwise there
| rising tide may rise high enough to drown GPL, but not
| proprietary software.
|
| Open source is easier to counterfeit/license-launder/re-
| implement using LLMs because source code is much lower-
| hanging fruit, and is understood by more people than
| closed-source assembly.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Maybe a good open source idea is to "seti at home" style
| crowd-source training, assuming that's possible.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| How close are we to good enough and who's working on that? I
| would be interested in supporting that work; to my mind, many
| of the real objections to LLMs are diminished if we can make
| them small and cheap enough to run in the home (and, perhaps,
| trained with distributed shared resources, although the
| training problem is the harder one).
| davidw wrote:
| Good question. It seems like most of the tech world is
| perfectly happy to be sharecroppers on the Big AI farms. I
| guess that's not quite the right analogy, since they're
| doing their own things with it; just that at the end of the
| day, the tool they're building everything on is owned by
| someone else.
| tmp10423288442 wrote:
| > LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital
| expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a
| monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away
| from the world of open source where you could do innovative
| work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some
| other open OS.
|
| When the FSF and GPL were created, I don't think this was
| really a consideration. They were perfectly happy with
| requiring Big Iron Unix or an esoteric Lisp Machine to use
| the software - they just wanted to have the ability to
| customize and distribute fixes and enhancements to it.
| Aozora7 wrote:
| >Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are
| 'good enough', but we're not there yet.
|
| Right now, we can get local models that you can run on
| consumer hardware, that match capabilities of state of the
| art models from two years ago. The improvements to model
| architecture may or may not maintain the same pace in the
| future, but we will get a local equivalent to Opus 4.6 or
| whatever other benchmark of "good enough" you have, in the
| foreseeable future.
| cubefox wrote:
| That's naive. Copyright doesn't just apply to software. There
| already have been countless lawsuits about copying music long
| before the term "open source" was invented. No, changing the
| lyrics a bit doesn't circumvent copyright. Nor does translating
| a Stephen King novel to German and switching the names of the
| places and characters.
|
| A court ordered the first Nosferatu movie to be destroyed
| because it had too many similarities to Dracula. Despite the
| fact that the movie makes rather large deviations from the
| original.
|
| If Claude was indeed asked to reimplement the existing
| codebase, just in Rust and a bit optimized, that could well be
| a copyright violation. Just like rephrasing _A Song ot Ice and
| Fire_ a bit, and switching to a different language, doesn 't
| remove its copyright.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Claude was asked to implement a public API, not an entire
| codebase. The definition of a public API is largely
| functional; even in an unusually complex case like the Java
| standard facilities (which are unusually creative even in the
| structure and organization of the API itself) the
| reimplementation by Google was found to be fair use.
| cubefox wrote:
| > Claude was asked to implement a public API, not an entire
| codebase.
|
| Allegedly. There have been several people who doubted this
| story. So how to find out who is right? Well, just let
| Claude compare the sources. Coincidentally, Claude Opus 4.6
| doesn't just score 75.6% on SWE-bench Verified but also
| 90.2% on BigLaw Bench.
|
| It's like our copyright lawyer is conveniently also a
| developer. And possibly identical to the AI that carried
| out the rewrite/reimplemention in question in the first
| place.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > Just like rephrasing A Song ot Ice and Fire a bit, and
| switching to a different language, doesn't remove its
| copyright.
|
| There is some precedent for this, e.g. _Alchemised_ is a
| recent best seller that had just enough changed from its
| Harry Potter fan fiction source in order to avoid copyright
| infringement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemised
|
| (I avoided the term "remove copyright" here because the new
| work is still under copyright, just not Harry Potter -
| related copyright.)
| cubefox wrote:
| That's apparently a different story with different plot, so
| that's not comparable.
| webstrand wrote:
| Its purpose "if you run the software you should be able to
| inspect and modify that software, and to share those
| modifications with your peers" not explicitly resist copyright.
| Yes copyright is bad in that it often prevents one from doing
| that, but it is not the purpose of the GPL to dismantle
| copyright.
|
| Reducing it to "well you can clone the proprietary software
| you're forced to use by LLM" is really missing the soul of the
| GPL.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| If not for copyright, you could always do that and copyleft
| wouldn't be needed.
| webstrand wrote:
| Just because something is copyleft doesn't mean the person
| who gave you the binary you're using has to supply you with
| the code the used to build it. That's what the GPL does.
| dathinab wrote:
| > we'll see that it was an attempt to fight copyrights with
| copyrights
|
| it's not that simple
|
| yes, GPLs origins have the idea of "everyone should be able to
| use"
|
| but it also is about attribution the original author
|
| and making sure people can't just de-facto "size public goods"
|
| the kind of AI usage is removing attribution and is often
| sizing public goods in a way far worse then most companies
| which just ignored the license did
|
| so today there is more need then ever in the last few decades
| for GPL like licenses
| amiga386 wrote:
| You've said "size" twice in comments, did you mean "seize"?
| johnofthesea wrote:
| > AI is eroding copyright, so there may no longer be a need for
| the GPL. GNU should stop and rethink its stance, chuck away the
| GPL as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and
| embrace LLM as the main weapon.
|
| Is this LLM thing freely available or is it owned and
| controlled by these companies? Are we going to rent the tools
| to fight "evil software corporations"?
| cozzyd wrote:
| easy, we ask Claude to write an open-source freely-available
| version of Claude with equal or better capabilities.
| josephg wrote:
| Open models do exist. They're nowhere near aa good as
| frontier models, but they're getting better all the time.
|
| It's probably only a matter of time before open models are as
| good as Claude code is today.
| Aozora7 wrote:
| With the release of GLM-5, I would say that they are pretty
| much almost as good. Basically 90% as good as Opus 4.6 on
| most tasks for 20% of inference cost, and open weights.
| Aozora7 wrote:
| There already are LLMs with open weights that are better at
| code than state of the art closed source models from a year
| ago. For now, you most people may have to rent the hardware
| to run those models, since it's too expensive for most people
| to own something that can run inference on one trillion
| parameters, but I wouldn't consider LLMs to be controlled by
| "evil software corporations" at this point.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| While I personally agree with you, Richard Stallman (the
| creator of the GPL) does not. He has always advocated in favor
| of strong copyright protection, because the foundation of the
| GPL is the monopoly power granted by copyright. The problem
| that the GPL is intended to solve is _proprietary software_.
|
| Generative models (AI) are not really eroding copyright. They
| are calling its bluff. The very notion of intellectual property
| depends on a property line: some arbitrary boundary where the
| property begins and ends. Generative models blur that line,
| making it impractical to distinguish which property belongs to
| whom.
|
| Ironically, these models are made by giant monopolistic
| corporations whose wealth is quite literally a market valuation
| (stock price) of their copyrights! If generative models ever
| become good enough to reimplement CUDA, what value will NVIDIA
| have left?
|
| The reality is that generative models are nowhere near good
| enough to actually call the bluff. Copyright is still the
| winning hand, and that is likely to continue, particularly
| while IP holders are the primary authors of law.
|
| ---
|
| This whole situation is missing the forest for the trees.
| Intellectual Property is _bullshit_. A system predicated on
| monopoly power can only result in consolidated wealth driving
| the consolidation of power; which is precisely what has
| happened. The words "starving artist" ring every bit as
| familiar today as any time in history. Copyright has utterly
| failed the very goals it was explicitly written with.
|
| It isn't the GPL that needs changing. So long as a system of
| copyright rules the land, copyleft is the best way to
| participate. What we really need is a cohesive political
| movement against monopoly power; one that _isn 't_ conveniently
| ignorant of copyright as its most significant source.
| pennomi wrote:
| Right, anything that can be copied instantly for free cannot
| be realistically owned.
| re-thc wrote:
| > What AI are eroding is copyright.
|
| At the moment it's people that are eroding copyright. E.g. in
| this case someone did something.
|
| "AI" didn't have a brain, woke up and suddenly decided to do
| it.
|
| Realistically nothing to do with AI. Having a gun doesn't mean
| you randomly shoot.
| xantronix wrote:
| So not only are we moving goalposts here, but we've decided the
| GNU team should join the other team? I don't understand how GNU
| would see mass model LLM training as anything but the most
| flagrant violations of their ethos. LLM labs, in their view,
| would be among the most evil software corporations to have ever
| existed.
| Peritract wrote:
| > chuck away the GPL as the main tool to fight evil software
| corporations and embrace LLM as the main weapon.
|
| LLMs are one of the primary manifestations of 'evil software
| corporations' currently.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > AI is eroding copyright
|
| Unless it is IP of the same big corpos that consumed all
| content available. Good luck with eroding them.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I agree with almost all of that, except the part about GNU
| changing their stance. I think GNU should stay true and
| consistent, if for no other reason than to not make many of
| their supporters who aren't on board with AI feel betrayed and
| have GNUs legacy soured. If the cause of LLMs conquering
| proprietary software needs an organization to champion it, let
| that be a new organization, not GNU.
| martin-t wrote:
| This is naive. Advertisement and network effects win.
| Individuals cannot compete with corporations on equal ground
| here.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing
| source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to
| Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch
|
| This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at
| that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey
| Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was
| created without the use of my knowledge of Micky Mouse"
|
| Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been
| its maintainer for years. The premise is that he prompted Claude
| to reimplement it, without using his own knowledge of it to
| direct or steer.
| re-thc wrote:
| > This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at
| that canvas on the wall and
|
| > He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it
|
| Difference being Claude looked; so not blind. The equivalent is
| more like I blindly took a photo of it and then used that to...
|
| Technically did look.
| amarant wrote:
| The article is poorly written. Blanchard was a chardet
| maintainer for years. Of course _he_ had looked at it 's
| code!
|
| What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude
| _didn 't_ look at the code, only the API and the test suite.
| The new implementation is all Claude. And the implementation
| is different enough to be considered original, completely
| different structure, design, and hey, a 48x improvement in
| performance! It's just API-compatible with the original.
| Which as per the Google Vs oracle 2021 decision is to be
| considered fair use.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| did he claim that Claude wasn't trained on the original? Or
| just that he didn't personally provide Claude with a copy?
| amarant wrote:
| I recon the latter, how would he know what was in
| Claude's training data?
| re-thc wrote:
| > What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that
| Claude didn't look at the code
|
| Who opened the PR? Who co-authored the commits? It's
| clearly on Github.
|
| > Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course
| he had looked at its code!
|
| So there you have it. If he looked, he co-authored then
| there's that.
| kjksf wrote:
| If I put my signature on Picasso painting, it doesn't
| make me co-author of said painting.
|
| Blanchard is very clear that he didn't write a single
| line of code. He isn't an author, he isn't a co-author.
|
| Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that.
| re-thc wrote:
| > Blanchard is very clear that he didn't write a single
| line of code
|
| He used Claude to write it. Difference? The fact that I
| write on the notepad vs printed it out = I didn't do it?
|
| > Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that.
|
| That's the equivalent of me saying I didn't kill anyone.
| The fingerprints on the knife doesn't change that.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I'll take a commit authored by someone else and then git
| amend the author to myself, did I write that commit then?
| By your logic I did apparently.
| dathinab wrote:
| > Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's
| been its maintainer for years.
|
| I would argue it's irrelevant if they looked or didn't look at
| the code. As well as weather he was or wasn't familiar with it.
|
| What matters is, that they feed to original code into a tool
| which they setup to make a copy of it. How that tool works
| doesn't really matter. Neither does it make a difference if you
| obfuscate that it's an copy.
|
| If I blindfold myself when making copies of books with a book
| scanner + printer I'm still engaging in copyright infringement.
|
| If AI is a tool, that should hold.
|
| If it isn't "just" a tool, then it did engage in copyright
| infringement (as it created the new output side by side with
| the original) in the same way an employee might do so on
| command of their boss. Which still makes the boss/company
| liable for copyright infringement and in general just because
| you weren't the one who created an infringing product doesn't
| mean you aren't more or less as liable of distributing it, as
| if you had done so.
| spullara wrote:
| if the actual text of the code isn't the same or obviously
| derivative, copyright doesn't apply at all.
| sigseg1v wrote:
| What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that
| the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM
| and it was trained on the existing work, that's a
| derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so
| you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to
| rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.
| nicole_express wrote:
| Of course, the problem with this interpretation is that
| all modern LLMs are derivatives from huge amounts of text
| under completely different licenses, including "All
| rights reserved", and therefore can not be used for any
| purpose.
|
| I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright
| to use the LLM to write code, unless the code is a
| rewrite of an open source project to change its license".
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Of course, the problem with this interpretation is that
| all modern LLMs are derivatives from huge amounts of text
| under completely different licenses, including "All
| rights reserved", and therefore can not be used for any
| purpose.
|
| > I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright
| to use the LLM to write code
|
| You seem like you're on the cusp of stating the obvious
| correct conclusion: it isn't.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| See also: https://monolith.sourceforge.net/, which seeks
| to ask the question:
|
| > But how far away from direct and explicit
| representations do we have to go before copyright no
| longer applies?
| ghostpepper wrote:
| As a cynical person I assume all the frontier LLMs were
| trained on datasets that include every open source
| project, but as a thought experiment, if an LLM was
| trained on a dataset that included every open source
| project _execept_ chardet, do you think said LLM would
| still be able to easily implement something very similar?
| spullara wrote:
| There is no doubt in my mind that it could still do it.
| spullara wrote:
| In order for it to be creatively derivative you would
| need to copy the structure, logic, organization, and
| sequence of operations not just reimplement the
| functionality. It is pretty clear in this case that
| wasn't done.
| cubefox wrote:
| It's not clear at all.
| bmcahren wrote:
| LLMs do not encode nor encrypt their training data. The
| fact they can recite training data is a defect not a
| default. You can understand this more simply by
| calculating the model size as an inverse of a fantasy
| compression algorithm that is 50% better than SOTA.
| You'll find you'd still be missing 80-90% of the training
| data even if it were as much of a stochastic parrot as
| you may be implying. The outputs of AI are not derivative
| just because they saw training data including the
| original library.
|
| Then onto prompting: 'He fed only the API and (his) test
| suite to Claude'
|
| This is Google v Oracle all over again - are APIs
| copyrightable?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _This is Google v Oracle all over again - are APIs
| copyrightable?_
|
| Yes this is the best way to ask the question. If I take a
| public facing API and reimplement everything, whether
| it's by human or machine, it should be sufficient. After
| all, that's what Google did, and it's not like their
| engineers never read a single line of the Java source
| code. Even in "clean room" implementations, a human might
| still have remembered or recalled a previous
| implementation of some function they had encountered
| before.
| thunderfork wrote:
| I find the "compression" argument not very strong, both
| because copyright still applies to (very) lossy codecs
| (e.g. your 16kbps Opus file of Thriller infringes, even
| if the original 192khz/32bit wav file was 12,000kbps),
| and because copyright still applies to transformed
| derivative works (a tiny midi file of Thriller might
| still be enough for the Jackson's label to get you)
| azakai wrote:
| > LLMs do not encode nor encrypt their training data. The
| fact they can recite training data is a defect not a
| default.
|
| About this specific point, it is unclear how much of a
| defect memorization actually is - there are also reasons
| to see it as necessary for effective learning. This link
| explains it well:
|
| https://infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorization-vs-
| gener...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _Because IMO it means that the existing work was used
| as input_
|
| That's your opinion (since you said "IMO"), not the
| actual legal definition.
| NSUserDefaults wrote:
| If you pirate a movie and reencode it, does that apply as
| well? You can still watch the movie and it is "obviously"
| the same movie, even though the bytes are completely
| different. Here you can use the program and it is, to the
| user, also the same.
| yorwba wrote:
| Copyright protects even very abstract aspects of human
| creative expression, not just the specific form in which it
| is originally expressed. If you translate a book into
| another language, or turn it into a silent movie, none of
| the actual text may survive, but the story itself remains
| covered by the original copyright.
|
| So when you clone the behavior of a program like chardet
| without referencing the original source code except by
| executing it to make sure your clone produces exactly the
| same output, you may still be infringing its copyright if
| that output reflects creative choices made in the design of
| chardet that aren't fully determined by the functional
| purpose of the program.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > If it isn't "just" a tool, then it did engage in copyright
| infringement
|
| Copyright infringement is a thing humans do. It's not a
| human.
|
| Just like how the photos taken by a monkey with a camera have
| no copyright. Human law binds humans.
| malicka wrote:
| Correct. The human who shares the copy is the one who
| engages in copyright infringement.
| margalabargala wrote:
| So, let's say that rather than actually touching any
| copyrighted material, a human merely tells an AI about
| how to go onto the internet and find copyrighted
| material, download it, and ingest it for training. The
| AI, fully autonomously, does so, and after training
| itself on the material deletes it so no human ever
| downloads, consumes, or shares it.
|
| If we are saying AI is "more than a tool", which seems to
| be the case courts are leaning since they've ruled AI
| output without direct human involvement is not
| copyrightable[0], then the above seems like it would be
| entirely legal.
|
| [0] https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html
| Ekaros wrote:
| Someone would likely get prosecuted if they instructed AI
| agent to run say a pump and dump scheme...
|
| Even if the final output doesn't have copyright
| protection it might still be copyright violation. I think
| it could be reasonable to have work that itself violates
| copyright when distributed even if it does not have copy
| right itself.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| >that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup
| to make a copy of it
|
| Well, no. They fed the spec (test cases, etc) into a tool
| which made a new program matching the spec. This is not a
| copy of the original code.
|
| But also this feels like arguing over the color of the
| iceberg while the titanic sinks. If you have a tool that can
| make code to spec, what is the value in source code anymore?
| Even if your app is closed-source, you can just tell claude
| to write new code that does the same thing.
| timeinput wrote:
| Blanchard fed the spec to the tool, and Anthropic fed the
| code to the tool, so Blanchard didn't do anything wrong,
| and Anthropic didn't do anything wrong. Nothing to see
| here.
| foresto wrote:
| > Blanchard fed the spec to the tool,
|
| Yes...
|
| > and Anthropic fed the code to the tool,
|
| Presumably, as part of the massive amount of open-source
| code that must have been fed in to train their model.
|
| > so Blanchard didn't do anything wrong, and Anthropic
| didn't do anything wrong. Nothing to see here.
|
| This is meant as irony, right?
| vbarrielle wrote:
| Everyone writes as if he just fed the spec and tests to
| Claude Code. Ignoring for now that the tests are under LGPL
| as well, the commit history shows that this has been done
| with two weeks of steering Claude Code towards the desired
| output. At every one of these interactions, the maintainer
| used his deep knowledge of the chardet codebase to steer
| Claude.
| logicprog wrote:
| I just don't see how it's relevant whether he did look or
| didn't. In my opinion, it's not just legally valid to make a
| re-implementation of something if you've seen the code as long
| as it doesn't copy expressive elements. I think it's also
| ethically fine as well to use source code as a reference for
| re-implementing something as long as it doesn't turn into an
| exact translation.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Ignoring the legal or ethical concerns. Let's say we live in
| a world where the cost of copying code is so close to zero
| that it's indistinguishable from a world without copyright.
|
| Anything you put out can and will be used by whatever giant
| company wants to use it with no attribution whatsoever.
|
| Doesn't that massively reduce the incentive to release the
| source of anything ever?
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Yes, and it reduces the incentives to release binaries too.
| Such a world will be populated by almost entirely SaaS,
| which can still compete on freedom.
| intrasight wrote:
| Most commercial software that I've used has the model of a
| legal moat around a pretty crappy database schema.
|
| The non IP protection has largely been in the effort
| involved in replicating an application's behavior and that
| effort is dropping precipitously.
| sarchertech wrote:
| You must not have used much commercial software outside
| of crappy business SaaS.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| No, because (most) people don't work on OSS for vanity,
| they do it to help other people, whether it's individuals
| or groups of individuals, ie corporations.
|
| It's the same question as, if an AI can generate "art", or
| photographers can capture a scene better than any
| (realistic) painter, then will people still create art?
| Obviously yes, and we see it of course after Stable
| Diffusion was released three years ago, people are still
| creating.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I don't know what a world without copyright does to
| corporate sponsored open source. It certainly reduces it
| because there are many corporate sponsored projects that
| monetize through dual licensing. My guess is in a world
| where you can't even guarantee attribution, it's much
| harder to convince your boss to let you open source a
| project in the first place.
|
| So ignoring people who are being paid by corporations
| directly to work on open source, in my experience the
| vast majority of contributors expect to be able to
| monetize their work eventually in a way that requires
| attribution. And out of the small number who don't expect
| a monetary return of any kind, a still smaller number
| don't expect recognition.
|
| If this weren't the case you'd see a much larger amount
| of anonymous contributions. There are people who
| anonymously donate to charity. The vast majority want
| some kind of recognition.
|
| Obviously we still see art, if you greatly reduce the
| monetary benefit to producing art, you'll see a lot less
| of it. This is especially true of non trivial open source
| software that unlike static artwork requires continual
| maintenance.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| It's actually not legally fine, or at least it's extremely
| dangerous. Projects that re-implement APIs presented by
| extremely litigious companies specifically do not allow
| people who, for instance, have seen the proprietary source
| code to then work on the project.
| jpc0 wrote:
| I don't think fear or legal action makes it illegal.
|
| If I know it is legal to make a turn at a red light. And I
| know a court will uphold that I was in the right but a
| police officer will fine me regardless and I would need to
| go to actually pursue some legal remedy I'm unlikely to do
| it regardless of whether it is legal because it is
| expensive, if not in money but time.
|
| In the case of copyright lawsuits they are notoriously
| expensive and long so even if a court would eventually deem
| it fine, why take the chance.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| That's my point. It's dangerous and there are sharks in
| the water. That sounds like you're not going to have a
| good time if you do the described approach to someone who
| might assert you're infringing.
| sunshowers wrote:
| My understanding is that that is a maximalist position for
| the avoidance of risk, and is sufficient but probably not
| necessary.
| simonw wrote:
| Right. The alternative is that we reward Dan for his 14 years
| of volunteer maintenance of a project... by banning him from
| working on anything similar under a different license for the
| rest of his life.
| esafak wrote:
| If you only stick to the API and ignore the implementation, it
| is not Mickey Mouse any more but a rodent. If it was just a
| clone it wouldn't be 50x as fast. Nevertheless, APIs apparently
| can be copyrightable. I generally disagree with this; it's how
| PC compatibles took off, giving consumers better options.
| amarant wrote:
| Wait what, didn't oracle lose the case against Google? Have I
| been living in an alternate reality where API compatibility
| is fair use?
| Aurornis wrote:
| Can anyone find the actual quote where Blanchard said this?
|
| My understanding was that his claim was that _Claude_ was not
| looking at the existing source code while writing it.
| pklausler wrote:
| Conveniently ignoring the likelihood that Claude had been
| trained on the freely accessible source code.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| Does he have access to Claude's training data? How can he
| claim Claude wasn't trained on the original code?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Isn't this a red herring? An API definition is fair use under
| Google v. Oracle, but the test suite is definitely
| copyrightable code!
| babypuncher wrote:
| What if we said that generative AI output is simply not
| copyrightable. Anything an AI spits out would automatically be
| public domain, except in cases where the output directly
| infringes the rights of an existing work.
|
| This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is
| essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the
| work to be truly public domain.
|
| I think this also helps somewhat with the ethical quandary of
| these models being trained on public data while contributing
| nothing of value back to the public, and disincentivize the
| production of slop for profit.
| kjksf wrote:
| We did in fact say so.
|
| https://www.carltonfields.com/insights/publications/2025/no-.
| ..
|
| > No Copyright Protection for AI-Assisted Creations: Thaler
| v. Perlmutter
|
| > A recent key judicial development on this topic occurred
| when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of
| Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2, 2026, effectively upholding
| lower court rulings that AI-generated works lacking human
| authorship are not eligible for copyright protection under
| U.S. law
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > > A recent key judicial development on this topic
| occurred when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the
| case of Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2, 2026, effectively
| upholding lower court rulings that AI-generated works
| lacking human authorship are not eligible for copyright
| protection under U.S. law
|
| This was AI summary? Those words were not in the article.
|
| The courts said Thaler could not have copyright because he
| refused to list himself as an author.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is
| essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the
| work to be truly public domain.
|
| That's not true at all. Anyone could follow these steps:
|
| 1. Have the LLM rewrite GPL code.
|
| 2. Do _not_ publish that public domain code. You have no
| obligation to.
|
| 3. Make a few tweaks to that code.
|
| 4. Publish a compiled binary/use your code to host a service
| under a proprietary license of your choice.
| axus wrote:
| Oracle had it's day in court with Google over the Java APIs.
| Reimplementing APIs can be done without copyright infringement,
| but Oracle must have tried to find real infringement during
| discovery.
|
| In this case, we could theoretically prove that the new chardet
| is a clean reimplementation. Blanchard can provide all of the
| prompts necessary to re-implement again, and for the cost of
| the tokens anyone can reproduce the results.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| >This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at
| that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey
| Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was
| created without the use of my knowledge of Micky Mouse"
|
| IANAL, but that analogy wouldn't work because Mickey Mouse is a
| trademark, so it doesn't matter how it is created.
| throwaway2027 wrote:
| I think we're going one step too far even, AI itself is a gray
| area and how can they guarantee it was trained legally or if it's
| even legal what they're doing and how can they assert that the
| input training data didn't contain any copyrighted data.
| observationist wrote:
| Google already spent billions of dollars and decades of lawyer
| hours proving it out as fair use. The legal challenges we see
| now are the dying convulsions of an already broken system of
| publishers and IP hoarders using every resource at their
| disposal to manipulate authors and creators and the public into
| thinking that there's any legitimacy or value underlying modern
| copyright law.
|
| AI will destroy the current paradigm, completely and utterly,
| and there's nothing they can do to stop it. It's unclear if
| they can even slow it, and that's a good thing.
|
| We will be forced to legislate a modern, digital oriented
| copyright system that's fair and compatible with AI. If
| producing any software becomes a matter of asking a machine to
| produce it - if things like AI native operating systems come
| about, where apps and media are generated on demand, with
| protocols as backbone, and each device is just generating its
| own scaffolding around the protocols - then nearly none of
| modern licensing, copyright, software patents, or IP
| conventions make any sense whatsoever.
|
| You can't have horse and buggy traffic conventions for
| airplanes. We're moving in to a whole new paradigm, and maybe
| we can get legislation that actually benefits society and
| individuals, instead of propping up massive corporations and
| making lawyers rich.
| casey2 wrote:
| Google has cut out some very specific ruling that have
| nothing to do with modern AI. These systems are just a really
| slow/lossy git clone, current law has no trouble with it,
| it's broadly illegal.
|
| If corporations are allowed to launder someone else work as
| their own people will simply stop working and just start
| endlessly remixing a la popular music.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| shall we now have to think about the tradeoffs in adopting
|
| - proprietary
|
| - free
|
| - slop-licensed
|
| software?
| megous wrote:
| We should just use LLMs to free more software and HW. Make it
| work against the system.
| mfabbri77 wrote:
| What if someone doesn't declare that it has been reimplemented
| using an LLM? Isn't it enough to simply declare that you have
| reimplemented the software without using an LLM? Good luck
| proving that in court...
|
| One thing is certain, however: copyleft licenses will disappear:
| If I can't control the redistribution of my code (through a GPL
| or similar license), I choose to develop it in closed source.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Arguably, the GPL has always been the wrong choice if you want
| to authoritatively control redistribution.
| dwroberts wrote:
| One of the things that irks me about this whole thing is, if it's
| so clean room and distinct, why make the changes to the existing
| project? Why not make an entirely new library?
|
| The answer to that, I think, is that the authors wanted to squat
| an existing successful project and gain a platform from it. Hence
| we have news cycle discussing it.
|
| Nobody cares about a new library using AI, but squash an existing
| one with this stuff, and you get attention. It's the reputation,
| the GitHub stars, whatever
| nicole_express wrote:
| I mean, Blanchard was the longtime maintainer of chardet
| already, and had wanted to relicense it for years. So I think
| that complicates your picture of "squatting an existing
| successful project".
|
| Honestly it's a weird test case for this sort of thing. I don't
| think you'd see an equivalent in most open source projects.
| intrasight wrote:
| I agree. But you can't copyright goodwill and reputation.
| Trademark does provide some protection there, right?
| delichon wrote:
| Imagine if the author has his way, and when we have AI write
| software, it becomes legally under the license of some other
| sufficiently similar piece of software. Which may or may not be
| proprietary. "I see you have generated a todo app very similar to
| Todoist. So they now own it." That does not seem like a good path
| either for open source software or for opening up the benefits of
| AI generated software.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Perhaps we should finally admit that copyright has always been
| nonsense, and abolish this ridiculous measure once and for all
| vladms wrote:
| Probably a wiser approach is to consider different times
| require different measures (in general!).
|
| I did not study in detail if copyright "has always been
| nonsense", but I do agree that nowadays some of the copyright
| regulations are nonsense (for example the very long duration of
| life + 70 years)
| intrasight wrote:
| I think AI is very much eroding the legitimacy of copyright -
| at least to software, which is long been questioned since it's
| more like math than creative expression.
|
| I think the industry will realize that it made a huge mistake
| by leaning on copyright for protection rather than on patents.
| joshmoody24 wrote:
| IMO the core idea of copyright isn't nonsense, but I do think
| the current implementation (70+ years after death) is
| egregiously overpowered. I've always thought the current laws
| were too deeply entrenched to ever change, but I'm tentatively
| optimistic AI will shock the system hard enough to trigger
| actual reform.
| mbgerring wrote:
| Actually I think the last 20 years of the Internet demonstrates
| that copyright is more important than ever, because unless it's
| enforced, people with more capital than the copyright owner
| will simply steal creative works and profit from them.
|
| The idea that "information wants to be free" was always a lie,
| meant to transfer value from creators to platform owners. The
| result of that has been disastrous, and it's long past time to
| push the pendulum in the other direction.
| logicprog wrote:
| > Ronacher notes this as an irony and moves on. But the irony
| cuts deeper than he lets on. Next.js is MIT licensed.
| Cloudflare's vinext did not violate any license--it did exactly
| what Ronacher calls a contribution to the culture of openness,
| applied to a permissively licensed codebase. Vercel's reaction
| had nothing to do with license infringement; it was purely
| competitive and territorial. The implicit position is:
| reimplementing GPL software as MIT is a victory for sharing, but
| having our own MIT software reimplemented by a competitor is
| cause for outrage. This is what the claim that permissive
| licensing is "more share-friendly" than copyleft looks like in
| practice. The spirit of sharing, it turns out, runs in one
| direction only: outward from oneself.
|
| This argument makes no sense. Are they arguing that because
| Vercel, specifically, had this attitude, this is an attitude
| necessitated by AI, reimplementation, and those who are in favor
| of it towards more permissive licenses? That certainly doesn't
| seem to be an accurate way to summarize what antirez or Ronacher
| believe. In fact, under the legal and ethical frameworks
| (respectively) that those two put forward, Vercel has no right to
| claim that position and no way to enforce it, so it seems very
| strange to me to even assert that this sort of thing would be the
| _practical_ result of AI reimplementations. This seems to just be
| pointing towards the hypocrisy of one particular company, and
| assuming that this would be the inevitable universal, attitude,
| and result when there 's no evidence to think so.
|
| It's ironic, because antirez actually literally addresses this
| specific argument. They completely miss the fact that a lot of
| his blog post is not actually just about legal but also about
| ethical matters. Specifically, the idea he puts forward is that
| yes, corporations can do these kinds of rewrites now, but they
| always had the resources and manpower to do so anyway. What's
| different now is that individuals can do this kind of rewrites
| when they never have the ability to do so before, and the vector
| of such a rewrite can be from a permissive to copyleft or even
| from decompile the proprietary to permissive or copyleft. The
| fact that it hasn't been so far is a more a factor of the fact
| that most people really hate copyleft and find an annoying and
| it's been losing traction and developer mind share for decades,
| not that this tactic can't be used that way. I think that's
| actually one of the big points he's trying to make with his GNU
| comparison -- not just that if it was legal for GNU to do it,
| then it's legal for you to do with AI, and not even just the
| fundamental libertarian ethical axiom (that I agree with for the
| most part) that it should remain legal to do such a rewrite in
| either direction because in terms of the fundamental axioms that
| we enforce with violence in our society, there should be a level
| playing field where we look at the action itself and not just
| whether we like or dislike the consequences, but specifically the
| fact that if GNU did it once with the ability to rewrite things,
| it can be done again, even in the same direction, it now even
| more easily using AI.
| antirez wrote:
| > They completely miss the fact that a lot of his blog post is
| not actually just about legal but also about ethical matters.
|
| Honestly I was confused about the summarization of my blog post
| into just a legal matter as well. I hope my blog post will be
| able to flash at least a short time in the HN front page so
| that the actual arguments it contain will get a bit more
| exposure.
| Talanes wrote:
| I'm failing to see what in the quoted text you took to be about
| AI rewrites specifically? It just reads as a slightly catty
| aside about the social reaction of rewrites in general (by
| implying the one example is generalizable.)
| throwaway2027 wrote:
| Perhaps software patents may play an even bigger role in the
| future.
| intrasight wrote:
| Or, hopefully, even less of a role.
| drnick1 wrote:
| It should be noted that the Rust community is also guilty of
| something similar. That is, porting old GPL programs, typically
| written in C, to Rust and relicensing them as MIT.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > porting old GPL programs, typically written in C, to Rust and
| relicensing them as MIT
|
| Everything for memory safety.
| nicole_express wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but my understanding is: In theory, copyright only
| protects the creative expression of source code; this is the
| point of the "clean room" dance, that you're keeping only the
| functional behavior (not protected by copyright). Patents are, of
| course, an entirely different can of worms. So using an LLM to
| strip all of the "creative expression" out of source code but
| create the same functionality feels like it could be equivalent
| enough.
|
| I like the article's point of legal vs. legitimate here, though;
| copyright is actually something of a strange animal to use to
| protect source code, it was just the most convenient pre-existing
| framework to shove it in.
| dathinab wrote:
| > this is the point of the "clean room" dance
|
| which is the actual relevant part: they didn't do that dance
| AFIK
|
| AI is a tool, they set it up to make a non-verbatim copy of a
| program.
|
| Then they feed it the original software (AFIK).
|
| Which makes it a side by side copy, as in the original source
| was used as reference to create the new program. Which tend to
| be seen as derived work even if very different.
|
| IMHO They would have to:
|
| 1. create a specification of the software _without looking at
| the source code_, i.e. by behavior observation (and an
| interface description). I.e. you give the AI access to running
| the program, but not to looking into the insides of it. I
| really don't think they did it as even with AI it's a huge pain
| as you normally can't just brute force all combinations of
| inputs and instead need to have a scientific
| model=>test=>refine loop (which AI can do, but can take long
| and get stuck, so you want it human assisted, and the human
| can't have inside knowledge about the program).
|
| 2. then generate a new program from specification, And only
| from it. No git history, no original source code access, no
| program access, no shared AI state or anything like that.
|
| Also for the extra mile of legal risk avoidance do both human
| assisted and use unrelated 3rd parties without inside knowledge
| for both steps.
|
| While this does majorly cut cost of a clean room approach, it
| still isn't cost free. And still is a legal mine field if done
| by a single person, especially if they have enough familiarity
| to potentially remember specific peaces of code verbatim.
| nicole_express wrote:
| Well sure they didn't do the dance, but you don't have to do
| the dance. The reason to do it is that it's a good defense in
| a lawsuit. Like you say, all of this is a legal minefield.
|
| So my understanding was that the original code was
| specifically not fed into Claude. But was almost certainly
| part of its training data, which complicates things, but if
| that's fair use then it's not relevant? If training's not
| fair use and taints the output, then new-chardet is a
| derivative of a lot of things, not just old-chardet...
|
| This is all new legal ground. I'm not sure if anyone will go
| to court over chardet, though, but something that's an actual
| money-maker or an FSF flagship project like readline, on the
| other hand, well that's a lot more likely.
| RaffaelCH wrote:
| > Then they feed it the original software (AFIK).
|
| My understanding is they did do the dance. From the article:
| "He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked
| it to reimplement the library from scratch."
|
| One could still make the argument that using the test suite
| was a critical contributing factor, but it is not a part of
| the resulting library. So in my uninformed opinion, it seems
| to me like the clean room argument does apply.
| grahamlee wrote:
| It's clear that we're entering a new era of copyright
| _expectations_ (whether we get new _legislation_ is different),
| but for now realise this: the people like me who like copyleft
| can do this too. We can take software we like, point an agent at
| it, and tell it to make a new version with the AGPL3.0-or-later
| badge on the front.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| But the LLM contributions would likely be ruled public domain,
| so AGPL may not be enforceable on these.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| The point of GPL is to restrict distribution. If there's
| already an MIT version, it's useless.
| grahamlee wrote:
| but the point of an EULA is to restrict distribution, so
| AGPL3 can help there.
| enriquto wrote:
| > The point of GPL is to restrict distribution.
|
| no, it isn't. The point of the GPL is to grant users of the
| software four basic freedoms (run, study, modify and
| _redistribute_ ). There's no restriction to distribution per
| se, other than disallowing the removal of these freedoms to
| other users.
| largbae wrote:
| This is only worth arguing about because software has value.
| Putting this in context of a world where the cost of writing code
| is trending to 0, there are two obvious futures:
|
| 1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses
| value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world,
| proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I
| can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not
| distribute it at all.
|
| 2. The coding cost reduction is all some temporary mirage, to be
| ended soon by drying VC money/rising inference costs, regulatory
| barriers, etc. In that world we should be reimplementing
| everything we can as copyleft while the inferencing is good.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| There was a recent ruling that LLM output is inherently public
| domain (presumably unless it infringes some existing
| copyright). In which case it's not possible to use them to
| "reimplement everything we can as copyleft".
| dathinab wrote:
| it's more complicated, the ruling was that AI can't be an
| author and the thing in question is (de-facto) public domain
| because it has no author in context of the "dev" claim it was
| fully build by AI
|
| but AI assisted code has an author and claiming it's AI
| assisted even if it is fully AI build is trivial (if you
| don't make it public that you didn't do anything)
|
| also some countries have laws which treat it like a tool in
| the sense that the one who used it is the author by default
| AFIK
| sarchertech wrote:
| There's an other option. The cost of copying existing software
| trends to 0, but the cost of writing new software stays far
| enough above 0 that it is still relatively expensive.
| casey2 wrote:
| The value of software has never been tied to the cost of
| writing it, even if you don't distribute it your still breaking
| the law.
| largbae wrote:
| The article is proceeding from the premise that a
| reimplementation is legal (but evil). To help my
| understanding of your comment, do you mean:
|
| 1. An LLM recreating a piece of software violates its
| copyright and is illegal, in which case LLM output can never
| be legally used because someone somewhere probably has a
| copyright on some portion of any software that an LLM could
| write.
|
| 2. You read my example as "copying a project without
| distributing it", vs. "having an LLM write the same
| functionality just for me"
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| There will always be cost though. Even if perfect code is
| getting one-shotted out, that is constantly maintained and
| adapted to changing conditions and technology, it simply can't
| _stay_ at 0 forever because one day the power is surely going
| to go out!
|
| More and more I am drawn to these kinds of ideas lately,
| perhaps as a kind of ethical sidestep, but still:
|
| - https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html
|
| - https://permacomputing.net/
|
| It's not going to solve any general issue here, but the one
| thing these freaks _need_ that can 't be generated by their
| models is energy, tons of it. So, the one thing I can do as an
| individual and in my (digital) community is work to be, in a
| word, self-sustainable. And depending on my company I guess, if
| I was a CEO I would hope I was wise enough to be thinking on
| the same lines.
|
| Everyone is making beautiful mountains from paper and wire. I
| will just be happy to make a small dollhouse of stone, I think
| it will be worth it. How can we see not just at least some
| small-level of hubris otherwise?
| t43562 wrote:
| Why does anyone need his new library? They can do what he did and
| make their own.
|
| I'm glad we can fork things at a point and thumb our noses at
| those who wish to cash in on other's work.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Why would I make my own? The new library is released under MIT
| license and faster than the old one.
| t43562 wrote:
| If you decide to improve it in any way to fit your needs you
| can merely tell your own AI to re-implement it with your
| changes. Then it's proprietary to you.
| righthand wrote:
| I think what is happening is the collapse of the "greater good".
| Open source is dependent upon providing information for the
| greater good and general benefit of its readers. However now that
| no one is reading anything, its purpose is for the great good of
| the most clever or most convincing or richest harvester.
| sayrer wrote:
| I don't think this part is correct: "If you distribute modified
| code, _or offer it as a networked service_ , you must make the
| source available under the same terms."
|
| That's what something like AGPL does.
| kazinator wrote:
| You can't put a copyright and MIT license on something you
| generated with AI. It is derived from the work of many unknown,
| uncredited authors.
|
| Think about it; the license says that copies of the work must be
| reproduced with the copyright notice and licensing clauses
| intact. Why would anyone obey that, knowing it came from AI?
|
| Countless instances of such licenses were ignored in the training
| data.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Courts have already ruled that AI-generated work belongs to the
| public domain. So, even the MIT license does not apply.
| harshreality wrote:
| When learning is sufficiently atomized and recombined,
| creations cease to be "derived from" in a legal sense.
|
| A lego sculpture is copyrighted. Lego blocks are not. The
| threshold between blocks and sculpture is not well-defined, but
| if an AI isn't prompted specifically to attempt to mimic an
| existing work, its output will be safely on the non-copyrighted
| side of things.
|
| A derivative work is separately copyrightable, but
| redistribution needs permission from the original author too.
| Since that usually won't be granted or would be uneconomical,
| the derivative work can't usually be redistributed.
|
| AI-produced material is inherently not copyrightable, but not
| because it's a derivative work.
| kazinator wrote:
| Token prediction is a form of "learning" that is reinforced
| by the goal of reproducing the correct next token of the
| work, rather that acquiring ideas and concepts. For instance,
| given the prefix "Four score and seven years", the weights
| are adjusted until "ago" is correctly predicted, which is a
| fancy way of saying that it was stored in the model in a
| lossy way. The model "learned" that "ago" follows "four score
| and seven years" exactly the way your hard drive "learns" the
| audio and video frames of a movie when you download a .mp4
| file.
|
| I dispute the idea that token sequences reproduced from the
| model are not derived works.
|
| I predict, no pun intended, that a time is coming when the
| idea that it's not a derived work will be challenged in
| mainstream law.
|
| The slop merchants are getting a free ride for the time
| being.
| harshreality wrote:
| Only because that quote is famous.
|
| As you said, it's lossy. Try it with any other distinctive
| but non-famous passage, and you won't get a correct
| prediction for the immediately following clause, much less
| for multiple sentences or paragraphs.
|
| That's the case _even when an LLM correctly identifies
| which book the prompted text is from._ It still won 't
| accurately continue on from some arbitrary passage. By the
| time you ask it to reproduce hundreds of words, you're into
| brand new book territory. Even when it's slop content, it's
| distinct slop.
|
| The exceptions are cases where a significant number of
| humans would also know a particular quote from memory.
| Then, chances are, a frontier LLM will too.
|
| You know how else you can reproduce a quote? Search for it
| on google, and search the resulting top hits; if it's a
| significant quote, multiple people have probably quoted it
| -- _legally_. You can also search a pirate library for the
| actual book, and search the book for the quote; while
| illegal, it 's very simple to do, so unless you propose to
| make the free and open internet illegal, I'd suggest that
| banning LLMs for being "derivative work" creation engines
| is not so different from destroying the internet.
|
| > I predict, no pun intended, that a time is coming when
| the idea that it's not a derived work will be challenged in
| mainstream law.
|
| If judges have any sense whatsoever, LLM generations
| (without specific prompt crafting to mimic existing works)
| will be judged to not be derived works and therefore not be
| violating copyright, in the same sense that you can live
| and breathe Taylor Swift's music, create new music in the
| same style, and still not be violating copyright.
|
| More likely, perhaps, is that everything will be so infused
| with LLM output that copyright ceases to be relevant, or
| forces copyright law to be rewritten from the ground up.
| skybrian wrote:
| Broadly speaking, the "freedom of users" is often protected by
| competition from competing alternatives. The GNU command line
| tools were replacements for system utilities. Linux was was a
| replacement for other Unix kernels. People chose to install them
| instead of proprietary alternatives. Was it due to ideology or
| lower cost or more features? All of the above. Different users
| have different motivations.
|
| Copyleft could be seen as an attempt to give Free Software an
| edge in this competition for users, to counter the increased
| resources that proprietary systems can often draw on. I think
| success has been mixed. Sure, Linux won on the server. Open
| source won for libraries downloaded by language-specific package
| managers. But there's a long tail of GPL apps that are not really
| all that appealing, compared to all the proprietary apps
| available from app stores.
|
| But if reimplementing software is easy, there's just going to be
| a lot more competition from both proprietary and open source
| software. Software that you can download for free that has better
| features and is more user-friendly is going to have an advantage.
|
| With coding agents, it's likely that you'll be able to modify
| apps to your own needs more easily, too. Perhaps plugin systems
| and an AI that can write plugins for you will become the norm?
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Was it due to ideology or lower cost or more features?
|
| It was due to _access_.
| casey2 wrote:
| If the model wasn't trained on copyleft, if he didn't use a
| copyleft test suite and if he wasn't the maintainer for years.
| Clearly the intent here is copyright infringement.
|
| If you have software your testsuite should be your testsuite, you
| do dev with a testsuite and then mit without releasing one.
| Depending on the test-suite it may break clean room rules,
| especially for ttd codebases.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| I feel like the licenses that suffer the most isn't the GPL, but
| the ones like SSPL. If your code can be re-implemented easily and
| legally by AWS using an LLM, why risk publishing it?
|
| It does feel like open source is about to change. My hunch is
| that commercial open source (beyond the consultation model) risks
| disappearing. Though I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
| kccqzy wrote:
| > When GNU reimplemented the UNIX userspace, the vector ran from
| proprietary to free. Stallman was using the limits of copyright
| law to turn proprietary software into free software. [...] The
| vector in the chardet case runs the other way.
|
| That's just your subjective opinion which many other people would
| disagree. I bet Armin Ronacher would agree that an MIT licensed
| library is even freer than an LGPL licensed library. To them, the
| vector is running from free to freer.
| bjt wrote:
| > If source code can now be generated from a specification, the
| specification is where the essential intellectual content of a
| GPL project resides. Blanchard's own claim--that he worked only
| from the test suite and API without reading the source--is,
| paradoxically, an argument for protecting that test suite and API
| specification under copyleft terms.
|
| This is an interesting reversal in itself. If you make the
| specification protected under copyright, then the whole practice
| of clean room implementations is invalid.
| dleslie wrote:
| IMHO, the API and Test Suite, particularly the latter, define the
| contract of the functional definition of the software. It almost
| doesn't matter what that definition looks like so long as it
| conforms to the contract.
|
| There was an issue where Google did something similar with the
| JVM, and ultimately it came down to whether or not Oracle owned
| the copyright to the header files containing the API. It went all
| the way to the US supreme court, and they ruled in Google's
| favour; finding that the API wasn't the implementation, and that
| the amount of shared code was so minimal as to be irrelevant.
|
| They didn't anticipate that in less than half a decade we'd have
| technology that could _rapidly_ reimplement software given a
| strong functional definition and contract enforcing test suite.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| A lot of untagged IANAL takes here today.
| ineedasername wrote:
| This article is setting up a bit of a moving target. Legal vs
| legitimate is at least only a single vague question to be defined
| but then the target changes to "socially legitimate" defined only
| indirectly by way of example, like aggressive tax avoidance as
| "antisocial"-- and while I tend to agree with that
| characterization my agreement is predicated on a layering of
| other principals.
|
| The fundamental problem is that once you take something outside
| the realm of law and rule of law in its many facets as the
| legitimizing principal, you have to go a whole lot further to be
| coherent and consistent.
|
| You can't just leave things floating in a few ambiguous things
| you don't like and feel "off" to you in some way- not if you're
| trying to bring some clarity to your own thoughts, much less
| others. You don't _have to land on a conclusion_ either. By all
| means chew over things, but once you try to settle, things fall
| apart if you haven't done the harder work of replacing the
| framework of law with that of another conceptual structure.
|
| You need to at least be asking "to what ends? What purpose is
| served by the rule?" Otherwise you're stuck in things where half
| the time you end up arguing backwards in ways that put purpose
| serving rules, the maintenance of the rule with justifications
| ever further afield pulled in when the rule is questioned and
| edge cases reached. If you're asking, essentially, "is the spirit
| of the rule still there?" You've got to stop and fill in what
| that spirit is or you or people that want to control you or have
| an agenda will sweep in with their own language and fill the void
| to their own ends.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| In the corporate world, we've started using reimplementation as a
| way to access tooling that security won't authorize.
|
| Sec has a deny by default policy. Eng has a use-more-AI policy.
| Any code written in-house is accepted by default. You can see
| where this is going.
|
| We've been using AI to reimplement tooling that security won't
| approve. The incentives conspired in the worst outcome, yet here
| we are. If you want a different outcome, you need to create
| different incentives.
| kemitchell wrote:
| Not Invented Here's long, slow mutagenic march toward full
| antibiotic resistance continues apace.
|
| There is a fundamental corpo-cognitive dissonance, to boot. If
| "AI" is cheap enough and good enough to implement security-
| relevant software from `git init` repeatedly, why isn't it also
| cheap enough and good enough to assess and approve the security
| of third-party software at pace with internal adoption? Is
| there some basis to believe LLMs' leverage on production
| differs from its leverage on analysis of existing code?
| ticulatedspline wrote:
| Surprised they don't mention Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.
| Seems a bit myopic to condone the general legality while arguing
| "you can only use it how I like it".
|
| It also doesn't talk about the far more interesting philosophical
| queston. Does what Blanchard did cover ALL implementations from
| Claude? What if anyone did exactly what he did, feed it the test
| cases and say "re-implement from scratch", ostensibly one would
| expect the results to be largely similar (technically under the
| right conditions deterministically similar)
|
| could you then fork the project under your own name and a
| commercial license? when you use an LLM like this, to basically
| do what anyone else could ask it to do how do you attach any
| license to it? Is it first come first serve?
|
| If an agent is acting mostly on its own it feels like if you
| found a copy of Harry Potter in the fictional library of Babel,
| you didn't write it, just found it amongst the infinite library,
| but if you found it first could you block everyone else that
| stumbles on a near-identical copy elsewhere in the library? or
| does each found copy represent a "Re-implementation" that could
| be individually copyrighted?
| danbruc wrote:
| Why are people even having problems with sharing their changes to
| begin with? Just publishing it somewhere does not seem too
| expensive. The risk of accidentally including stuff that is not
| supposed to become public? Or are people regularly completely
| changing codebases and do not want to make the effort freely
| available, maybe especially to competitors? I would have assumed
| that the common case is adding a missing feature here, tweaking
| something there, if you turn the entire thing on its head, why
| not have your own alternative solution from scratch?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If Blanchard is claiming not to have been substantively involved
| in the creation of the new implementation of chardet (i.e.
| "Claude did it"), then the new implementation is machine
| generated, and in the USA cannot be copyright and thus cannot be
| licensed.
|
| If he is claiming to have been somehow substantively "enough"
| involved to make the code copyrightable, then his own familiarity
| with the previous LGPL implementation makes the new one almost
| certainly a derivative of the original.
| sigmar wrote:
| >then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementation
| makes the new one almost certainly a derivative of the
| original.
|
| The "clean room rewrite" is just an extreme way to have a
| bulletproof shield against litigation. Not doing it that way
| doesn't automatically make all new code he writes derivative
| solely because he saw how the code worked previously.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If the clean room re-write was done entirely by Claude, then
| the result cannot be copyright in the USA, and thus there is
| no license at all.
|
| And if he was in fact more involved (which he appears to
| deny) that it's a bit weak to say that someone with huge
| familiarity with chardet could choose to reimplement chardet
| without the result being derivative.
| serial_dev wrote:
| So if I read any LGPL code in my life, I can never think
| about working on something similar in my life?
| vbarrielle wrote:
| There's a difference between "I've read a LGPL code once,
| maybe I could do something similar" and "I've been
| reading this LGPL code for 12 years and now I'm going to
| do exactly the same thing".
| hexyl_C_gut wrote:
| I'm less concerned about AI eroding copyleft and more exited
| about AI eroding copy right.
| AndriyKunitsyn wrote:
| There's a Japanese version of that page, written in classical
| text writing direction, in columns. Which is cool. Makes me
| wonder, though - how readable is it with so many English
| loanwords which should be rotated sideways to fit into columns?
| ddellacosta wrote:
| Total digression but yeah, that layout is stupid and the way
| those words are dropped in using Romaji makes no sense. That's
| not how Japanese people lay out pages on the web. In fact I
| don't think I've ever seen a Japanese web page laid out like a
| book like this, and in general I'd expect the English proper
| nouns and words that don't have obvious translations to get
| transliterated into Katakana. Smells like automatic conversion
| added by someone not really familiar with common practices for
| presenting Japanese on the web.
| tmp10423288442 wrote:
| He also has a Korean vertical layout that lays out Latin-
| character words the same way. Is this common in Korea when
| vertical layout is used? The author seems to be Korean.
|
| Looks like Wikipedia has an example of Traditional Chinese
| vertical layout with the Latin letters rotated as in TFA's
| layout (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical
| _writin...)
| Khaine wrote:
| Someone be brave, and do this to ZFS. Poke the Oracle bear!
| mh2266 wrote:
| Buried in here: Mark Pilgrim suddenly reappearing after his
| sudden disappearance years ago! Has he been up to anything since
| then?
| moralestapia wrote:
| That's a non-sequitur. chardet v7 is GPL-derived work (currently
| in clear violation of the GPL). If xe wanted it to be a different
| thing xe should've published as such. Simple as.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| i've been following this for a while.. and the trend for
| copyright (of any form - books code pictures music whatever)
| being laundered by reinventing the "same" thing in-some-way.. is
| kind-of clear.
|
| But what happens with the _new_ things? Has the era of software-
| making (or creating things at large) finished, and from now on
| everything will be re-(gurgitated|implemented|polished) old
| stuff?
|
| Or all goes back to proprietary everything.. Babylon-tower style,
| noone talks to noone?
|
| edit: another view - is open-source from now on only for resume-
| building? "see-what-i've-built" style
| t43562 wrote:
| It seems that this chap didn't go and implement a new library, he
| reimplemented an existing one and became sole-controller of it.
| i.e. he seems to have taken its reputation, brand whatever you
| call it away from the contributors and entirely to himself. Their
| work of establishing it as a well known solution is no longer
| recognised.
|
| So of course we feel that something wrong has happened even if
| it's not easy to put one's finger on it.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| The really interesting question to me is if this transcends
| copyright and unravels the whole concept of intellectual
| property. Because all of it is premised on an assumption that
| creativity is "hard". But LLMs are not just writing software,
| they are rapidly being engineered to operate completely generally
| as knowledge creation engines: solving math proofs, designing
| drugs, etc.
|
| So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at
| all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little
| to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial IP law -
| let's say, patents: it just becomes and input parameter that the
| AI needs to work around the patents like any other constraints.
| palmotea wrote:
| > So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at
| all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required
| little to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial
| IP law - let's say, patents: it just becomes and input
| parameter that the AI needs to work around the patents like any
| other constraints.
|
| I think it still does: IIRC, the current legal situation is AI-
| output does not qualify for IP protections (at least not
| without substantial later human modification). IP protections
| are solely reserved for human work.
|
| And I'm fine with that: if a person put in the work, they
| _should_ have protections so their stuff can 't be ripped off
| for free by all the wealthy major corporations that find some
| use for it. Otherwise: who cares about the LLMs.
| robmccoll wrote:
| I think you have a rather idealized model of IP in mind. In
| practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy
| major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough
| pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain
| the little guy every time.
| palmotea wrote:
| > In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the
| wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep
| enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents
| will drain the little guy every time.
|
| Then fix that instead of blowing it up. Because IP law is
| also literally the _only_ thing that protects the little
| guy 's work in many cases.
|
| Arguments like yours are kinda unfathomably incomplete to
| me, almost like they're the remnants of some propaganda
| campaign. It's constructed to appeal to the defense of the
| little guy, but the actual effect would be to disempower
| him and further empower the wealthy major corporations with
| "big enough warchest[s]."
|
| I mean, one thing I think the RIAA _would love_ is to stop
| paying royalties to every artist ever. And the only thing
| they 'd be worried about is an even bigger fish (like
| Amazon, Apple, or Spotify) no longer paying royalties to
| them. But as you said, they have a big enough war chest
| that they probably could force a deal somehow. All the
| artists without a war chest? Left out in the cold.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Blowing up IP would sink the RIAA. They would no longer
| have legal grounds to go after file sharing, and I'm
| confident that given the same legal footing that file
| sharing would win any day of the week.
| jbergqvist wrote:
| Does this matter in practice though? By modifying some of the
| generated code and not taking a solution produced by an LLM
| end-to-end but borrowing heavily from it, can't a human claim
| full ownership of the IP even though in reality the LLM did
| most of the relevant work?
| reverius42 wrote:
| I think as long as the human puts in substantial and
| transformational effort, they can claim to be the copyright
| holder of the entire work, yes.
| nkmnz wrote:
| > AI-output does not qualify for IP protections
|
| I beg to differ. AI-output did not entitle the person
| creating the prompt for IP protections, so far - but my
| objection is not directed towards the "so far", but towards
| your omission of "the person creating the prompt", because if
| an AI outputs copyrighted material from the training data,
| that material is still copyrighted. AI is not a magical
| copyright removal machine.
| reverius42 wrote:
| The U.S. Supreme Court just declined to hear a case, thus
| upholding a lower court precedent that LLM output are not
| copyrightable: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-
| supreme-court-de...
|
| What this means in practice is that (currently), all output
| of an LLM is legally considered to not be copyrightable (to
| the extent that it's an original work). If it happens to
| regurgitate an existing copyrighted work, though, is that
| infringement? I'm not sure we have a legal precedent on
| that question yet.
| rlpb wrote:
| What if a person puts in the work, but the work was worthless
| or can be trivially reproduced without effort?
|
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
| spwa4 wrote:
| Don't worry. The courts have consistently sided with huge
| companies on copyright. In the US. In Europe. Doesn't matter.
|
| Company incorporates GPL code in their product? Never once have
| courts decided to uphold copyright. HP did that many times.
| Microsoft got caught doing it. And yet the GPL was never
| applied to their products. Every time there was an excuse. An
| inconsistent excuse.
|
| Schoolkid downloads a movie? 30,000 USD per infraction PLUS
| armed police officer goes in and enforces removal of any
| movies.
|
| Or take the very subject here. AI training WAS NOT considered
| fair use when OpenAI violated copyright to train. Same with
| Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, ... They incorporated harry
| potter and the linux kernel in ChatGPT, in the model itself.
| Undeniable. Literally. So even if you accept that it's changed
| now, OpenAI should still be forced to redistribute the training
| set, code, and everything needed to run the model for
| everything they did up to 2020. Needless to say ... courts
| refused to apply that.
|
| So just apply "the law", right. Courts' judgement of using AI
| to "remove GPL"? Approved. Using AI to "make the next Disney-
| style movie"? SEND IN THE ARMY! Whether one or the other
| violates the law according to rational people? Whatever excuse
| to avoid that discussion is good enough.
| js8 wrote:
| It might unravel intellectual property, just not in a fair way.
| When capitalism started, public land was enclosed to create
| private property. Despite this being in many cases a quite
| unfair process, we still respect this arrangement.
|
| With AI, a similar process is happening - publicly available
| information becomes enclosed by the model owners. We will
| probably get a "vestigial" intellectual property in the form of
| model ownership, and everyone will pay a rent to use it. In
| fact, companies might start to gatekeep all the information to
| only their own LLM flavor, which you will be required to use to
| get to the information. For example, product documentation and
| datasheets will be only available by talking to their AI.
| nradov wrote:
| Nothing changes for drug patents regardless of whether an LLM
| was used in the discovery process.
| reverius42 wrote:
| Not sure why this should be true; the US Supreme Court
| recently chose to let precedent stand that AI creations are
| not copyrightable.
| https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-
| de...
|
| That also seems relevant for this whole discussion, actually
| -- if a work can't be copyrighted it certainly can't have a
| changed license, or any license at all. (I guess it's
| effectively public domain to the extent that it's public at
| all?)
| nradov wrote:
| You're really missing the point in multiple ways. First,
| precedents on copyright law are irrelevant to patent law.
| Second, AI generated works generally can be copyrighted
| under the human creator's name.
| reverius42 wrote:
| No, I think you are quite incorrect, at least on the
| latter point:
|
| "Lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision
| that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was
| ineligible for copyright protection because it did not
| have a human creator."
|
| Not eligible for copyright protection does not mean it
| can be copyrighted "under the human creator's name". It
| means there is no creative work at all. No copyright.
| reverius42 wrote:
| And while courts in theory aren't supposed to apply
| copyright precedent to patent cases, in practice, they
| apparently do a lot of the time, so it's kind of a mess!
| https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/ckjip/vol16/iss1/4/#:
| ~:t...
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Even if all I have to do is tell my agent, "here is a patent
| for a drug, analyse the patent and determine an equivalent
| but non-infringing drug" and it chugs away for a couple of
| hours and spits out a drug along with all the specifications
| to manufacture it?
|
| I guess the state of play will be that for new drugs the
| original manufacturer will _already have done that_ and
| ensured that literally anything that could be found as a
| workaround is included in the scope of the patent. But I feel
| like it will not be possible to keep that wartertight.
| nradov wrote:
| Yes, even so. Human drug researchers have been doing the
| same thing for decades. As soon as one pharmaceutical
| company launches a successful small-molecule drug everyone
| else jumps to find a minor tweak that will hit the same
| target (ideally with fewer side effects) while evading the
| patent. There is already specialized software to help with
| this process so I'm skeptical that LLM agents would be very
| helpful for this use case.
| paxys wrote:
| The formula is what is patented, not the process to come up
| with it.
| newyankee wrote:
| If you think about creative outcomes as n dimensional
| 'volumes', AI expressions can cover more than humans in many
| domains. These are precisely artistic styles, music styles etc.
| and tbh not everyone can be a Mozart but may be a lot more with
| AI can be Mozart lite. This begs the question how much of
| creativity is appreciated as a shared experience
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I've always thought the opposite: IP law was created to make
| sure creativity stays hard, and hence controllable by the
| elites.
|
| Patents came along when farmers started making city goods,
| threatening guilds secrets. Copyright came when the printing
| press made copying and translating the bible easy and
| accessible to all. (Trademark admittedly does not fit this
| view, but doesn't seem all that damaging either)
|
| To Protect The Arts, and To Time Limit Trade Secrets were just
| the Protect The Children of old times, a way to confuse people
| who didn't look too hard at actual consequences.
|
| This means that the future of IP depends on what lets the
| powers that be pull up the ladder behind them. Long term I'd
| expect e.g. copyright expansion and harder enforcement, just
| because cloning by AI gets easy enough to threaten the status
| quo.
| cobbzilla wrote:
| > Trademark admittedly does not fit this view, but doesn't
| seem all that damaging either
|
| Isn't trademark the only thing keeping a certain cartoon
| mouse out of the public domain, despite the fact that his
| earliest animations are out of copyright? Not sure if you'd
| consider that damaging, or if anyone has yet tested the
| boundaries of the House of Mouse's patience here.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Good. Intellectual property is now a twisted concept by the
| elite, whatever its benefits were previously. As soon as Disney
| made Mickey popular, it was all downhill.
| rfw300 wrote:
| More likely: this is a transitional phase where our previously
| hard problems become easy, and we will soon set our sights on
| new and much harder problems. The pinnacle of creative
| achievement in the universe is probably not 2010s B2B SaaS.
|
| It is entirely possible, however, that human beings will not be
| the primary drivers of progress on those problems.
| paxys wrote:
| "Hard" or "easy" has never been part of the premise.
|
| A company spends a decade and billions of dollars to develop a
| groundbreaking drug and patents it.
|
| I think of a cool new character called "Mr Poop" and publish a
| short story about him with an hour of work.
|
| Both of us get the exact same protection under the law (yes yes
| I know copyright vs patent etc., but ultimately they are all
| about IP protection).
| mbgerring wrote:
| See also "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"
| (https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence), and what a goofy,
| naive, misguided disaster that early internet optimism turned
| into.
|
| No, AI does not mean the end of either copyright or copyleft, it
| means that the laws need to catch up. And they should, and they
| will.
| munk-a wrote:
| I think the missing thing here is that the license violation
| already happened. Most of the big models trained on data in a
| manner that violated terms of service. We'll need a court case
| but I think it's extremely reasonable to consider any model
| trained on GPL code to be infected with open licensing
| requirements.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I agree there has to be a court case about it. I think the
| current argument, however, is that it is transformative, and
| therefore falls under fair use.
| munk-a wrote:
| Yea, a finding that training is transformative would be
| pretty significant and it's likely that the precedent of
| thumbnail creation being deemed transformative would likely
| steer us towards such a finding. Transformative is always a
| hard thing to bank on because it is such a nebulous and
| judgement based call. There are excellent examples of how
| precise and gritty this can get in audio sampling.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Didn't know about thumbnails being fair use. In that case,
| I just don't see an argument that genAI training on source
| code is less transformative than thumbnails.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You might wish that were true, but there are very strong
| arguments it's not. Training on copyleft licensed code is not a
| license violation. Any more than a person reading it is. In
| copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that
| copyright no longer applies. It's fair use.
|
| But agreed that we're waiting for a court case to confirm that.
| Although really, the main questions for any court cases are not
| going to be around the principle of fair use itself or whether
| training is transformative enough (it obviously is), but rather
| on the specifics:
|
| 1) Was any copyrighted material _acquired_ legally (not
| applicable here), and
|
| 2) Is the LLM always providing a unique expression (e.g. not
| regurgitating books or libraries verbatim)
|
| And in this particular case, they confirmed that the new
| implementation is 98.7% unique.
| gspr wrote:
| > Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license
| violation. Any more than a person reading it is.
|
| Some might hold that we've granted persons certain
| exemptions, on account of them being persons. We do not have
| to grant machines the same.
|
| > In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use
| that copyright no longer applies.
|
| Has the model really performed an extreme transformation if
| it is able to produce the training data near-verbatim? Sure,
| it can _also_ produce extremely transformed versions, but is
| that really relevant if it holds within it enough information
| for a (near-)verbatim reproduction?
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _We do not have to grant machines the same._
|
| No we don't _have_ to, but so far we do, because that 's
| the most legally consistent. If you want to change that,
| you're going to need to pass new laws that may wind up
| radically redefining intellectual property.
|
| > _Has the model really performed an extreme transformation
| if it is able to produce the training data near-verbatim?_
|
| Of course it has, if the _transformation_ is extreme, as it
| appears to be here. If I memorize the lyrics to a bunch of
| love songs, and then write my own love song where every
| line is new, nobody 's going to successfully sue me just
| because I can sing a bunch of other songs from memory.
|
| Also, it's not even remotely clear that the LLM _can_
| produce the training data near-verbatim. Generally it _can
| 't_, unless it's something that it's been trained on with
| high levels of repetition.
| munk-a wrote:
| I want to briefly pick at this:
|
| > you're going to need to pass new laws that may wind up
| radically redefining intellectual property
|
| You're correct that this is one route to resolving the
| situation, but I think it's reasonable to lean more
| strongly into the original intent of intellectual
| property laws to defend creative works as a manner to
| sustain yourself that would draw a pretty clear
| distinction between human creativity and reuse and LLMs.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| >Has the model really performed an extreme transformation
| if it is able to produce the training data near-verbatim?
| Sure, it can also produce extremely transformed versions,
| but is that really relevant if it holds within it enough
| information for a (near-)verbatim reproduction?
|
| I feel as though, from an information-theoretic standpoint,
| it can't be possible that an LLM (which is almost certainly
| <1 TB big) can contain any substantial verbatim portion of
| its training corpus, which includes audio, images, and
| videos.
| Copyrightest wrote:
| The big difference between people reading code and LLMs
| reading code is that people have legal liability and LLMs do
| not. You can't sue an LLM for copyright infringement, and
| it's almost impossible for users to tell when it happens.
|
| BTW in 2023 I watched ChatGPT spit out hundreds of lines of
| F# verbatim from my own GitHub. A lot of people had this
| experience with GitHub Copilot. "98.7% unique" is still a lot
| of infringement.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You can sue the company making the LLM, which is what many
| have done.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _people have legal liability and LLMs do not. You can 't
| sue an LLM for copyright infringement_
|
| That's not relevant, because you can still sue the person
| using the LLM and publishing the repository. Legal
| liability is completely unchanged.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| A human reading a unit of work is not a "copy". I'm pretty
| sure our legal systems agree that thought or sight is not
| copying something.
|
| Training an LLM inherently requires making a copy of the
| work. Even the initial act of loading it from the internet
| and copying it into memory to then train the LLM is a copy
| that can be governed by its license and copyright law
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Training an LLM inherently requires making a copy of the
| work._
|
| But that's not relevant here. Because the copyleft license
| does not prohibit that (and it's not even clear that _any_
| license _can_ prohibit it, as courts may confirm it 's fair
| use, as most people are currently assuming). That's why I
| noted under (1) that it's not applicable here.
| munk-a wrote:
| It's absolutely prohibited to copy and redistribute for
| commercial purposes materials that you're unlicensed to
| do so with. This isn't an issue when it comes to the
| copy-left scenario (though it may potentially enforce
| transitive licensing requirements on the copier that LLM
| runners don't want to follow) but it is a huge issue that
| has come up with LLM training.
|
| LLM training involves ingesting works (in a potentially
| transformative process) and partially reproduce them -
| that's a generally restricted action when it comes to
| licensing.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _It 's absolutely prohibited to copy and redistribute
| for commercial purposes materials that you're unlicensed
| to do so with._
|
| Sure, but that's not what LLM's generally do, and it's
| certainly not what they're intended to do.
|
| The LLM companies, and many other people, argue that
| training falls under _fair use_. One element of fair use
| is whether the purpose /character is sufficiently
| _transformative_ , and transforming texts into weights
| without even a remote 1-1 correspondence is the
| transformation.
|
| And this is why LLM companies ensure that partial
| reproduction _doesn 't_ happen during LLM usage, using a
| kind of copyrighted-text filter as a last check in case
| anything would unintentionally get through. (And it
| doesn't even tend to occur in the first place, except
| when the LLM is trained on a bunch of copies of the same
| text.)
| cortesoft wrote:
| I think you are confusing two different meanings of the
| word 'copy'. The fact that a computer loads it into memory
| does not make it automatically a 'copy' in the copyright
| sense.
| arjie wrote:
| Well, the license change sounds pretty strange, but to be honest
| if I were to use this software I would use it without adhering to
| the MIT. It's machine-created content which is not, in general,
| copyrightable. You can assert whatever license you want on such
| content, but I am not going to adhere to it. For example, I
| declare you may use the following under the Elastic License
| The
| iberator wrote:
| Easy solution for now:
|
| Add something like this to NEW gpl /bsd/mit licenses:
|
| 'you are forbidden from reimplementing it with AI'
|
| or just:
|
| 'all clones, reimpletetions with ai etc must still be GPL'
| foresto wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it
| to reimplement the library from scratch.
|
| From GPL2:
|
| > The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work
| for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete
| source code means all the source code for all modules it
| contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus
| the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the
| executable.
|
| Is a project's test suite not considered part of its source code?
| When I make modifications to a project, its test cases are very
| much a part of that process.
|
| If the test suite is part of this library's source code, and
| Claude was fed the test suite or interface definition files, is
| the output not considered a _work based on the library_ under the
| terms of LGPL 2.1?
| tty456 wrote:
| Google v. Oracle ruled that use of APIs are fair game and could
| be argued that test cases are strictly a use of APIs and not
| implementation.
| vbarrielle wrote:
| Google vs Oracle ruled that APIs fall under copyright (the
| contrary was thought before). However, it was ruled that, in
| that specific case, fair use applied, because of
| interoperability concerns. That's the important part of this
| case: fair use is never automatic, it is assessed case by
| case.
|
| Regarding chardet, I'm not sure "I wanted to circumvent the
| license" is a good way to argue fair use.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's transformative, so no.
|
| Legally, using the tests to help create the reimplementation is
| fine.
|
| However, it seems possible you can't _redistribute_ the same
| tests under the MIT license. So the reimplementation MIT
| distribution could need to be source code only, not source code
| plus tests. Or, the tests can be distributed in parallel but
| still under LGPL, not MIT. It doesn 't really matter since
| compiled software won't be including the tests anyways.
| foresto wrote:
| > It's transformative, so no.
|
| I'm not following your logic there, and I don't see any
| mention of "transformative" in the license. Can you explain
| what you mean?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Sorry, I misspoke. Transformation is what makes the _LLM
| itself_ legal -- its training data is sufficiently
| transformed into weights.
|
| And so, a work being sufficiently transformative is one way
| in which copyright no longer applies, but that's not the
| case here specifically. The specific case here is
| essentially just a _clean-room reimplementation_ (though
| technically less "clean", but still presumably the same
| legally). But the end result is still a completely
| different expression of underlying non-copyrightable ideas.
|
| And in both cases, it doesn't matter _what_ the original
| license was. If a resulting work is sufficiently
| transformative _or_ a reimplementation, copyright no longer
| applies, so the license no longer applies.
| foresto wrote:
| That's interesting, but it misses my point:
|
| The library's test suite and interfaces were apparently
| used directly, not transformed. If either of those are
| considered part of the library's source code, as the
| license's wording seems to suggest, then I think output
| from their use could be considered a _work based on the
| library_ as defined in the license.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Legally that's been established as acceptable.
|
| Google LLC v Oracle America assumed (though didn't
| establish) that API's are copyrightable... BUT that
| developing against them _falls under fair use_ , as long
| as the function implementations are independent.
|
| Test suites are again generally considered
| copyrightable... but the _behavior being tested is not_.
|
| So no, it's not considered to be a work based on the
| library. This seems pretty clear-cut in US law by now.
|
| Also, the LGPL text doesn't say "work based on the
| library". It says "If you modify a copy of the Library",
| and this is not a "combined work" either. And the whole
| point is that this is not a modified copy -- it's a
| reimplementation.
|
| _In theory_ , a license _could_ be written to prevent
| running its tests from being run against software not
| derived from the original, i.e. clean-room
| reimplementations. In practice, it remains dubious
| whether any court would uphold that. And it would also be
| trivial to then get around it, by taking advantage of
| fair use to re-implement the tests in e.g. plain English
| (or any specification language), and then re-implementing
| those back into new test code. Because again, test
| _behaviors_ are not copyrightable.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| But the tests were transformed to the new language, they
| are not copied as-is.
|
| Software patents would work as you describe, but not
| copyright.
| animitronix wrote:
| LPGL is dead, long live the AI rewrites of your barely open
| source code
| kanemcgrath wrote:
| without discussing copyright, I don't believe any of this is
| copied. Which I think should be the argument that actually
| matters.
|
| I downloaded both 6.0 and 7.0 and based on only a light
| comparison of a few key files, nothing would suggest to me that
| 7.0 was copied from 6.0, especially for a 41x faster
| implementation. It is a lot more organized and readable in my
| armature opinion, and the code is about 1/10th the size.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Someone should put this to the test. Take the recently leaked
| Minecraft source code and have Copilot build an exact replica in
| another programming language and then publish it as open source.
| See if Microsoft believes AI is copyright infringement or not.
| Aboutplants wrote:
| I've often thought that the key to fighting this is through
| this exact method. Turn the tool against them
| amelius wrote:
| You will probably run into design patents.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| Software patents is not a thing in EU.
| IshKebab wrote:
| They absolutely are. That's a myth.
|
| But also software patents and design patents are totally
| different things.
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| Very much is. "Software programs, as such" are exempt in
| the EPC article 52. However if the software program
| interacts with the world - if it has a "further technical
| effect" - it is patentable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eu
| r...
| amelius wrote:
| I said design patents:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
| peacebeard wrote:
| The big question is: if copyrighted material was used in the
| training material, is the LLM's output copyright infringement
| when it resembles the training material? In your example, you
| are taking the copyrighted material and giving it to the LLM as
| input and instructing the LLM to process it. Regardless of
| where the legal cards fall, this is a much less ambiguous
| scenario.
| LPisGood wrote:
| I think Disney ran into this with people generating Marvel
| characters etc
| robmccoll wrote:
| As described, this would not be the same thing. If the AI is
| looking at the source and effectively porting it, that is
| likely infringement. The idea instead should be "implement
| Minecraft from scratch" but with behavior, graphics, etc.
| identical. Note that you'll need to have an AI generate assets
| or something since you can't just reuse textures and models.
| Gigachad wrote:
| AI models have already looked at the source of GPL software
| and contain it in their dataset. Adding the minecraft source
| to the mix wouldn't seem much different. Of course art assets
| and trade marks would have to be replaced. But an AI "clean
| room" implementation has yet to be legally tested.
| reverius42 wrote:
| For copyright purposes I think there is an important legal
| distinction between training data (fed in once, ahead of
| time, and can in theory no longer be recovered as-is) and
| context window data (stored exactly for the duration of the
| model call).
|
| I'm not sure there should be, but I think there is.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| That's why he is saying it's not equivalent. For it to be
| the same, the LLM would have to train on/transform
| Minecraft's source code into its weights, then you prompt
| the LLM to make a game using the specifications of
| Minecraft solely through prompts. Of course it's copyright
| infringement if you just give a tool Minecraft's source
| code and tell it to copy it, just like it would be
| copyright infringement if you used a copier to copy
| Minecraft's source code into a new document and say you
| recreated Minecraft.
| paxys wrote:
| Is there a legal distinction between training, post-
| training, fine tuning and filling up a context window?
|
| In all of these cases an AI model is taking a copyrighted
| source, reading it, jumbling the bytes and storing it in
| its memory as vectors.
|
| Later a query reads these vectors and outputs them in a
| form which may or may not be similar to the original.
| SatvikBeri wrote:
| Judges have previously ruled that training counts as
| sufficiently transformative to qualify for fair use:
| https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-
| distr...
|
| I don't know of any rulings on the context window, but
| it's certainly possible judges would rule that would not
| qualify as transformative.
| NiloCK wrote:
| A room "as clean" as the one under dispute (chardet) is very
| easy to replicate.
|
| AI 1: - (reads the source), creates a spec + acceptance
| criteria
|
| AI 2: - implements from spec
|
| AI 1 is in the position of the maintainer who facilitated the
| license swap.
| martin-t wrote:
| They might not care. Products win not by quality or features
| but by advertisement, hype and network effects.
|
| The original implementation would still have the upper hand
| here. OTOH if I as a nobody create something cool, there's
| nothing stopping a huge corporation from "reimplementing"
| (=stealing) it and and using their huge advertising budget to
| completely overshadow me.
|
| And that's how they like it.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Given how hard companies like Nintendo and Microsoft have
| been taking down leaks or fan creations, it seems they very
| much do care about keeping this stuff locked down.
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| _This_ was not about legality.
|
| > That question is this: does legal mean legitimate?
|
| Just because something is legal does not mean it's moral thing
| to do.
| larodi wrote:
| this question should've been posed earlier when first LLMs
| were training. many people chose to ignore the question, and
| now, several distillation epochs later, it is not a question
| that matters, as both yes/no are true, and not true.
|
| is it legitimate for millions of people to exploit, expound
| on knowledge that was perhaps, to begin with, not legitimate
| to use? well they did already, who's to judge the commons
| now?
| mirashii wrote:
| What a ridiculous take. Many people loudly raised the
| question and objected to the practice from the beginning,
| but a handful of companies ignored the objections and ran
| faster than the legal system. If they were in the wrong,
| legally or morally, they still deserve to face
| repercussions for it.
| miggol wrote:
| Wow, it feels like this argument rewired my brain.
|
| When I first read about the chardet situation, I was conflicted
| but largely sided on the legal permissibility side of things.
| Uncomfortably I couldn't really fault the vibers; I guess I'm
| just liberal at heart.
|
| The argument from the commons has really invoked my belief in the
| inherent morality of a public good. Something being
| "impermissible" sounds bad until you realize that otherwise the
| arrow of public knowledge suddenly points backwards.
|
| Seeing this example play out in real life has had retroactive
| effects on my previously BSD-aligned brain. Even though the
| argument itself may have been presented before, I now understand
| the morals that a GPL license text underpins better.
| lukev wrote:
| I agree with the thrust of this article, that norms and what we
| perceive as good or desirable extend considerably beyond the
| minimum established by law.
|
| But a point that was not made strongly, which highlights this
| even more, is that this goes in _every direction_.
|
| If this kind of reimplementation is legal, then I can take any
| permissive OSS and rebuild it as proprietary. I can take any
| proprietary software and rebuild it as permissive. I can take any
| proprietary software and rebuild it as my _own_ proprietary
| software.
|
| Either the law needs to catch up and prevent this kind of
| behavior, or we're going to enter an effectively post-copyright
| world with respect to software. Which ISN'T GOOD, because that
| will disincentivize any sort of open license at all, and
| companies will start protecting/obfuscating their APIs like trade
| secrets.
| integralid wrote:
| It goes in one direction only.
|
| Companies can take open-source software and make a proprietary
| reimplementation. You can't take a proprietary software and
| make an open source GPL version.
|
| I am absolutely certain that if you tried you would be sued to
| oblivion. But big company screwing up open source is not even
| news anymore. In fact I (still) believe that the fact that even
| though LLMs were trained on tons of GPL and AGPL or even
| unlicensed software it's considered ok to use LLM code in
| proprietary projects is example of just that.
| lukev wrote:
| From a strictly legal perspective the two are equivalent. The
| fact that there are structural injustices in the system is
| true, but that's not a question that any answer to "what
| should be legal" can fix.
| martin-t wrote:
| I've been thinking this for over two years, that's why I
| stopped contributing to open source at that time - my work was
| only gonna be exploited to make rich people richer regardless
| of the license.
|
| Crazy that only now we're seeing a bunch of articles coming to
| the same conclusion now.
|
| I think copyright should still apply, but if it doesn't, we
| need new laws - ones which protect all human work, creative or
| not. Laws should serve and protect people, not algorithms and
| not corporations "owning" those algorithms.
|
| I put owning in quotes because ownership should go to the
| people who did the work.
|
| Buying/selling ownership of both companies and people's work
| should be illegal just like buying/selling whole humans is.
| Even if it took thousands of years to get here.
|
| Money should not buy certain things because this is the root
| cause of inequality. Rich people are not getting richer at a
| faster rate by being more productive than everyone else but by
| "owning" other people's work and using it as leverage to
| extract even more from others.
|
| Maybe LLM and mass unemployment of white collar workers will be
| the wakeup call needed for a reform. Or revolution.
|
| Last time this happened was during the second industrial
| revolution and that's how communism got popular. We should do
| better this time because this is the last revolution which
| might be possible.
| winstonwinston wrote:
| > Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing
| source code directly.
|
| That's a weird statement while releasing the new version of the
| same project. Maybe just release it as a new project, chardet-ai
| v1.0 or whatever.
| martin-t wrote:
| 1) Legality and morality are obviously different and unrelated
| concepts. More people should understand that.
|
| 2) Copyright was the wrong mechanism to use for code from the
| start, LLMs just exposed the issue. The thing to protect
| shouldn't be creativity, it should be human work - any kind of
| work.
|
| The hard part of programming isn't creativity, it's making
| correct decisions. It's getting the information you need to make
| them. Figuring out and understanding the problem you're trying to
| solve, whether it's a complex mathematical problem or a
| customer's need. And then evaluating solutions until you find the
| right one. (One constrains being how much time you can spend on
| it.)
|
| All that work is incredibly valuable but once the solution
| exists, it's each easier to copy without replicating or even
| understanding the thought process which led to it. But that
| thought process took time and effort.
|
| _The person who did the work deserved credit and compensation._
|
| And he deserves it transitively, if his work is used to build
| other works - proportional to his contribution. The hard part is
| quantifying it, of course. But a lot of people these days benefit
| from throwing their hands up and saying we can't quantify it
| exactly so let's make it finders keepers. That's exploitation.
|
| 3) Both LLM training and inference are derivative works by any
| reasonable meaning of those words. If LLMs are not derivative
| works of the training data then why is so much training data
| needed? Why don't they just build AI from scratch? Because they
| can't. They just claim they found a legal loophole to exploit
| other people's work without consent.
|
| I am still hoping the legal people take time to understand how
| LLMs work, how other algorithms, such as synonym replacement or
| c2rust work, decide that calling it "AI" doesn't magically remove
| copyright and the huge AI companies will be forced to destroy
| their existing models and train new ones which respect the
| licenses.
| palata wrote:
| > an argument for protecting that test suite and API
| specification under copyleft terms.
|
| If we protect API under copyright, it makes it easier to prevent
| interoperability. We obviously do NOT want that. It would give
| big companies even more power.
|
| Now in the US, the Supreme Court that the output of an LLM is not
| copyrightable. So even a permissive licence doesn't work for that
| reimplementation: it should be public domain.
|
| Disclaimer: I am all for copyleft for the code I write, but
| already without LLMs, one could rewrite a similar project and use
| the licence they please. LLMs make them faster at that, it's just
| a fact.
|
| Now I wonder: say I vibe-code a library (so it's public domain in
| the US), I don't publish that code but I sell it to a customer.
| Can I prevent them from reselling it? I guess not, since it's
| public domain?
|
| And as an employee writing code for a company. If I produce
| public domain code because it is written by an LLM, can I publish
| it, or can the company prevent me from doing it?
| josalhor wrote:
| I think the direction we are going, the GPL is going to fade
| away. I think people will look at this like writing a book and
| claiming the ideas in the book cannot be copied. This debate is
| not that different from the ones going on in the music industry.
| I open sourced my latest software as Apache 2.0 after debating a
| lot about this. Unless the FSF wins in court in the next <=2-3
| years, there is no coming back from this.
| makerofthings wrote:
| If an AI can license-wash open source software like this then the
| licenses become meaningless. Which is fascinating. Commercial
| software cloning that is simple enough for an average person to
| drive is next and the ultimate form of piracy, see an app for
| $10? Don't fancy paying? Just ask ChatGPT for a clone. Future is
| going to be wild.
| paxys wrote:
| You've just described why every SaaS stock has taken a beating
| in the last 6 months.
| makerofthings wrote:
| How long until this thing is good enough to clone photoshop?
| Or Skyrim? I think all bets are off for the software world.
| j-bos wrote:
| > ultimate form of piracy
|
| Nothing was stolen, not even copied, lamest piracy I've heard
| of.
| makerofthings wrote:
| I take your point, but if the re-implementation looks the
| same, I would say it's a form of copying. (Which I don't
| think is a problem, I don't think you should be able to own
| sequences of numbers.)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > If source code can now be generated from a specification, the
| specification is where the essential intellectual content of a
| GPL project resides.
|
| Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-like to
| corporate software packages, even if the so-called owners did not
| like it. We're ready to throw it all away, and let intellectual
| property owners get so much more control.
|
| The implications will not end up being anti-large-corporation or
| pro-sharing. If you can prevent someone from re-implementing a
| spec or building a client that speaks your API or building a
| work-a-like, it will be the large corporations that exersize this
| power as usual.
| alterom wrote:
| _> Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-
| like to corporate software packages, even if the so-called
| owners did not like it_
|
| Our "foreparents" weren't competing with corporations with
| unlimited access to generative AI trained _on their work_. The
| times, they 're-a-changin'.
|
| You're rehashing the argument made in one of the articles which
| this piece criticizes and directly addresses, while ignoring
| the entirety of what was written before the conclusion that you
| quoted.
|
| If anyone finds themselves agreeing with the comment I'm
| responding to, please, do yourself a favor and read the linked
| article.
|
| I would do no justice to it by reiterating its points here.
| randyrand wrote:
| It doesn't matter if it's legitimate. The people that use it
| don't care. They just find it online and click download. This is
| the reality.
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