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Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

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Re: Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

#51

Post by z3c0 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #47
thomastjeffery wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is a particularly egregious case, but the problem is more general. Copyright itself is just a bad move all around. Copyright demands that everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor. Therefore, we should not expect people to earn wages for labor; and we should instead expect people to earn royalties from their "works" (the countable commodity). Absurd. Copyright gr…

> Everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor. Is it not? If I spend 10 years writing the greatest novel of all time, and you, a publishing company, make copies and sell 10 million copies, I feel entitled to some recompense. My labor has value to me, but only the product of that labor has value to anyone else.

The goal is the product, but what is being exchanged is production, ie labor for a certificate of your own past production, aka money.

Re: Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

#52

Post by 5701652400 »

copying other business pixel-to-pixel and direct claims agains competitor is just distasteful. add to this recent YC "AI that MITM API and re-implments anything automatically" is very bad image to YC.

with such bad behavior from SWE community, you just got to lock down your app behind certificate pinning, hardware attestation, gRPC/protobufs, and internal data only. no more "free open web in browsers" when you get gents like this stealing other peoples efforts.

Re: Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

#54

Post by thewebguyd »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #48
egypturnash wrote: post #42

"Now software developers are feeling what authors and artist felt". As an artist who got repeatedly told to stop making buggy whips and get into the absolutely tedious-sounding new field of "writing prompts" every time I expressed dismay and displeasure about image generation around here, every story about this sort of thing here is the sweetest schadenfreude I have tasted in my life. Especially when the general feel…

I can’t imagine software engineers caring about this at all. The only people that care about UI theft are C suite IP clutchers. SWEs generally love being able to use each other’s work. Copying UI by eye has been SOP since the dawn of computing.

> Copying UI by eye has been SOP since the dawn of computing.

Case in point, the very GUI operating systems we use today are arguably a "stolen" product from xerox parc.

Re: Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

#55

Post by thomastjeffery »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #47
thomastjeffery wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is a particularly egregious case, but the problem is more general. Copyright itself is just a bad move all around. Copyright demands that everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor. Therefore, we should not expect people to earn wages for labor; and we should instead expect people to earn royalties from their "works" (the countable commodity). Absurd. Copyright gr…

> Everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor. Is it not? If I spend 10 years writing the greatest novel of all time, and you, a publishing company, make copies and sell 10 million copies, I feel entitled to some recompense. My labor has value to me, but only the product of that labor has value to anyone else.

You feel entitled to recompense from the publisher, because they are profiting from your labor. The problem I brought up is still there, just in the hands of the publisher, and not the writer. Now the publisher gets to profit from work they did not do, and you are lucky to get a good cut.

Your labor has value to everyone else, even if that value is speculative. If we don't have a mechanism to commoditize the ends of labor, then we can just speculate instead. Speculating the value of labor is more uncertain than valuing copyrighted works, which means that the business of labor speculation cannot compete with the business of copyright valuation. At the same time, copyright is a lie: the "product of a work" is a totally arbitrary imagined boundary that can't always be meaningfully drawn in the first place; meaning that entire categories of work are impossible to copyright at all. Removing that lie would put everyone on a level playing field, where all labor is valuable, and all valuation is fair.

Re: Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

#56

Post by z3c0 »

glimshe wrote: post #8

Software copyrights are among humanity's worst inventions. We as a species are no better off because of it, and neither are the small creators that copyrights are supposed to protect. Software copyrights only exist to protect a renter model from big corporations. There's an argument to be made for patent protections, but many of those are questionable considering the number of trivial software-related patents (there…

> I hope they can expose the ridiculousness of software copyrights but I won't be holding my breath.

I think it has already, but it's a hard pill for many to swallow. While I haven't actually counted, the conversations around the effectiveness of copyright/IP seem to be regular conversations now, both here and IRL.

Re: Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

#57

Post by _kst_ »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #27
glimshe wrote: post #8

Software copyrights are among humanity's worst inventions. We as a species are no better off because of it, and neither are the small creators that copyrights are supposed to protect. Software copyrights only exist to protect a renter model from big corporations. There's an argument to be made for patent protections, but many of those are questionable considering the number of trivial software-related patents (there…

Software is a particularly egregious case, but the problem is more general. Copyright itself is just a bad move all around. Copyright demands that everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor. Therefore, we should not expect people to earn wages for labor; and we should instead expect people to earn royalties from their "works" (the countable commodity). Absurd. Copyright gr…

"Copyright demands that everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor."

Isn't it?

If you spend ten years writing the Great American Novel, and I spend ten years writing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again, have I created as much value as you have?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value#Critique...

Re: Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

#58

Post by theturtletalks »

arjie wrote: post #28

The Corgi event doesn't seem particularly notable. There are similar features implemented in the most bog standard way that those features can be implemented using the pattern that AFAIK Github pioneered with a 'Danger Zone'. Both parties are using the same upstream components so it ends up looking the same. I don't know when the extreme intellectual property viewpoint entered software engineering as a mainstream opi…

Did you even look into the situation?

Corgi was spending 10K/yr for DocSend. They decided to build their own and the LLM took UI from PaperMark, an open-source alternative. I’ve implemented features that exist in open-source and LLM has never blatantly ripped off the UI.

Corgi has raised $106M but won’t pay for DocSend? Fine. Wants to build their own version based on Open-source? Fine. Keep it closed source and then try to monetize your version? That’s treacherous.

How is Microsoft Office vs Open Office a good parallel to this?

Re: Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

#59

Post by davebren »

aldousd666 wrote: post #17

Copyright doesn't cover the results of code, nor the methods used in the code, techniques and algorithms aren't covered by copyright. Period. Copyright applies to 'the work'. If you don't copy the source code, it's not covered.

Whatever LLM they used copied the source code. It took their prompt and filled in the blanks of the spec by copying from the closest matching open source project. This is just what a next token predictor is going to do if you tell it to replicate software that's in its training set since that is the optimal way to predict the next tokens.

Re: Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

#60

Post by davebren »

In effect the source code is being copied by the LLM. This is what it's designed to do. LLMs are a lossy statistical compression of their training data.

If you give it a prompt telling it to replicate a product that's in its training set then its optimal next token prediction output is going to be to a lossy copy of that product's source code.

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