431–440 of 505 posts
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Recipes are not copyrightable for that exact reason.
Substitue recipe for literally any other piece of unique information.
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Some different scenarios: (1) You leave your employer, don’t take any code with you, start your own company, reimplement your ex-employer’s product from scratch, but you do it in a very different way (different language, different design choices, different tech stack, different architecture) (2) You leave your employer, take their code with you, start your own company, make some superficial changes to their code to o…
Numbers 2, 3, & 4 are all illegal because they start with an illegal action. If I find a dollar on the sidewalk and put it in my wallets, is that stealing? If I punch a man getting change at a hotdog stand and a dollar falls on the sidewalk and then I put that in my wallet, is that stealing? It doesn't matter what the scenario is after you stole code from your former employer, all actions are poisoned after.
Imagine the ex-employee open sources it, and I’m an innocent third party using that code base, ignorant of its unlawful origins. Am I infringing their ex-employers copyright (even if unintentionally)? For (2), obviously “yes”. But what about (3) or (4)?
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Um, the entire intent of these "AI" systems is explicitly to reproduce copyrighted work with mechanical changes to make it not appear to be a verbatim copy. That is the whole purpose and mechanism by which they operate. Also the intent does not matter under law - not intending to break the law is not a defense if you break the law. Not intending to take someone's property doesn't mean it becomes your property. You mi…
> Also the intent does not matter under law - not intending to break the law is not a defense if you break the law Intent frequently matters a great deal when applying laws. In the specific area of copyright law, it doesn't itself make the use non infringing, but it can absolutely impact the damages or a fair use argument.
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Um, the entire intent of these "AI" systems is explicitly to reproduce copyrighted work with mechanical changes to make it not appear to be a verbatim copy. That is the whole purpose and mechanism by which they operate. Also the intent does not matter under law - not intending to break the law is not a defense if you break the law. Not intending to take someone's property doesn't mean it becomes your property. You mi…
I actually once tracked this claim down in the case of stable diffusion. I concluded that it was just completely impossible for a properly trained stable diffusion model to reproduce the works it was trained on. The SD model easily fits on a typical USB stick, and comfortably in the memory of a modern consumer GPU. The training corpus for SD is a pretty large chunk of image data on the internet. That absolutely does…
Thinking in terms of compression, the compression in generative AI models is lossy. The mathematical bounds on compression only apply to lossless compression. Keeping in mind that a small fraction of the training corpus is presented to the training algorithm multiple times, it's not absurd to suggest that these works exist inside the algorithm in a recallable form. Hence the NYT's lawyers being able to write prompts that recall large chunks of NYT articles verbatim.
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Software like Blackduck or Scanoss is designed to identify exactly that type of behaviour. It is used very often to scan closed source software and to check whether it contains snippets that are copied from open source with incompatible licenses (e.g. GPL). To be able to do so, these softwares build a syntax tree of what your code snippet is, and compare the tree structure with similar trees in open source software w…
But there has to be a threshold. If a GPL project contains a function which takes two variables and returns x+y, and I have functionally identical code in a project I made with an incompatible license, it is obviously absurd to sue me.
As a matter of fact, the Eclipse Foundation requires every contributor to declare that every piece of code is their own original creation and is not a copy/paste from other projects, with the exception possibly of other Eclipse Foundation or Apache Foundation projects because their respective licenses allow that. Even code snippets from StackOverflow are formally forbidden.
If I am not mistaken, in the Oracle-Google trial over Java on Android, at the end Google re-implementation of Java API on Android was considered fair-use, because Google kept the original "signatures" of the Java SDK API and rewrote most of the implementation with the exception of copying "0.4% of the total Java source code and was minimal" [1] However the trial came to this conclusion after several iterations in court.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....
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Yeah many industries like: - Big Corps that buy IP - Patent Trolls - Companies that fuck over artists
Why would anyone make video games if they couldn't make money from selling them?
Of course, money is a huge motivator, but so is self-expression.
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The simple version is that code is copyrightable as an expression . And the underlaying algorithm is patentable . The legal term you're looking for here is the "Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison" test; What remains if you subtract all the non-copyrightable elements from a given piece of code.
Algorithms have become patentable only very recently in the history of patents, without a rationale being ever provided for this change, and in some countries they have never become patentable. Even in the countries other than USA where algorithms have become patentable, that happened only due to USA blackmailing those countries into changing their laws "to protect (American) IP". It is true however that there exist…
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I suspect that this is exactly what will happen; not just with code, but also prose and artwork. Someone is likely to design an LLM that is specifically trained to do exactly that. Lots of money to be made...
I was mainly inspired by this section: > Specifically, the judge cited the study's observation that Copilot reportedly "rarely emits memorized code in benign situations, and most memorization occurs only when the model has been prompted with long code excerpts that are very similar to the training data." That almost sounds like it'd be fine to train an "art transformation model" which takes an image and transforms it…
There is a reason a famous AI model architecture is called transformer, it is pretty much optimised to be good at transforming artistic and intellectual works.
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> The copilot team rushed to slap a copyright filter on top to keep these verbatim examples from showing up, and now claims they never happen. More than that: the fact that they claimed it wasn't possible before adding the filter, to filter out the thing that said wasn't possible. This doesn't help me trust anything else they might say or have already said. My take on that was always: if it isn't possible, then why a…
How do you know they aren’t training it on their internal code? Since you really need to work hard to make the AI spit out anything verbatim, and you have no knowledge of their internal code, how could you ever prove or deny it?
Because if they were, they would have said.
It would be an excellent answer to the concerns being discussed here: “we are so sure that there is nothing to worry about in this regard, that we are using our own code as well as the stuff we've schlepped from github and other public sources”.