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Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

writings.hongminhee.org

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Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#31

Post by Aurornis »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

> 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 Mi…

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.

Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#32

Post by nicole_express »

dwroberts wrote: post #8

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 th…

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.

Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#33

Post by spullara »

dathinab wrote: post #19
sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

> 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 Mi…

> 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…

if the actual text of the code isn't the same or obviously derivative, copyright doesn't apply at all.

Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#34

Post by antirez »

logicprog wrote: post #15

> 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: r…

> 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.

Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#35

Post by grahamlee »

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.

Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#36

Post by [deleted] »

ordu wrote: post #3

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 i…

[deleted]

Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#37

Post by sarchertech »

logicprog wrote: post #21
sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

> 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 Mi…

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.

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?

Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#38

Post by largbae »

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.

Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

#40

Post by johnofthesea »

ordu wrote: post #3

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 i…

> 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"?

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