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

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

#141

Post by Legend2440 »

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…

>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.

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

#142

Post by wolvesechoes »

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

Unless it is IP of the same big corpos that consumed all content available. Good luck with eroding them.

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

#144

Post by overfeed »

cloverich wrote: post #135
davidw wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

> 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.

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

#145

Post by moralestapia »

kazinator wrote: post #53

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.

Courts have already ruled that AI-generated work belongs to the public domain. So, even the MIT license does not apply.

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

#146

Post by wolvesechoes »

drnick1 wrote: post #25

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.

> porting old GPL programs, typically written in C, to Rust and relicensing them as MIT

Everything for memory safety.

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

#147

Post by enriquto »

armchairhacker wrote: post #104
grahamlee wrote: post #35

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.

The point of GPL is to restrict distribution. If there’s already an MIT version, it’s useless.

> 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.

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

#148

Post by svilen_dobrev »

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

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

#149

Post by webstrand »

pocksuppet wrote: post #70
webstrand wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If not for copyright, you could always do that and copyleft wouldn't be needed.

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.

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

#150

Post by joshmoody24 »

moi2388 wrote: post #12

Perhaps we should finally admit that copyright has always been nonsense, and abolish this ridiculous measure once and for all

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.
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