161–170 of 623 posts
So of course we feel that something wrong has happened even if it's not easy to put one's finger on it.
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.
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.
Perhaps we should finally admit that copyright has always been nonsense, and abolish this ridiculous measure once and for all
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
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.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 bus…
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.
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…
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.
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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.
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 noto…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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/
For the right goal, he should have called it "rightcopy".