171–180 of 623 posts
TheAdd something like this to NEW gpl /bsd/mit licenses:
'you are forbidden from reimplementing it with AI'
or just:
'all clones, reimpletetions with ai etc must still be GPL'
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…
Company incorporates GPL code in their product? Never once have courts decided to uphold copyright. HP did that many times. Microsoft got caught doing it. And yet the GPL was never applied to their products. Every time there was an excuse. An inconsistent excuse.
Schoolkid downloads a movie? 30,000 USD per infraction PLUS armed police officer goes in and enforces removal of any movies.
Or take the very subject here. AI training WAS NOT considered fair use when OpenAI violated copyright to train. Same with Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, ... They incorporated harry potter and the linux kernel in ChatGPT, in the model itself. Undeniable. Literally. So even if you accept that it's changed now, OpenAI should still be forced to redistribute the training set, code, and everything needed to run the model for everything they did up to 2020. Needless to say ... courts refused to apply that.
So just apply "the law", right. Courts' judgement of using AI to "remove GPL"? Approved. Using AI to "make the next Disney-style movie"? SEND IN THE ARMY! Whether one or the other violates the law according to rational people? Whatever excuse to avoid that discussion is good enough.
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…
That's naive. Copyright doesn't just apply to software. There already have been countless lawsuits about copying music long before the term "open source" was invented. No, changing the lyrics a bit doesn't circumvent copyright. Nor does translating a Stephen King novel to German and switching the names of the places and characters. A court ordered the first Nosferatu movie to be destroyed because it had too many simi…
There is some precedent for this, e.g. Alchemised is a recent best seller that had just enough changed from its Harry Potter fan fiction source in order to avoid copyright infringement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemised
(I avoided the term “remove copyright” here because the new work is still under copyright, just not Harry Potter - related copyright.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM and it was trained on the existing work, that's a derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.
In order for it to be creatively derivative you would need to copy the structure, logic, organization, and sequence of operations not just reimplement the functionality. It is pretty clear in this case that wasn't done.
I think the missing thing here is that the license violation already happened. Most of the big models trained on data in a manner that violated terms of service. We'll need a court case but I think it's extremely reasonable to consider any model trained on GPL code to be infected with open licensing requirements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's naive. Copyright doesn't just apply to software. There already have been countless lawsuits about copying music long before the term "open source" was invented. No, changing the lyrics a bit doesn't circumvent copyright. Nor does translating a Stephen King novel to German and switching the names of the places and characters. A court ordered the first Nosferatu movie to be destroyed because it had too many simi…
> Just like rephrasing A Song ot Ice and Fire a bit, and switching to a different language, doesn't remove its copyright. There is some precedent for this, e.g. Alchemised is a recent best seller that had just enough changed from its Harry Potter fan fiction source in order to avoid copyright infringement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemised (I avoided the term “remove copyright” here because the new work is sti…
I think the missing thing here is that the license violation already happened. Most of the big models trained on data in a manner that violated terms of service. We'll need a court case but I think it's extremely reasonable to consider any model trained on GPL code to be infected with open licensing requirements.
But agreed that we're waiting for a court case to confirm that. Although really, the main questions for any court cases are not going to be around the principle of fair use itself or whether training is transformative enough (it obviously is), but rather on the specifics:
1) Was any copyrighted material acquired legally (not applicable here), and
2) Is the LLM always providing a unique expression (e.g. not regurgitating books or libraries verbatim)
And in this particular case, they confirmed that the new implementation is 98.7% unique.
> He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch.
From GPL2:
> The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.
Is a project's test suite not considered part of its source code? When I make modifications to a project, its test cases are very much a part of that process.
If the test suite is part of this library's source code, and Claude was fed the test suite or interface definition files, is the output not considered a work based on the library under the terms of LGPL 2.1?