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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

#511

Post by red_admiral »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #409
dogcomplex wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should be removing IP law entirely, not strengthening it to cover entire classes of problem even when implemented entirely differently. Same for anyone trying to claim "colorful monster creatures" as innately Pokemon IP. Just because someone climbed a mountain first doesn't mean they own it forever. Nobody should be honouring any of these claims. Nor should we be treating AI models themselves as respected IP. They…

Good news! LLM output cannot be copyrighted. Everything that an LLM produces is automatically, irrevocably, in the public domain.

If the LLM output is already someone else's copyrighted work, the LLM doesn't change that?

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

#512

Post by raxxorraxor »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #409
dogcomplex wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should be removing IP law entirely, not strengthening it to cover entire classes of problem even when implemented entirely differently. Same for anyone trying to claim "colorful monster creatures" as innately Pokemon IP. Just because someone climbed a mountain first doesn't mean they own it forever. Nobody should be honouring any of these claims. Nor should we be treating AI models themselves as respected IP. They…

Good news! LLM output cannot be copyrighted. Everything that an LLM produces is automatically, irrevocably, in the public domain.

I think it can be copyrighted or is a very complex legal issue. Coding support is used in commercial apps where copyrights are fully reserved. I cannot be feasibly determined if any output is purely LLM or not.

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

#513

Post by vbarrielle »

xbar wrote: post #461

Oracle v Google concluded that APIs could not be protected by either copyright or copyleft. It seemed to me at the time that most here supported that decision. Has anything changed?

No, APIs fall under copyright, but the Supreme Court found that Google's reimplementation of Java's API was falling under fair use. Fair use is decided case by case, one cannot use that decision as a precedent.

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

#514

Post by noemit »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #279

> If source code can now be generated from a specification, the specification is where the essential intellectual content of a GPL project resides. Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-like to corporate software packages, even if the so-called owners did not like it. We're ready to throw it all away, and let intellectual property owners get so much more control. The implications will not end up b…

Copyright has always benefited those with power, down to the very first instance: Albrecht Durer bullying little children who wanted to make inferior copies of his prints so that their familities could enjoy the art. Durer insisted the art was only for nobles. Ab initio

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

#515

Post by red_admiral »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #279

> If source code can now be generated from a specification, the specification is where the essential intellectual content of a GPL project resides. Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-like to corporate software packages, even if the so-called owners did not like it. We're ready to throw it all away, and let intellectual property owners get so much more control. The implications will not end up b…

The specification of chardet, which started this all off, is essentially forced by the unicode statndard though.

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

#516

Post by gspr »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #500
gspr wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel as though, from an information-theoretic standpoint, it can't be possible that an LLM (which is almost certainly It doesn't need to for my argument to make sense. It's a problem if it reproduces a single copyrighted work (near)-verbatim. Which we have plenty of examples of.

Do we? Even when people attempt to jail break most models with 1000s of prompts they are only able to get a paragraph or two of well known copyrighted works and some blocks of paraphrased text, and that's with giving it a substantially leading question.

It surely doesn't matter how leading or contorted the prompt has to be if it shows that the model is encoding the copyrighted work verbatimly or nearly so.

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

#517

Post by Frieren »

xyzal wrote: post #508
vbarrielle wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite in my opinion. The output of an LLM from a simple prompt falls into the public domain, but if you also give a copyrighted work as input, the mechanistic transformation performed will not alter the original license (same as encoding a video does not change its license).

Are training data counted as input? It would be interesting to see a court ruling that the output of LLMs trained on copyleft code are licensed under the GPL ... and all other viral licenses simultaneously

> Are training data counted as input?

It is quantum legality, to use copyright input is legal or illegal depending on the observer.

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

#518

Post by dTal »

devonkelley wrote: post #450
thayne wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I really don't think we want APIs to be protected by IP. But in this case it isn't just the API, there were also tests involved. I think you could make a pretty strong argument that if you used a test suite to get an agent to implement some code, the code is a derivative product of the test code.

[dead]

What exactly is the difference between "a machine-readable contract for what the output has to be" and "source code"?

What is the difference between an "agent" and a "compiler"?

For that matter, what is the difference between "I got an agent to provide a high level description" and a decompiler?

What is the difference between ["decompiling" a binary, editing the resulting source, recompiling, and redistributing] and [analyzing the behavior of a binary, feeding that description into an LLM, generating source code that replicates that behavior, editing that, recompiling and redistributing]?

Takeaway: we are now in a world where software tools can climb up and down the abstraction stack willy nilly and independently of human effort. Legal tools that attempt to track the "provenance" of "source code" were already shaky but are now crumbling entirely.

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

#519

Post by wiz21c »

within 20 years, everyone will be developing software which will be copyrighted partly by AI and be behind walled gardens. Sure you'll be able to do things locally but everything (security clearance, walled garden, government's control etc) but it will forever remain at the level of "tinkering".

If you are 50 years old or more, the computing you were born with (you own the computer, you own the programs) will be gone. Copyleft only makes sense if you own the computer.

That makes me sad.

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

#520

Post by Saline9515 »

xyzal wrote: post #508
vbarrielle wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite in my opinion. The output of an LLM from a simple prompt falls into the public domain, but if you also give a copyrighted work as input, the mechanistic transformation performed will not alter the original license (same as encoding a video does not change its license).

Are training data counted as input? It would be interesting to see a court ruling that the output of LLMs trained on copyleft code are licensed under the GPL ... and all other viral licenses simultaneously

Unless your llm works by quoting large parts of copyrighted works, reinterpretations of them aren't copyrighted. Because it's not a copy.
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