Good idea, but as several comments here suggest, the time when this sort of thing could be taken as satire is gone. I promise you there are multiple people here thinking that this is a good idea. I predict that within a year we will see a service that does exactly this.
Malus – Clean Room as a Service
301–310 of 566 posts
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#302The post claims (tongue-in-cheek, of course) that their customer owns the resulting code. But that's not true! According to binding precedent, works created by an AI are not protected by copyright. NO ONE OWNS THEM!!! I think maybe this is a good thing, but honestly, it's hard to tell.
If you’re referring to Thaler v. Perlmutter, that is not binding precedent nationwide, only in courts under the D.C. Circuit. And it only applies to “pure” AI-generated works; it did not address AI-assisted works, which seem very likely to be copyrightable.
Though here, the purpose is still served.
If I want to clone some GPL clone into a MIT license, if it ends up in the public domain because it can't be copyrighted, what do I care? I've still got the code I want without the GPL.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is satire, but the very notion of open source license obligations is meaningless in context. FLOSS licenses do not require you to publish your purely internal changes to the code; any publication happens by your choice, and given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever, publishing your software with a proprietary copyright isn't going to exactly save…
"given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever" I'm missing something there, that's precisely what I'm arguing again. How can it do a clean-room reimplementation when the open source code is most likely in the training data? That only works if you would train on everything BUT the implementation you want. It's definitely feasible but wouldn't that be prohi…
Civil War Hospital Clean Room equivalent
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#304Are licenses even enforceable now? Given that the law is not being followed in the United States anymore?
Everything is enforceable by the rich, nothing is enforceable by the poor
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
"given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever" I'm missing something there, that's precisely what I'm arguing again. How can it do a clean-room reimplementation when the open source code is most likely in the training data? That only works if you would train on everything BUT the implementation you want. It's definitely feasible but wouldn't that be prohi…
If I hired a human to write a clone of GNU grep to be released under a MIT license, and he wrote one that was performed exactly the same as GNU grep, it would be impossible for me to prove that the guy I hired didn't look at the GNU code. But we'd be able to look at his clone code and see it's different, with different algorithms, etc. We could do a compare and see if there are any parts that were copied. It's certai…
What you argue is a non-sequitur and regardless of case law really makes no sense when the spirit of the action is to replicate something. Reasonable people would say that replicating and disseminating code with the express purpose of avoiding copyright is a violation of copyright and why it exists in the first place.
Just because something is trivial enough to copy does not mean it was trivial to conceive of and codify. Mens rea really does matter when we are talking about defrauding intellectual property holders and stealing their opportunity.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#306I feel like this is related to these issues (with somebody attempting this approach for real): https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331
It also shows why this approach is questionable. Opus 4.6 without tool use or web access can provide chardets source code in full from memory/training data (ironically, including the licensing header): https://gist.github.com/yannleretaille/1ce99e1872e5f3b7b133e...
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#307Is AI-driven clean room implementation a wild west at the moment? I suppose there haven't yet been any cases to test this out in real life?
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#308Edit: I did it. Paid them $0.51 to clean room `copyleft`, just to see what would happen. A clean package is now sitting on my desktop, custom-built (I presume) and fully documented. Deleting it now, for obvious reasons. But is it still satire if they actually provide the literal service they're satirizing? How far do they take the satire? If you pay them do they actually generate output?
Is it satire? Or is it a warning?
If it's a warning, it's a warning that also delivers the thing it's warning about.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this doesn't cause a…
The reason speed limits make such a great example for these arguments is because they're a preemptive law. Technically, nobody is directly harmed by speeding. We outlaw speeding on the belief that it statistically leads to and/or is correlated with other harms. Contrast this to a law against assault or theft: in those kinds of cases, the law makes the direct harm itself illegal. Increasing the precision of enforcemen…
This unwritten distinction exists only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression. There is no upside (even if getting away with speeding feels good). We should strive to enforce all laws 100% of the time as that is the only fair option.
If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#310> 2010, Jordan Peterson: clean your room
> 2026, Malus: Clean Room as a Service
> 2026, Jordan Peterson: how could I have missed this business opportunity