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Malus – Clean Room as a Service

malus.sh

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Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#351

Post by terryf »

hamdingers wrote: post #309
ff317 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The speed limit example is a great one. Consider a road that has a 35mph limit. Now - which of the following scenarios is SAFER: a) I'm driving on the road in a brand new 4x4 porsche on a sunny day with great visibility and brand new tyres. Doing 40mph. b) I'm driving on the same road in a 70s car with legal but somewhat worn out tyres, in the dark, while it's raining heavily. Doing 35mph.

Of course technically option a is violating the law but no sane police officer will give you a fine in this case. Nor should they! A robot will, however. This is stupid.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#352

Post by degamad »

Pannoniae wrote: post #135
jerf wrote: post #75

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…

Yup :P As in their post: "The future of software is not open. It is not closed. It is liberated, freed from the constraints of licenses written for a world in which reproduction required effort, maintained by a generation of developers who believed that sharing code was its own reward and have been comprehensively proven right about the sharing and wrong about the reward." This applies to open-source but also very we…

If they really believed that their process eliminated any licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to open source projects?

High quality decompilers have existed for a long time, and there's a lot more value in making a cleanroom implementation of Photoshop or Office than of Redis or Linux. Why go after such a small market?

I suspect the answer us that they don't believe it's legal, they just think that they can get away with it because they're less likely to get sued.

(I really suspect that they don't believe that at all, and it's all just a really good satire - after all, they blatantly called the company "EvilCorp" in Latin.)

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#354

Post by efreak »

rhoopr wrote: post #14

> You have been so generous, so unreasonably, almost suspiciously generous, that you have made it possible for an entire global economy to run on software that nobody technically owns, maintained by people that nobody technically employs, governed by licenses that nobody technically reads. It is a miracle of human cooperation. It is also, from a fiduciary standpoint, completely insane. Funny but true.

Where do you see this? It doesn't appear to be in the website (if it's in the video, I didn't watch it but it's not in the subtitle file)

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#355

Post by Barrin92 »

tavavex wrote: post #155

This is extremely good satire. Question is, why hasn't anyone done this for real? There's enough people with the right knowledge and who would love to destroy open source for personal gain. Is it that this kind of service would be so open to litigation that it would need a lot of money upfront? Or is someone already working on this, and we're just living out the last good days of OSS?

>why hasn't anyone done this for real?

because LLMs can't program anything of non-trivial complexity despite the persistent delusions from its advocates, same reason the lovers of OSS haven't magically fixed every bug in open source software.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#356

Post by ompogUe »

gbalduzzi wrote: post #327
hamdingers wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> 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). Isn't this the point of the whole conversation we are having here? Laws on copyright were not created for current AI usage on open source project replication. They need to change, because if they are perfectly enforced by the letter, they result in actions that are clearly against t…

^This. A large % of jurisprudence is in just trying to keep up with how tech disrupts society.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#357

Post by aero_code »

metalcrow wrote: post #283
mcherm wrote: post #249

The 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.

This is a misreading of the law. Court cases say that AI cannot own copyright, not that AI output cannot be copyrighted.

No, according to everything I've read before, the parent post was correct and you're not. This article clearly says "art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law":

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-co...

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#359

Post by Eisenstein »

pc86 wrote: post #316
c-linkage wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code is Law is pretty much demonstrates that it is not possible to precisely define law. https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2025/10/29/code-is-law-sparks... Additionally, law is not logical. Law is about justice and justice is not logical.

"Law is about justice" is one of those things a good professor gets every 1L to raise their hands in agreement to before spending the next semester proving why that's 100% not the case.

Justice is part of a moral framework. Law is part of a procedural framework. You can structure the law to try to optimize for justice, but the law has never been about morality, the law is about keeping society operating on top of whatever structure is dominant.

Example: the Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States in 1922 that a Japanese descended person could not naturalize as a US citizen despite having white skin because he was not technically Caucasian. The next year in 1923 they ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that an Indian descended man could not natural despite being Caucasian because his skin was not white.

Why did the court give two contradictory reasons for the rulings which would each be negated if the reasoning were swapped? I wouldn't say it was for justice. It was because America at that time did not want non-white immigrants, and what 'white' is, is a fiction that means something completely different than what it claims to mean, and the justices were upholding that structure.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#360

Post by fundad »

exceptione wrote: post #338
arrsingh wrote: post #295

It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could be a way for OSS devs to get paid. What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay…

I am only 50% certain that your idea is expanding on the satire, if not: project owners can provide dual licensing. I'm sorry if you are serious and didn't understand you.

I was going to say "this is just a license"
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