Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

This could be read as a reformulation of the old adage - "what's mine is mine, and what is yours, is mine too".

So, you can pilfer the commons ("public") but not stuff unavailable in source form.

If we expand your thought experiment to other forms of expression, say videos on YT or Netflix, then yes.

I don't think you can classify "public data in" as public domain. Public data could also include commercial licenses which forbid using it in any way other than what the license states. Just because the source is open for viewing does not necessarily mean it is OSL.

That's the core issue here. All models are trained on ALL source code that is publicly available irrespective of how it was licensed. It is illegal but every company training LLMs is doing it anyways.

Copyright is not a blacklist but an allowlist of things kept aside for the holder. Everything else is free game. LLM ingestion comes under fair use so no worries. If someone can get their hand on it, nothing in law stops it from training ingestion.

We can debate if this law is moral. Like the GP I took agree public data in -> public domain out is what's right for society. Copyright as an artificial concept has gone on for long enough.

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot.

How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no permission was sought from authors of source code the models were trained on. So there is no way to just release the code created by a machine into public domain without knowing how the model was inspired to come up with the generated code in the first place. Pretty sure it would be considered in the scope of "reverse engineering" and that is not specific only to humans. You can extend it to machines as well.

EDIT: I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code. And a licensing model with original authors (all Github users who contributed code in some form) should be setup to be reimbursed by AI companies. In other words, a % of profits must flow back to community as a whole every time code-related tokens are generated. Even if everyone receives pennies it doesn't matter. That is fair. Also should extend to artists whose art was used for training.

This has the potential to kill open source, or at least the most restrictive licenses (GPL, AGPL, ...): if a license no longer protects software from unwanted use, the only possible strategy is to make the development closed source.