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No right to relicense this project

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Re: No right to relicense this project

#101

Post by orthoxerox »

senko wrote: post #62
Roritharr wrote: post #13

As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context. A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern. One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical. Took him a week after work. I…

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?" DMCA. The EULA likely prohibits reverse engineering. If a competitor does that, hit'em with lawyers. Or, if you want to be able to sleep at night, recognize this as an opportunity instead of a threat.

What about jurisdictions where reverse engineering is an inalienable right?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#102

Post by amelius »

3rodents wrote: post #92
Roritharr wrote: post #13

As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context. A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern. One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical. Took him a week after work. I…

You're not describing anything new, you're describing progress. A company invests time and money and expertise into building a product, it becomes established, people copy in 1/10th of the time, the quality of products across the industry improve. Long before generative AI, Instagram famously copied Snapchat's stories concept in a weekend, and that is now a multi-multi-multi-billion contributor to Meta's bottom line.…

> You don't protect yourself from your competitor by worrying about them copying your mobile app.

They did not copy the mobile app. They copied the service.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#103

Post by duskdozer »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #9
mytailorisrich wrote: post #2

> Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation). I don't think that the second sentence is a valid claim per se, it depends on what this "rewritten code" actually looks like (IANAL). Edit: my understanding of "clean room…

I came here to say this. While I agree with Mark that what they’re doing is not nice , I’m not sure it’s wrong . A clean-room implementation is one way the industry worked around licensing in the past (and present, I guess), but it’s not a requirement in law as far as I know. I’m not sure that “a total rewrite” wouldn’t, in fact, pass muster - depending on how much of a rewrite it was of course. The ‘clean room’ appr…

I spent like two minutes looking at the diff between the original and the supposed "clean room" implementation [1] and already found identical classes, variable names, methods, and parameters. It looks like there was no actual attempt at clean-rooming this, regardless of whether that "counts".

[1]https://github.com/chardet/chardet/compare/6.0.0.post1...7.0...

Re: No right to relicense this project

#104

Post by amelius »

Roritharr wrote: post #13

As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context. A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern. One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical. Took him a week after work. I…

Makes me wonder when AI will put the mobile phone OS duopoly to an end.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#105

Post by duskdozer »

spoiler wrote: post #38
imcritic wrote: post #32

Licenses are cancer and the enemy of opensource.

I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.

If the GPL causes you problems, then it's working as intended.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#106

Post by amelius »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #63
bandrami wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH as of yesterday the output of the LLM isn't copyrightable, which makes licensing it difficult

I wrote this comment on another thread earlier, but it seems relevant here, so I'll just c/p: I think we didn't even began to consider all the implications of this, and while people ran with that one case where someone couldn't copyright a generated image, it's not that easy for code. I think there needs to be way more litigation before we can confidently say it's settled. If "generated" code is not copyrightable, wh…

Maybe we should build an LLM that can be the judge of that :)

Re: No right to relicense this project

#107

Post by bakugo »

graemep wrote: post #99
bandrami wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH as of yesterday the output of the LLM isn't copyrightable, which makes licensing it difficult

As other's have pointed out, this case is really about refusing to allow an LLM to be recognised as the author. The person using the LLM waived any right to be recognised as the author. Its also US only. Other countries will differ. This means you can only rely on this ruling at all for something you are distributing only in the US. Might be OK for art, definitely not for most software. Very definitely not OK for a s…

> the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.

This seems extremely vague. One could argue that any part of the pipeline counts as an "arrangement necessary for the creation of the work", so who is the author? The prompter, the creator of the model, or the creator of the training data?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#108

Post by vkou »

zozbot234 wrote: post #49
oytis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It requires the original project to not be in the training data for the model for it to be a clean room rewrite

That only matters if expression of the original project really does end up in the rewrite, doesn't it? This can be checked for (by the team with access to the code) and it's also quite unlikely at least. It's not trivial at all to have an LLM replicate their training verbatim: even when feasible (the Harry Potter case, a work that's going to be massively overweighted in training due to its popularity) it takes very s…

> That only matters if expression of the original project really does end up in the rewrite, doesn't it?

If that were the case, nobody would bother with clean-room rewrites.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#109

Post by tclancy »

soulofmischief wrote: post #69

The README has clearly been touched by an LLM. Count the idiosyncrasies: “chardet 7.0 is a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x” Do people not write anymore?

I finally had to mute r/isthisai on Reddit because there’s now a subset of people who see the hand of AI in everything. Could that be generated by a clanker? Sure, but it’s also exactly what I would write if I wanted a quick pitch for a library that addresses some immediate concerns. It’s also what I would focus on if the fact we had just finished a rebuild from scratch.

As Freud famously said, sometimes an em dash is just an em dash.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#110

Post by dathinab »

The argument that a rewrite is a copyright violation because they are familiar with the code base is not fully sound.

"Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law.

Or else a artist having seen a picture of a sunset over an empty ocean wouldn't be allowed to pain another sunset over an empty ocean as people could claim copyright violation.

Through what is a violation is, if you place the code side by side and try to circumvent copyright law by just rephrasing the exact same code.

This also means that if you give an AI access to a code base and tell it to produce a new code base doing the same (or similar) it will most likely be ruled as copyright violation as it's pretty much a side by side rewriting.

But you very much can rewrite a project under new license even if you have in depth knowledge. IFF you don't have the old project open/look at it while doing so. Rewrite it from scratch. And don't just rewrite the same code from memory, but instead write fully new code producing the same/similar outputs.

Through while doing so is not per-se illegal, it is legally very attackable. As you will have a hard time defending such a rewrite from copyright claims (except if it's internally so completely different that it stops any claims of "being a copy", e.g. you use complete different algorithms, architecture, etc. to produce the same results in a different way).

In the end while technically "legally hard to defend" != "illegal", for companies it's most times best to treat it the same.

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