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

writings.hongminhee.org

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

#101

Post by simonw »

logicprog wrote: post #21
sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

> Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Mi…

I just don't see how it's relevant whether he did look or didn't. In my opinion, it's not just legally valid to make a re-implementation of something if you've seen the code as long as it doesn't copy expressive elements. I think it's also ethically fine as well to use source code as a reference for re-implementing something as long as it doesn't turn into an exact translation.

Right. The alternative is that we reward Dan for his 14 years of volunteer maintenance of a project... by banning him from working on anything similar under a different license for the rest of his life.

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

#102

Post by babypuncher »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

> Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Mi…

What if we said that generative AI output is simply not copyrightable. Anything an AI spits out would automatically be public domain, except in cases where the output directly infringes the rights of an existing work.

This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the work to be truly public domain.

I think this also helps somewhat with the ethical quandary of these models being trained on public data while contributing nothing of value back to the public, and disincentivize the production of slop for profit.

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

#103

Post by kelseyfrog »

In the corporate world, we've started using reimplementation as a way to access tooling that security won't authorize.

Sec has a deny by default policy. Eng has a use-more-AI policy. Any code written in-house is accepted by default. You can see where this is going.

We've been using AI to reimplement tooling that security won't approve. The incentives conspired in the worst outcome, yet here we are. If you want a different outcome, you need to create different incentives.

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

#104

Post by armchairhacker »

grahamlee wrote: post #35

It's clear that we're entering a new era of copyright _expectations_ (whether we get new _legislation_ is different), but for now realise this: the people like me who like copyleft can do this too. We can take software we like, point an agent at it, and tell it to make a new version with the AGPL3.0-or-later badge on the front.

The point of GPL is to restrict distribution. If there’s already an MIT version, it’s useless.

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

#105

Post by axus »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

> Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Mi…

Oracle had it's day in court with Google over the Java APIs. Reimplementing APIs can be done without copyright infringement, but Oracle must have tried to find real infringement during discovery.

In this case, we could theoretically prove that the new chardet is a clean reimplementation. Blanchard can provide all of the prompts necessary to re-implement again, and for the cost of the tokens anyone can reproduce the results.

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

#106

Post by ticulatedspline »

Surprised they don't mention Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. Seems a bit myopic to condone the general legality while arguing "you can only use it how I like it".

It also doesn't talk about the far more interesting philosophical queston. Does what Blanchard did cover ALL implementations from Claude? What if anyone did exactly what he did, feed it the test cases and say "re-implement from scratch", ostensibly one would expect the results to be largely similar (technically under the right conditions deterministically similar)

could you then fork the project under your own name and a commercial license? when you use an LLM like this, to basically do what anyone else could ask it to do how do you attach any license to it? Is it first come first serve?

If an agent is acting mostly on its own it feels like if you found a copy of Harry Potter in the fictional library of Babel, you didn't write it, just found it amongst the infinite library, but if you found it first could you block everyone else that stumbles on a near-identical copy elsewhere in the library? or does each found copy represent a "Re-implementation" that could be individually copyrighted?

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

#107

Post by cubefox »

zozbot234 wrote: post #81
cubefox wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's naive. Copyright doesn't just apply to software. There already have been countless lawsuits about copying music long before the term "open source" was invented. No, changing the lyrics a bit doesn't circumvent copyright. Nor does translating a Stephen King novel to German and switching the names of the places and characters. A court ordered the first Nosferatu movie to be destroyed because it had too many simi…

Claude was asked to implement a public API, not an entire codebase. The definition of a public API is largely functional; even in an unusually complex case like the Java standard facilities (which are unusually creative even in the structure and organization of the API itself) the reimplementation by Google was found to be fair use.

> Claude was asked to implement a public API, not an entire codebase.

Allegedly. There have been several people who doubted this story. So how to find out who is right? Well, just let Claude compare the sources. Coincidentally, Claude Opus 4.6 doesn't just score 75.6% on SWE-bench Verified but also 90.2% on BigLaw Bench.

It's like our copyright lawyer is conveniently also a developer. And possibly identical to the AI that carried out the rewrite/reimplemention in question in the first place.

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

#108

Post by danbruc »

Why are people even having problems with sharing their changes to begin with? Just publishing it somewhere does not seem too expensive. The risk of accidentally including stuff that is not supposed to become public? Or are people regularly completely changing codebases and do not want to make the effort freely available, maybe especially to competitors? I would have assumed that the common case is adding a missing feature here, tweaking something there, if you turn the entire thing on its head, why not have your own alternative solution from scratch?

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

#109

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

If Blanchard is claiming not to have been substantively involved in the creation of the new implementation of chardet (i.e. "Claude did it"), then the new implementation is machine generated, and in the USA cannot be copyright and thus cannot be licensed.

If he is claiming to have been somehow substantively "enough" involved to make the code copyrightable, then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementation makes the new one almost certainly a derivative of the original.

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

#110

Post by grahamlee »

armchairhacker wrote: post #104
grahamlee wrote: post #35

It's clear that we're entering a new era of copyright _expectations_ (whether we get new _legislation_ is different), but for now realise this: the people like me who like copyleft can do this too. We can take software we like, point an agent at it, and tell it to make a new version with the AGPL3.0-or-later badge on the front.

The point of GPL is to restrict distribution. If there’s already an MIT version, it’s useless.

but the point of an EULA is to restrict distribution, so AGPL3 can help there.
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