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No right to relicense this project

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Re: No right to relicense this project

#111

Post by bsza »

swiftcoder wrote: post #20
scosman wrote: post #14

Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code. Question: if they had built one using AI teams in both “rooms”, one writing a spec the other implementing, would that be fine? You’d need to verify spec doesn’t include source code, but that’s easy enough. It seems to mostly follow the IBM-era precedent. However, since the model probably had the original c…

> Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code. It doesn't matter how they structure the agents. Since chardet is in the LLM training set, you can't claim any AI implementation thereof is clean room.

So by that logic, you're not legally allowed to implement your own character detector and license it as your own if you've ever looked at chardet's source code? I'm confused. I thought copyright laws protect intellectual property as-is, not the impression it leaves on someone.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#112

Post by swiftcoder »

bsza wrote: post #111
swiftcoder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code. It doesn't matter how they structure the agents. Since chardet is in the LLM training set, you can't claim any AI implementation thereof is clean room.

So by that logic, you're not legally allowed to implement your own character detector and license it as your own if you've ever looked at chardet's source code? I'm confused. I thought copyright laws protect intellectual property as-is, not the impression it leaves on someone.

> if you've ever looked at chardet's source code

If you wish to be able to claim in court that it is a "clean room" implementation, yes.

Clean room implementations are specifically where a company firewalls the implementing team off from any knowledge of the original implementation, in order to be able to swear in court that their implementation does not make any use of the original code (which they are in such a case likely not licensed to use).

Re: No right to relicense this project

#113

Post by Maken »

skeledrew wrote: post #81

I feel like the author is missing a huge point here by fighting this. The entire reason why GPL and any other copyleft license exists in the first place is to ensure that the rights of a user to modify, etc a work cannot be ever taken away. Before, relicensing as MIT - or any other fully permissive license - would've meant open doors to apply restrictions going forward, but with AI this is now a non-issue. Code is no…

The user is the end-user of the product. If the relicensing means that someone down the line receives a close-down binary application that he cannot modify, that's a violation of the user's rights.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#114

Post by rwmj »

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…

No serious enterprise SaaS company differentiates themselves solely on the product (the products are usually terrible). It's the sales channel, the fact that you know how to bill a big company, the human engineer who is sent on site to deploy and integrate the product, the people on the support line 24/7, the regulatory framework that ensures the customer can operate legally and obtain insurance, the fact that there's a deep pool of potential hires who have used and understand the product. Those are the differentiators.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#115

Post by camgunz »

senko wrote: post #56
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

That's a very incorrect reading. AI can't be the author of the work. Human driving the AI can, unless they zero-shotted the solution with no creative input.

Only the authored parts can be copyrighted, and only humans can author [0].

"For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user."

"In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that 'the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.'"

"Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection. In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are 'independent of' and do 'not affect' the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself."

IMO this is pretty common sense. No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it.

[0]: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-40

Re: No right to relicense this project

#116

Post by antirez »

I believe that Pilgrim here does not understand very well how copyright works:

> Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code

This is simply not true. The reason why the "clean room" concept exists is precisely since actually the law recognizes that independent implementations ARE possibile. The "clean room" thing is a trick to make the litigation simpler, it is NOT required that you are not exposed to the original code. For instance, Linux was implemented even if Linus and other devs where well aware of Unix internals. The law really mandates this: does the new code copy something that was in the original one? The clean room trick makes it simpler to say, it is not possible, if there are similar things it is just by accident. But it is NOT a requirement.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#117

Post by jacquesm »

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 person using the LLM waived any right to be recognised as the author.

They can't waive their liability from being identified as an infringer though.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#118

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

dathinab wrote: post #110

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 wh…

I think you could have an LLM produce a written English detailed description of the complete logic of the program and tests.

Then use another LLM to produce code from that spec.

This would be similar to the cleanroom technique.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#119

Post by Garlef »

IanCal wrote: post #34
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 might be interested in the dark factory work here https://factory.strongdm.ai/ They do something very similar for some of their work. It’s hard to use external services so they replicate them and the cost of doing so has come down from “don’t be daft, we can’t reimplement slack and google drive this sprint just to make testing faster” to realistic. They run the sdks against the live services and their own impleme…

> It’s hard to use external services

I think it's interesting to add what they use it for and why its hard.

What they use it for:

- It's about automated testing against third party services.

- It's not about replicating the product for end users

Why using external services is hard/problematic

- Performance: They want to have super fast feedback cycles in the agentic loop: In-Memory tests. So they let the AI write full in-memory simulations of (for example) the slack api that are behaviorally equivalent for their use cases.

- Feasiblity: The sandboxes offered by these services usually have performance limits (= number of requests per month, etc) that would easily be exhausted if attached to a test harness that runs every other minute in an automated BDD loop.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#120

Post by skeledrew »

user34283 wrote: post #67
DarkmSparks wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Because they couldnt have done any of that refactoring without a licence to do so, and that licence forbids them from relicencing it.

Afaik you can do whatever you like to GPL licensed code, you do not need a license to refactor it. I understand you need to publish the source code of your modifications, if you distribute them outside of your company.

You can do anything except change the license, which ensures that right to do anything passes on to others in perpetuity. That's how it's designed.
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