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

Post by amarant » Mon, Mar 09, 2026, 6:04 PM UTC

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #72

amarant wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is poorly written. Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at it's code! What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code, only the API and the test suite. The new implementation is all Claude. And the implementation is different enough to be considered original, completely different structure, design, and hey, a 48x improvement in performanc…

did he claim that Claude wasn't trained on the original? Or just that he didn't personally provide Claude with a copy?

Post by thenewnewguy » Mon, Mar 09, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #20

ordu wrote: post #3

I believe it is a narrow view of the situation. If we take a look into the history, into the reasons for inventing GPL, we'll see that it was an attempt to fight copyrights with copyrights. The very name 'copyleft' is trying to convey the idea. What AI are eroding is copyright. You can re-implement not just a GPL program, but to reverse engineer and re-implement a closed source program too, people have demonstrated i…

> LLM as the main weapon LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS. I don't think that's an exciting idea for the Free Software Foundation. Perhaps with time we…

Post by kjksf » Mon, Mar 09, 2026, 6:15 PM UTC

re-thc wrote: post #82

amarant wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is poorly written. Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at it's code! What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code, only the API and the test suite. The new implementation is all Claude. And the implementation is different enough to be considered original, completely different structure, design, and hey, a 48x improvement in performanc…

> What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code Who opened the PR? Who co-authored the commits? It's clearly on Github. > Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at its code! So there you have it. If he looked, he co-authored then there's that.

Post by satvikpendem » Mon, Mar 09, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

bmcahren wrote: post #99

sigseg1v wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM and it was trained on the existing work, that's a derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.

LLMs do not encode nor encrypt their training data. The fact they can recite training data is a defect not a default. You can understand this more simply by calculating the model size as an inverse of a fantasy compression algorithm that is 50% better than SOTA. You'll find you'd still be missing 80-90% of the training data even if it were as much of a stochastic parrot as you may be implying. The outputs of AI are n…

Post by malicka » Mon, Mar 09, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

margalabargala wrote: post #112

dathinab wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been its maintainer for years. I would argue it's irrelevant if they looked or didn't look at the code. As well as weather he was or wasn't familiar with it. What matters is, that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it. How that tool works doesn't really matter. Neither does it make a difference if you obfuscate that…

> If it isn't "just" a tool, then it did engage in copyright infringement Copyright infringement is a thing humans do. It's not a human. Just like how the photos taken by a monkey with a camera have no copyright. Human law binds humans.