Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 200 posts

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#121

Post by Telaneo »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #108
Telaneo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that. If we can have this, but for everything, so films, books, TV, music and everything else, I'd agree. This however is not the world we live in. The amount of culture we could have from people remixing the past 50 years worth of c…

Code is not culture, nor art. I'm not sure why you'd want to compare them.

I want more high quality code and I want more high quality culture. Both have one major obstacle in the way and is at the core of this post, my comment and yours: Copyright. I fail to see why we should make exceptions to copyright for the sake of code, but not for the sake of culture.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#122

Post by progval »

amszmidt wrote: post #51
papercrane wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DMCA notice is available here: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-1... The notice has a list of files and says that they were copied from ffmpeg, removed the original copyright notice, added their own and licensed under the more permissive Apache license.

Thanks for the link; sadly none of the links to the repo can be viewed to see what exactly occurred. To those downvoting, curious why? Many of the links are not viewable, since GitHub hides them, so any discussion becomes quite tricky.

You can find an archive of the links' targets at https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:5861f19187336...

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#123

Post by F3nd0 »

larschdk wrote: post #114
habibur wrote: post #97

LGPL allows compiling the whole of ffmpeg into a so or lib and then dynamically linking from there for your closed source code. That's the main difference between LGPL and GPL. But if you change or add something in building ffmpeg.so that should be GPLed. Apparently they copied some files from ffmpeg mixed with their propitiatory code and compiled it as a whole. That's the problem here.

Copyright law defines derivative work by substantial similarity and dependence, not by technical mechanisms like linking. Technical measures such as linking is not a copyright concept. Dynamic linking is a condition for LGPL compliance, but it is not sufficient. Dynamic linking does not automatically prevent a combined work from being a derived work.

> Dynamic linking is a condition for LGPL compliance

No, it isn’t. The condition says to allow your users to make and use their own modifications to the part of the software which falls under the LGPL. Dynamic linking is only a convenient way of allowing this, not a requirement.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#124

Post by bobsmooth »

alienbaby wrote: post #59
bfrog wrote: post #39

I wonder how this will work with AI stuff generating code without any source or attribution. It’s not like the LLMs make this stuff up out of thin air it comes from source material.

Llm's do not verbatim disgorge chunks of the code they were trained on.

ChatGPT has given me code with comments so specific I found the original 6 year old github.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#125

Post by [deleted] »

martin-t wrote: post #92
meindnoch wrote: post #78

[flagged]

So progress is always good, no matter how many people's work you exploit without their consent? You have a nice car, can I just take it and use it myself? Why is code any different? Is slavery OK too? A much more interesting problem is how to create prosperity without throwing people under the bus - with everybody who contributed profiting proportionally to their contribution.

[deleted]

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#126

Post by throwaway150 »

eithed wrote: post #84
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software licensing is just another form of property rights, and property rights is what society uses to incentivise civility.

I guess who cares about civility if you're the last man standing. Also - that word: civility. We're animals driven by self-interest. What should civility even mean here

> We're animals driven by self-interest. What should civility even mean here

That self-interest has led to cooperation between humans. Humans have evolved to work together, cooperate, form social bonds, and friendships because doing so improves survival and wellbeing over the long run. Civility is part of that toolkit. It is not a denial of self-interest. Civility is part of that self-interest.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#127

Post by kelseyfrog »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #118
kelseyfrog wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The die is certainly not multi-terabyte. A more realistic number would be 32k-sided to 50k-sided if we want to go with a pretty average token vocabulary size. Really, it comes down to encoding. Arbitrarily short utf-8 encoded strings can be generated using a coin flip.

The number of sides has nothing to do with the data within. It's not random and sometimes it repeats things in an obviously non-chance way.

Of course, it's random and by chance - tokens are literally sampled from a predicted probability distribution. If you mean chance=uniform probability you have to articulate that.

It's trivially true that arbitrarily short reconstructions can be reproduced by virtually any random process and reconstruction length scales with the similarity in output distribution to that of the target. This really shouldn't be controversial.

My point is that matching sequence length and distributional similarity are both quantifiable. Where do you draw the line?

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#128

Post by Dylan16807 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #127
Dylan16807 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of sides has nothing to do with the data within. It's not random and sometimes it repeats things in an obviously non-chance way.

Of course, it's random and by chance - tokens are literally sampled from a predicted probability distribution. If you mean chance=uniform probability you have to articulate that. It's trivially true that arbitrarily short reconstructions can be reproduced by virtually any random process and reconstruction length scales with the similarity in output distribution to that of the target. This really shouldn't be controve…

> Of course, it's random and by chance - tokens are literally sampled from a predicted probability distribution.

Picking randomly out of a non-random distribution doesn't give you a random result.

And you don't have to use randomness to pick tokens.

> If you mean chance=uniform probability you have to articulate that.

Don't be a pain. This isn't about uniform distribution versus other generic distribution. This is about the very elaborate calculations that exist on a per-token basis specifically to make the next token plausible and exclude the vast majority of tokens.

> My point is that matching sequence length and distributional similarity are both quantifiable. Where do you draw the line?

Any reasonable line has examples that cross it from many models. Very long segments that can be reproduced. Because many models were trained in a way that overfits certain pieces of code and basically causes them to be memorized.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#129

Post by kelseyfrog »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #128
kelseyfrog wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, it's random and by chance - tokens are literally sampled from a predicted probability distribution. If you mean chance=uniform probability you have to articulate that. It's trivially true that arbitrarily short reconstructions can be reproduced by virtually any random process and reconstruction length scales with the similarity in output distribution to that of the target. This really shouldn't be controve…

> Of course, it's random and by chance - tokens are literally sampled from a predicted probability distribution. Picking randomly out of a non-random distribution doesn't give you a random result. And you don't have to use randomness to pick tokens. > If you mean chance=uniform probability you have to articulate that. Don't be a pain. This isn't about uniform distribution versus other generic distribution. This is ab…

> Very long segments that can be reproduced

Right, and very short segments can also be reproduced. Let's say that "//" is an arbitrarily short segment that matches some source code. This is trivially true. I could write "//" on a coin and half the time it's going to land "//". Let's agree that's a lower bound.

I don't even disagree that there is an upper bound. Surely reproducing a repo in its entirety is a match.

So there must exist a line between the two that divides too short and too long.

Again, by what basis do you draw a line between a 1 token reproduction and a 1,000 token reproduction? 5, 10, 20, 50? How is it justified? Purely "reasonableness"?

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#130

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

kstrauser wrote: post #110
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #15

Clash of cultures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai#Regulation vs. the 鬼子 鬼佬 老外

What's the clash? Is the claim that China lacks the notion of copyright, or that they don't care about the rule of law?

No, they have that. It's just not universally applied, or rather with 'some flexibility' instead :-)

It remains to be seen how much 'pull' FFmpeg has against the 'push' of Rockchip.

Post reply on HN