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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#121

Post by amelius »

timschmidt wrote: post #118
dessimus wrote: post #114

Interesting to see how this plays out. Conceivably if running an LLM over text defeats copyright, it will destroy the book publishing industry, as I could run any ebook thru an LLM to make a new text, like the ~95% regurgitated Harry Potter.

This has already been done via brute force for melodies: https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...

Did they listen to their own creation?

If not, maybe it should not constitute a valid case in court.

Also, I'm wondering if they are not themselves liable considering they have every copyrighted work in there too.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#122

Post by kshri24 »

carlob wrote: post #102
kshri24 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your assessment. Which is why I was proposing a middle-ground where an agreement is setup between the model training company and the collective of developers/artists et all and come up with a license agreement where they are rewarded for their original work for perpetuity. A tiny % of the profits can be shared, which would be a form of UBI. This is fair not only because companies are using AI generated o…

Why settle on some private agreement between creators and ai companies where a tiny percentage is shared, let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute.

> let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute.

That's not what I favor because you are inserting a middleman, the Government, into the mix. The Government ALWAYS wants to maximize tax collections AND fully utilize its budget. There is no concept of "savings" in any Government anywhere in the World. And Government spending is ALWAYS wasteful. Tenders floated by Government will ALWAYS go to companies that have senators/ministers/prime ministers/presidents/kings etc as shareholders. In other words, the tax money collected will be redistributed again amongst the top 500 companies. There is no trickle down. Which is why agreements need to be between creators and those who are enjoying fruits of the creation. What have Governments ever created except for laws that stifle innovation/progress every single time?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#123

Post by dspillett »

> Accepting AI-rewriting as relicensing could spell the end of Copyleft

The more restrictive licences perhaps, though only if the rewriter convinces everyone that they can properly maintain the result. For ancient projects that aren't actively maintained anyway (because they are essentially done at this point) this might make little difference, but for active projects any new features and fixes might result in either manual reimplementation in the rewritten version or the clean-room process being repeated completely for the whole project.

> chardet 7.0 is a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API —

(from the github description)

The “same name” part to me feels somewhat disingenuous. It isn't the same thing so it should have a different name to avoid confusion, even if that name is something very similar to the original like chardet-ng or chardet-ai.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#124

Post by conartist6 »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #82
kshri24 wrote: post #17

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no per…

> We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. That horse has bolted. No one knows where all the AI code any more, and it would no longer possible to be compliant with a ruling that no one can use AI generated code. There may be some mental and legal gymnastics to make it possible, but it will…

I hate that this may be true, but I also don't think the law will fix this for us.

I think this is down the community and the culture to draw our red lines on and enforce them. If we value open source, we will find a way to prevent its complete collapse through model-assisted copyright laundering. If not, OSS will be slowly enshittified as control of projects slowly flows to the most profit-motivated entities.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#125

Post by josephg »

amelius wrote: post #111

I think you should interpret it like this: You cannot copyright the alphabet, but you can copyright the way letters are put together. Now, with AI the abstraction level goes from individual letters to functions, classes, and maybe even entire files. You can't copyright those (when written using AI), but you __can__ copyright the way they are put together.

> You can't copyright those anymore (when written using AI), but you __can__ copyright the way they are put together.

Sort of, but not really. Copyright usually applies to a specific work. You can copyright Harry Potter. But you can't copyright the general class of "Wizard boy goes to wizard school". Copyrights generally can't be applied to classes of works. Only one specific work. (Direct copies - eg made with a photocopier - are still considered the same work.)

Patterns (of all sorts) usually fall under patent law, not copyright law. Patents have some additional requirements - notably including that a patent must be novel and non-obvious. I broadly think software patents are a bad idea. Software is usually obvious. Patents stifle innovation.

Is an AI "copy" a copy like a photocopier would make? Or is it a novel work? It seems more like the latter to me. An AI copy of a program (via a spec) won't be a copy of the original code. It'll be programmed differently. Thats why "clean room reimplementations" are a thing - because doing that process means you can't just copy the code itself. But what do I know, I'm not a lawyer or a judge. I think we'll have to wait for this stuff to shake out before anyone really knows what the rules will end up being.

Weird variants of a lot of this stuff have been tested in court. Eg the Google v Oracle case from a few years ago.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#126

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

> The copyright vacuum: If AI-generated code cannot be copyrighted (as the courts suggest), then the maintainers may not even have the legal standing to license v7.0.0 under MIT or any license.

I believe this is a misunderstanding of the ruling. The code can’t be copyrighted by a LLM. However, the code could be copyrighted by the person running the LLM.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#127

Post by conartist6 »

dspillett wrote: post #123

> Accepting AI-rewriting as relicensing could spell the end of Copyleft The more restrictive licences perhaps, though only if the rewriter convinces everyone that they can properly maintain the result. For ancient projects that aren't actively maintained anyway (because they are essentially done at this point) this might make little difference, but for active projects any new features and fixes might result in either…

Who cares if it can be maintained. The system now penalizes the original creator for creating it and gives thieves the ability to conduct legal theft at a gargantuan scale, the only limit being how creative the abuser is in making money.

With the incentives set up like that, the era of open software cooperation would be ended rapidly.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#128

Post by orthoxerox »

shevy-java wrote: post #94

> In traditional software law, a “clean room” rewrite requires two teams So, I dislike AI and wish it would disappear, BUT! The argument is strange here, because ... how can a2mark ensure that AI did NOT do a clean-room conforming rewrite? Because I think in theory AI can do precisely this; you just need to make sure that the model used does that too. And this can be verified, in theory. So I don't fully understand a…

Clean room is sufficient, but not necessary to avoid the accusations of license violation.

a2mark has to demonstrate that v7 is "a work containing the v6 or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated straightforwardly into another language", which is different from demanding a clean-room reimplementation.

Theoretically, the existence of a publicly available commit that is half v6 code and half v7 can be used to show that this part of v7 code has been infected by LGPL and must thus infect the rest of v7, but that's IMO going against the spirit of the [L]GPL.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#129

Post by [deleted] »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #82
kshri24 wrote: post #17

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no per…

> We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. That horse has bolted. No one knows where all the AI code any more, and it would no longer possible to be compliant with a ruling that no one can use AI generated code. There may be some mental and legal gymnastics to make it possible, but it will…

[deleted]

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#130

Post by LadyCailin »

kshri24 wrote: post #122
carlob wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why settle on some private agreement between creators and ai companies where a tiny percentage is shared, let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute.

> let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute. That's not what I favor because you are inserting a middleman, the Government, into the mix. The Government ALWAYS wants to maximize tax collections AND fully utilize its budget. There is no concept of "savings" in any Government anywhere in the World. And Government spending is ALWAYS wasteful. Tenders floated by Government will ALWAYS go to companies t…

Uh, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

Just because you have a failure of imagination for how government should work, doesn’t mean it can’t work. And stifling innovation is exactly what I want, when that innovation is “steal from everyone so we can invent the torment nexus” or whatever’s going on these days.

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