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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

#121

Post by re-thc »

kjksf wrote: post #115
re-thc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If I put my signature on Picasso painting, it doesn't make me co-author of said painting. Blanchard is very clear that he didn't write a single line of code. He isn't an author, he isn't a co-author. Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that.

> Blanchard is very clear that he didn't write a single line of code

He used Claude to write it. Difference? The fact that I write on the notepad vs printed it out = I didn't do it?

> Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that.

That's the equivalent of me saying I didn't kill anyone. The fingerprints on the knife doesn't change that.

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

#122

Post by satvikpendem »

sarchertech wrote: post #37
logicprog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ignoring the legal or ethical concerns. Let’s say we live in a world where the cost of copying code is so close to zero that it’s indistinguishable from a world without copyright. Anything you put out can and will be used by whatever giant company wants to use it with no attribution whatsoever. Doesn’t that massively reduce the incentive to release the source of anything ever?

No, because (most) people don't work on OSS for vanity, they do it to help other people, whether it's individuals or groups of individuals, ie corporations.

It's the same question as, if an AI can generate "art", or photographers can capture a scene better than any (realistic) painter, then will people still create art? Obviously yes, and we see it of course after Stable Diffusion was released three years ago, people are still creating.

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

#123

Post by idle_zealot »

babypuncher wrote: post #102
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 quand…

> 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.

That's not true at all. Anyone could follow these steps:

1. Have the LLM rewrite GPL code.

2. Do not publish that public domain code. You have no obligation to.

3. Make a few tweaks to that code.

4. Publish a compiled binary/use your code to host a service under a proprietary license of your choice.

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

#124

Post by satvikpendem »

re-thc wrote: post #121
kjksf wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I put my signature on Picasso painting, it doesn't make me co-author of said painting. Blanchard is very clear that he didn't write a single line of code. He isn't an author, he isn't a co-author. Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that.

> Blanchard is very clear that he didn't write a single line of code He used Claude to write it. Difference? The fact that I write on the notepad vs printed it out = I didn't do it? > Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that. That's the equivalent of me saying I didn't kill anyone. The fingerprints on the knife doesn't change that.

I'll take a commit authored by someone else and then git amend the author to myself, did I write that commit then? By your logic I did apparently.

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

#125

Post by NSUserDefaults »

spullara wrote: post #33
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 the actual text of the code isn't the same or obviously derivative, copyright doesn't apply at all.

If you pirate a movie and reencode it, does that apply as well? You can still watch the movie and it is “obviously” the same movie, even though the bytes are completely different. Here you can use the program and it is, to the user, also the same.

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

#126

Post by margalabargala »

malicka wrote: post #119
margalabargala wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Correct. The human who shares the copy is the one who engages in copyright infringement.

So, let's say that rather than actually touching any copyrighted material, a human merely tells an AI about how to go onto the internet and find copyrighted material, download it, and ingest it for training. The AI, fully autonomously, does so, and after training itself on the material deletes it so no human ever downloads, consumes, or shares it.

If we are saying AI is "more than a tool", which seems to be the case courts are leaning since they've ruled AI output without direct human involvement is not copyrightable[0], then the above seems like it would be entirely legal.

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html

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

#127

Post by AndriyKunitsyn »

There's a Japanese version of that page, written in classical text writing direction, in columns. Which is cool. Makes me wonder, though - how readable is it with so many English loanwords which should be rotated sideways to fit into columns?

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

#128

Post by davidw »

thenewnewguy wrote: post #113
davidw wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is massive capital expenditure not also required to enforce the GPL? If some company steals your GPLed code and doesn't follow the license, you will have to sue them and somebody will have to pay the lawyers.

> Is massive capital expenditure not also required to enforce the GPL?

It's nowhere near the order of magnitude of the kind of spending they're sinking into LLM's. The FSF and other groups were reasonably successful at enforcing the GPL, operating on a budget 1000's of times smaller than that of AI companies.

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

#129

Post by xantronix »

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…

So not only are we moving goalposts here, but we've decided the GNU team should join the other team? I don't understand how GNU would see mass model LLM training as anything but the most flagrant violations of their ethos. LLM labs, in their view, would be among the most evil software corporations to have ever existed.

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

#130

Post by yorwba »

spullara wrote: post #33
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 the actual text of the code isn't the same or obviously derivative, copyright doesn't apply at all.

Copyright protects even very abstract aspects of human creative expression, not just the specific form in which it is originally expressed. If you translate a book into another language, or turn it into a silent movie, none of the actual text may survive, but the story itself remains covered by the original copyright.

So when you clone the behavior of a program like chardet without referencing the original source code except by executing it to make sure your clone produces exactly the same output, you may still be infringing its copyright if that output reflects creative choices made in the design of chardet that aren't fully determined by the functional purpose of the program.

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