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No right to relicense this project

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Re: No right to relicense this project

#131

Post by graemep »

bakugo wrote: post #107
graemep wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken. This seems extremely vague. One could argue that any part of the pipeline counts as an "arrangement necessary for the creation of the work", so who is the author? The prompter, the creator of the model, or the creator of the training data?

The courts will have to settle that according to circumstances. I think it is likely to be the prompter, and in some cases the creator of the training data as well. The creator of the model will have copyright on the model, but unlikely to have copyright on its outputs (any more than the writer of a compiler has copyright on its output).

Re: No right to relicense this project

#132

Post by 9864247888754 »

knollimar wrote: post #123
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does the second LLM have the codebase in its training?

One could use Comma, which has only been trained on public domain texts:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05209

Re: No right to relicense this project

#133

Post by jmyeet »

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…

I think the genie is out of the bottle on this one and there's really no putting it back.

There is a certain amount of brand loyalty and platform inertia that will keep people. Also, as you point out, just having the source code isn't enough. Running a platform is more than that. But that gap will narrow with time.

The broader issue here is that there are people in tech who don't realize that AI is coming for their jobs (and companies) too. I hope people in this position can maybe understand the overall societal issues for other people seeing their industries "disrupted" (ie destroyed) by AI.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#134

Post by robinsonb5 »

binaryturtle wrote: post #89

Isn't the real issue here that tons of projects that depend on the "chardet" now drag in some crappy still unverified AI slop? AI forgery poisoning, IMHO. Why does this new project here needed to replace the original like that in this dishonourable way? The proper way would have been to create a proper new project. Note: even Python's own pip drags this in as dependency it seems (hopefully they'll stick to a proper v…

This indeed the real issue (not the AI angle per se, but the wholesale replacement. The licensing issue is real, but less important IMO).

Half a million lines of code have been deleted and replaced over the course of four days, directly to the main branch with no opportunity for community review and testing. (I've no idea whether depending projects use main or the stable branch, but stable is nearly 4 years old at this point, so while I hope it's the version depending projects use, I wouldn't put money on it.)

The whole thing smells a lot like a supply chain attack - and even if it's in good faith, that's one hell of a lot of code to be reviewed in order to make sure.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#135

Post by maxerickson »

camgunz wrote: post #115
senko wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So if I want to publish a project under some license and I put a comment in an AI generated file (never mind what I put in the comment), how do you go about proving which portion of that file is not protected under copyright?

If the AI code isn't copyrightable, I don't have any obligations to acknowledge it.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#136

Post by jacquesm »

antirez wrote: post #116

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 litig…

This is correct. I think any author of a main chunk of code that they claim ownership to (which is probably all of us!) should at least study the basics of copyright law. Getting little details wrong can cost you time, money and eventually your business if you're not careful.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#137

Post by skeledrew »

Maken wrote: post #113
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.

But it's a non-issue as said user can just have AI reverse engineer said binary. Or reimplement something with the same specs. That's what it means for code to be cheap.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#138

Post by jacquesm »

scosman wrote: post #64
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.

Yeah I mention that in the question. Might still be valid for closed source projects (probably is). I think courts would need to weigh in on the open source side. There’s legal precedent is that you can use a derived work to generate a new unique work (the spec derived for the copyrighted code is very much a derived work). There are rulings that LLMs are transformative works, not just copies of training data. LLMs ca…

I just wrote a long comment about that, but yes, you are on to something here.

The key to me is that the LLM itself is a derived work and that by definition it can not produce something original. Which in turn would make profiting off such a derived work created by an automated process from copyrighted works a case of wholesale copyright infringement. If you can get a judge to agree on that I predict the price of RAM will come down again.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#139

Post by bandrami »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #63
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

I wrote this comment on another thread earlier, but it seems relevant here, so I'll just c/p: I think we didn't even began to consider all the implications of this, and while people ran with that one case where someone couldn't copyright a generated image, it's not that easy for code. I think there needs to be way more litigation before we can confidently say it's settled. If "generated" code is not copyrightable, wh…

In terms of adoption, "it's not settled" is even worse

Re: No right to relicense this project

#140

Post by skeledrew »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #130
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…

Code is only cheap with AI because AI ignores the law.

Laws change, and it's also law that now says AI-generated works can't be copyrighted, which makes everything even cheaper.
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