Someone be brave, and do this to ZFS. Poke the Oracle bear!
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
131–140 of 623 posts
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#132There'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?
Total digression but yeah, that layout is stupid and the way those words are dropped in using Romaji makes no sense. That's not how Japanese people lay out pages on the web. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a Japanese web page laid out like a book like this, and in general I'd expect the English proper nouns and words that don't have obvious translations to get transliterated into Katakana. Smells like automatic conversion added by someone not really familiar with common practices for presenting Japanese on the web.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
We did in fact say so. https://www.carltonfields.com/insights/publications/2025/no-... > No Copyright Protection for AI-Assisted Creations: Thaler v. Perlmutter > A recent key judicial development on this topic occurred when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2, 2026, effectively upholding lower court rulings that AI-generated works lacking human authorship are not eli…
> > A recent key judicial development on this topic occurred when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2, 2026, effectively upholding lower court rulings that AI-generated works lacking human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection under U.S. law
This was AI summary? Those words were not in the article.
The courts said Thaler could not have copyright because he refused to list himself as an author.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#134Not a lawyer, but my understanding is: In theory, copyright only protects the creative expression of source code; this is the point of the "clean room" dance, that you're keeping only the functional behavior (not protected by copyright). Patents are, of course, an entirely different can of worms. So using an LLM to strip all of the "creative expression" out of source code but create the same functionality feels like…
> this is the point of the "clean room" dance
which is the actual relevant part: they didn't do that dance AFIK
AI is a tool, they set it up to make a non-verbatim copy of a program.
Then they feed it the original software (AFIK).
Which makes it a side by side copy, as in the original source was used as reference to create the new program. Which tend to be seen as derived work even if very different.
IMHO They would have to:
1. create a specification of the software _without looking at the source code_, i.e. by behavior observation (and an interface description). I.e. you give the AI access to running the program, but not to looking into the insides of it. I really don't think they did it as even with AI it's a huge pain as you normally can't just brute force all combinations of inputs and instead need to have a scientific model=>test=>refine loop (which AI can do, but can take long and get stuck, so you want it human assisted, and the human can't have inside knowledge about the program).
2. then generate a new program from specification, And only from it. No git history, no original source code access, no program access, no shared AI state or anything like that.
Also for the extra mile of legal risk avoidance do both human assisted and use unrelated 3rd parties without inside knowledge for both steps.
While this does majorly cut cost of a clean room approach, it still isn't cost free. And still is a legal mine field if done by a single person, especially if they have enough familiarity to potentially remember specific peaces of code verbatim.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right but LLM companies are building frontier models with frontier talent while trying to sock up demand with a loss leader strategy, on top of an historic infrastructure build out.
Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i think, not a high priced endeavor for an org (compared to an individual).
IMO the proposition is little fishy, but its not totally without merit and imo deserves investigation. If we are all worried about our jobs, even via building custom for sale software, there is likely something there that may obviate the need at least for end user applications. Again, im deeply skeptical, but it is interesting.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#136Not a lawyer, but my understanding is: In theory, copyright only protects the creative expression of source code; this is the point of the "clean room" dance, that you're keeping only the functional behavior (not protected by copyright). Patents are, of course, an entirely different can of worms. So using an LLM to strip all of the "creative expression" out of source code but create the same functionality feels like…
> this is the point of the "clean room" dance which is the actual relevant part: they didn't do that dance AFIK AI is a tool, they set it up to make a non-verbatim copy of a program. Then they feed it the original software (AFIK). Which makes it a side by side copy, as in the original source was used as reference to create the new program. Which tend to be seen as derived work even if very different. IMHO They would…
Well sure they didn't do the dance, but you don't have to do the dance. The reason to do it is that it's a good defense in a lawsuit. Like you say, all of this is a legal minefield.
So my understanding was that the original code was specifically not fed into Claude. But was almost certainly part of its training data, which complicates things, but if that's fair use then it's not relevant? If training's not fair use and taints the output, then new-chardet is a derivative of a lot of things, not just old-chardet...
This is all new legal ground. I'm not sure if anyone will go to court over chardet, though, but something that's an actual money-maker or an FSF flagship project like readline, on the other hand, well that's a lot more likely.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#137Earlier 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…
> 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 Yeah, a bit of a conundrum. But I don't think that fighting for copyright now can bring any benefits for FOSS. GNU should bring Stallman back and see whether he can come with any new ideas and a new strategy. Alternativ…
>Yeah, a bit of a conundrum.
IMO the primary significant trend in AI. Doesn't get talked about nearly enough. Means the AI is working, I guess.
>GNU should bring Stallman back ... Alternatively they could try without Stallman.
Leave Britney alone >:(
>copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical)
I've busted out "intellectual property is a crime against humanity" at layfolk to see if that shortcuts through that entire little politico-philosophical minefield. They emote the requisite mild shock when such things as crimes against humanity are mentioned; as well as at someone making such a radical statement which seems to come from no familiar species of echo chamber; and then a moment later they begin to very much look like they see where I'm coming from.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#138[deleted]
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#139Buried in here: Mark Pilgrim suddenly reappearing after his sudden disappearance years ago! Has he been up to anything since then?
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#140I 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…
> chuck away the GPL as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and embrace LLM as the main weapon.
LLMs are one of the primary manifestations of 'evil software corporations' currently.