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No right to relicense this project

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Re: No right to relicense this project

#141

Post by jacquesm »

bsza wrote: post #111
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.

So by that logic, you're not legally allowed to implement your own character detector and license it as your own if you've ever looked at chardet's source code? I'm confused. I thought copyright laws protect intellectual property as-is, not the impression it leaves on someone.

Well, you are not making things easier for yourself by looking at that source code if the author of chardet brings a case for copyright infringement against you.

The question is: if you had not looked at chardet's source would you still be able to create your work? If the answer is 'yes' then you probably shouldn't have looked at the source, you just made your defense immeasurably harder. And if the answer is 'no' then you probably should have just used chardet and respected its license.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#142

Post by adrian17 »

tclancy wrote: post #109
soulofmischief wrote: post #69

The README has clearly been touched by an LLM. Count the idiosyncrasies: “chardet 7.0 is a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x” Do people not write anymore?

I finally had to mute r/isthisai on Reddit because there’s now a subset of people who see the hand of AI in everything. Could that be generated by a clanker? Sure, but it’s also exactly what I would write if I wanted a quick pitch for a library that addresses some immediate concerns. It’s also what I would focus on if the fact we had just finished a rebuild from scratch. As Freud famously said, sometimes an em dash i…

FWIW, I don't think there's even a room for interpretation here, given the commit that created the README (and almost all commits since the rewrite started 4 days ago) is authored by

> dan-blanchard and claude committed 4 days ago

Re: No right to relicense this project

#143

Post by cap11235 »

spoiler wrote: post #38
imcritic wrote: post #32

Licenses are cancer and the enemy of opensource.

I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.

And what exactly are some of these problems?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#144

Post by Orygin »

spoiler wrote: post #128
Orygin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wtf are these comments? A LGPL licensed project, guaranteed to be free and open source, being LLM-washed to a permissive license, and GPL is the problem here? They are literally stealing from open source, but it's the original license that is the issue?

They have been maintaining the project for years. It's not like some Joe Random with ChatGPT randomly entered the scene

And? Doesn't give them any right to re-license the code. Especially not to strip rights for other users.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#145

Post by darkwater »

It's not clear at all why the current maintainers wanted/needed this re-licensing. I guess that their employee, Monarch Money, wants to use derivative work in their application without releasing the changes? It was already LGPL, perfect for a library, not GPL.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#146

Post by twoodfin »

dathinab wrote: post #110

The argument that a rewrite is a copyright violation because they are familiar with the code base is not fully sound. "Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law. Or else a artist having seen a picture of a sunset over an empty ocean wouldn't be allowed to pain another sunset over an empty ocean as people could claim copyright violation. Through wh…

If I read Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and then proceed to write a structurally identical novel with many of the same story beats and character types, it will not be difficult to convince a jury exposed to these facts that I’ve created a derivative work.

On the other hand, if I can prove to the jury’s satisfaction that I’ve never been exposed to Puzo’s work in any form, it’s independent creation.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#148

Post by pera »

jmyeet wrote: post #129
dathinab wrote: post #110

The argument that a rewrite is a copyright violation because they are familiar with the code base is not fully sound. "Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law. Or else a artist having seen a picture of a sunset over an empty ocean wouldn't be allowed to pain another sunset over an empty ocean as people could claim copyright violation. Through wh…

This is a bad argument. Think of a rewrite (by a human or an LLM) as a translation . If you wrote a book in English and somebody translated it into Spanish, it'd still be a copyright issue. Same thing with translations. That's very different to taking the idea of a body of work. So you can't copyright the idea of a pirate taking a princess hostage and a hero rescuing her. That's too generic. But even here there are l…

Suchir Balaji, the OpenAI researcher who was found dead in his flat just before testifying against his employer, published an excellent article somehow related to this topic:

When does generative AI qualify for fair use?

https://suchir.net/fair_use.html

Balaji's argument is very strong and I feel we will see it tested in court as soon as LLM license-washing starts getting more popular.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#149

Post by simiones »

dathinab wrote: post #110

The argument that a rewrite is a copyright violation because they are familiar with the code base is not fully sound. "Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law. Or else a artist having seen a picture of a sunset over an empty ocean wouldn't be allowed to pain another sunset over an empty ocean as people could claim copyright violation. Through wh…

> "Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law.

On the contrary. Except for discussions about punitive damages and so on, insider knowledge or lack thereof is completely irrelevant to patent law. If company A has a patent on something, they can assert said patent against company B regardless of whether any person in company B had ever seen or heard of company A and their patent. Company B could have a legal trail proving they invented their product that matches the patent from scratch with no outside knowledge, and that they had been doing this before company A had even filed their patent, and it wouldn't matter at all - company A, by virtue of filing and being granted a patent, has a legal monopoly on that invention.

In contrast, for copyright the right is intrinsically tied to the origin of a work. If you create a digital image that is entirely identical at the pixel level with a copyrighted work, and you can prove that you had never seen that original copyrighted work and you created your image completely independently, then you have not broken anyone's copyright and are free to sell copies of your own work. Even more, you have your own copyright over your own work, and can assert it over anyone that tries to copy your work without permission, despite an identical work existing and being owned by someone else.

Now, purely in principle this would remain true even if you had seen the other work. But in reality, it's impossible to convince any jury that you happened to produce, entirely out of your own creativity, an original work that is identical to a work you had seen before.

> But you very much can rewrite a project under new license even if you have in depth knowledge. IFF you don't have the old project open/look at it while doing so.

No, this is very much false. You will never be able to win a court case on this, as any significant similarity between your work and the original will be considered a copyright violation, per the preponderance of the evidence.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#150

Post by [deleted] »

simiones wrote: post #149
dathinab wrote: post #110

The argument that a rewrite is a copyright violation because they are familiar with the code base is not fully sound. "Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law. Or else a artist having seen a picture of a sunset over an empty ocean wouldn't be allowed to pain another sunset over an empty ocean as people could claim copyright violation. Through wh…

> "Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law. On the contrary. Except for discussions about punitive damages and so on, insider knowledge or lack thereof is completely irrelevant to patent law. If company A has a patent on something, they can assert said patent against company B regardless of whether any person in company B had ever seen or heard…

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