Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Because they couldnt have done any of that refactoring without a licence to do so, and that licence forbids them from relicencing it.
So effective, LGPL means you freely give all copyright for your work to the license holder? Even if the license holder has moved on from the project? What if I decide to make a JS or Rust implementation of this project and use it as inspiration? Does that mean I'm no longer doing a "clean room" implementation and my project is contaminated by LGPL too?
No right to relicense this project
151–160 of 388 posts
Re: No right to relicense this project
#152Earlier 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…
Indeed, but in the clean room scenario, the party who implements the spec has to be a separate entity that has never seen the code. Whether or not the LLM is copyright infringing is a separate question - it definitely has (at least some) familiarity with the code in question, which makes the "clean room" argument an uphill battle
Re: No right to relicense this project
#153AFAIK this was not a clean room reimplementation. But since it was rewritten by hand, into a different language, with not just a different internal design but a different API, I could easily buy that chardetng doesn't infringe while Python chardet 7 does.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#155The 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…
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.
Original works can only be produced by a human being, by definition in copyright law. Any artifact produced by an animal, a mechanical process, a machine, a natural phenomenon etc is either a derived work if it started from an original copyrighted work, or a public domain artifact not covered by copyright law if it didn't.
For example, an image created on a rock struck by lightning is not a copyright covered work. Similarly, an image generated by an diffusion model from a randomly generated sentence is not a copyrightable work. However, if you feed a novel as a prompt to an LLM and ask for a summary, the resulting summary is a derived work of said novel, and it falls under the copyright of the novel's owner - you are not allowed to distribute copies of the summary the LLM generated for you.
Whether the output of an LLM, or the LLM weights themselves, might be considered derived works of the training set of that LLM is a completely different discussion, and one that has not yet been settled in court.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#156I have successfully reproduced a few projects with LLM assistance via strict cleanroom rules and only working off public specifications.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#157Re: No right to relicense this project
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#159Re: No right to relicense this project
#160Pin your dependency versions people! With hashes at this point, cant trust anybody out here.