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

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

#151

Post by pennomi »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #47
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…

While I personally agree with you, Richard Stallman (the creator of the GPL) does not. He has always advocated in favor of strong copyright protection, because the foundation of the GPL is the monopoly power granted by copyright. The problem that the GPL is intended to solve is proprietary software . Generative models (AI) are not really eroding copyright. They are calling its bluff. The very notion of intellectual p…

Right, anything that can be copied instantly for free cannot be realistically owned.

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

#152

Post by RaffaelCH »

dathinab wrote: post #134
nicole_express wrote: post #27

Not 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…

> Then they feed it the original software (AFIK).

My understanding is they did do the dance. From the article: "He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch."

One could still make the argument that using the test suite was a critical contributing factor, but it is not a part of the resulting library. So in my uninformed opinion, it seems to me like the clean room argument does apply.

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

#153

Post by timeinput »

Legend2440 wrote: post #141
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…

>that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it Well, no. They fed the spec (test cases, etc) into a tool which made a new program matching the spec. This is not a copy of the original code. But also this feels like arguing over the color of the iceberg while the titanic sinks. If you have a tool that can make code to spec, what is the value in source code anymore? Even if your app…

Blanchard fed the spec to the tool, and Anthropic fed the code to the tool, so Blanchard didn't do anything wrong, and Anthropic didn't do anything wrong. Nothing to see here.

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

#154

Post by mikkupikku »

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…

I agree with almost all of that, except the part about GNU changing their stance. I think GNU should stay true and consistent, if for no other reason than to not make many of their supporters who aren't on board with AI feel betrayed and have GNUs legacy soured. If the cause of LLMs conquering proprietary software needs an organization to champion it, let that be a new organization, not GNU.

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

#155

Post by beepbooptheory »

largbae wrote: post #38

This is only worth arguing about because software has value. Putting this in context of a world where the cost of writing code is trending to 0, there are two obvious futures: 1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world, proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not…

There will always be cost though. Even if perfect code is getting one-shotted out, that is constantly maintained and adapted to changing conditions and technology, it simply can't stay at 0 forever because one day the power is surely going to go out!

More and more I am drawn to these kinds of ideas lately, perhaps as a kind of ethical sidestep, but still:

- https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html

- https://permacomputing.net/

It's not going to solve any general issue here, but the one thing these freaks need that can't be generated by their models is energy, tons of it. So, the one thing I can do as an individual and in my (digital) community is work to be, in a word, self-sustainable. And depending on my company I guess, if I was a CEO I would hope I was wise enough to be thinking on the same lines.

Everyone is making beautiful mountains from paper and wire. I will just be happy to make a small dollhouse of stone, I think it will be worth it. How can we see not just at least some small-level of hubris otherwise?

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

#156

Post by sigmar »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #109

If Blanchard is claiming not to have been substantively involved in the creation of the new implementation of chardet (i.e. "Claude did it"), then the new implementation is machine generated, and in the USA cannot be copyright and thus cannot be licensed. If he is claiming to have been somehow substantively "enough" involved to make the code copyrightable, then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementatio…

>then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementation makes the new one almost certainly a derivative of the original.

The "clean room rewrite" is just an extreme way to have a bulletproof shield against litigation. Not doing it that way doesn't automatically make all new code he writes derivative solely because he saw how the code worked previously.

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

#157

Post by harshreality »

kazinator wrote: post #53

You can't put a copyright and MIT license on something you generated with AI. It is derived from the work of many unknown, uncredited authors. Think about it; the license says that copies of the work must be reproduced with the copyright notice and licensing clauses intact. Why would anyone obey that, knowing it came from AI? Countless instances of such licenses were ignored in the training data.

When learning is sufficiently atomized and recombined, creations cease to be "derived from" in a legal sense.

A lego sculpture is copyrighted. Lego blocks are not. The threshold between blocks and sculpture is not well-defined, but if an AI isn't prompted specifically to attempt to mimic an existing work, its output will be safely on the non-copyrighted side of things.

A derivative work is separately copyrightable, but redistribution needs permission from the original author too. Since that usually won't be granted or would be uneconomical, the derivative work can't usually be redistributed.

AI-produced material is inherently not copyrightable, but not because it's a derivative work.

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

#158

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

sigmar wrote: post #156
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #109

If Blanchard is claiming not to have been substantively involved in the creation of the new implementation of chardet (i.e. "Claude did it"), then the new implementation is machine generated, and in the USA cannot be copyright and thus cannot be licensed. If he is claiming to have been somehow substantively "enough" involved to make the code copyrightable, then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementatio…

>then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementation makes the new one almost certainly a derivative of the original. The "clean room rewrite" is just an extreme way to have a bulletproof shield against litigation. Not doing it that way doesn't automatically make all new code he writes derivative solely because he saw how the code worked previously.

If the clean room re-write was done entirely by Claude, then the result cannot be copyright in the USA, and thus there is no license at all.

And if he was in fact more involved (which he appears to deny) that it's a bit weak to say that someone with huge familiarity with chardet could choose to reimplement chardet without the result being derivative.

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

#159

Post by Serenacula »

balamatom wrote: post #137
ordu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bus…

How do you even argue such a thing? I've had no such luck, I've met many people who seem to view copyright and a person owning their ideas and work as a sort of inherent moral.

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

#160

Post by JoshTriplett »

nicole_express wrote: post #71
sigseg1v wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM and it was trained on the existing work, that's a derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.

Of course, the problem with this interpretation is that all modern LLMs are derivatives from huge amounts of text under completely different licenses, including "All rights reserved", and therefore can not be used for any purpose. I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code, unless the code is a rewrite of an open source project to change its license".

> Of course, the problem with this interpretation is that all modern LLMs are derivatives from huge amounts of text under completely different licenses, including "All rights reserved", and therefore can not be used for any purpose.

> I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code

You seem like you're on the cusp of stating the obvious correct conclusion: it isn't.

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