161–170 of 388 posts
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Uh, this is just a curiosity, but do you have a reference for that last argument? If true, it would mean most commercial code being developed today, since it's increasingly AI-generated, would actually be copyright-free. I don't think most Western courts would uphold that position.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47232289
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…
That's the neat thing: you don't!
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…
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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' th…
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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?
The standard way of "relicensing" a project is to contact all of the prior code contributors about it and get their ok. Generally relicensing is done in good faith for a good reason, so pretty much everyone ok's it. Trickiness can turn up when code contributors aren't contactable (ie dead, missing, etc), and I'm unsure of the legally sound approach to that.
If they're dead and their estate doesn't care, you might pirate it without getting sued, but any recipient of the new work would be just as liable as you are, and they'd know that, so I probably wouldn't risk it.
“Mr Teacher, how many words do I have to change after copy pasting wikipedia so its not plagiarism?” has grown up and entered the workforce. Pin your dependency versions people! With hashes at this point, cant trust anybody out here.
Tech people, particularly engineers, tend to make a fundamental error when dealing with the law that almost always causes them to make wrong conclusions. And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic.
An example I like to use is people who do something illegal on the Internet and then use the argument "you can't prove I did it (with absolute certainty)". It could've been someone who hacked your Wifi. You don't know who on the Wifi did it, etc. But the law will look at the totality of the evidence. Did the activity occur when you were at home and stop when you weren't? How likely are alternative explanations? Etc.
All of that will be considered based on some legal standard depending on the venue. In civil court that tends to be "the preponderance of the evidence" (meaning more likely than not) while in criminal court it's "beyond a reasonable doubt" (which is a much higher standard).
So, using your example, an engineer will often fall into a trap of thinking they can substitute enough words to have a new original work, Ship of Theseus-like. And the law simply doesn't work that way.
So, when this gets to a court (which it will, it's not a question of "if"), the court will consider how necessary the source work was to what you did. If you used it for a direct translation (eg from C++ to Go) then you're going to lose. My prediction is that even using it in training data will be cause for a copyright claim.
If you use Moby Dick in your training data and ask an LLM to write a book like Moby Dick (either explicitly or implicitly) then you're going to have an issue. Even if you split responsibilities so one LLM (training on Moby Dick) comes up with a structure/prompt and another LLM (not trained on Moby Dick) writes it, I don't think that'll really help you avoid the issue.
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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' th…
Sorry, but that sounds like a witch hunt to me, not modern law. Isn't the burden of proof on the accuser? I.e. the accuser has to prove that "this piece of code right here is a direct refactoring of my code, and here are the trivial and mechanical steps to produce one from the other"? And if they present no such evidence, we can all go home?
Copyright is automatic for a reason, the simple act of creation is technically enough to establish copyright. But that mechanism means that if your claimed creation has an uncanny resemblance to an earlier, published creation or an unpublished earlier creation that you had access to that you are going to be in trouble when the real copyright holder is coming to call.
In short: just don't. Write your own stuff if you plan on passing it off as your own.
The accuser just needs to establish precedence.
So if you by your lonesome have never listened to the radio and tomorrow morning wake up and 'Billy Jean' springs from your brain you're going to get sued, even if the MJ estate won't be able to prove how you did it.
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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.
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…