Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite • Hacker News Board

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#171

Post by bandrami » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 12:44 PM UTC

zabzonk wrote: post #170

danlitt wrote: post #134

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanish…

> It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours" I think there is precedence that says exactly this - for example the BIOS rewrites for the IBM PC from people like Phoenix. And it would be trivial to instruct an LLM to prefer to use (say, in assembler) register C over register B wherever that was possible, resulting in different code.

Different but still derivative

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#172

Post by uyzstvqs » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #144

dathinab wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the author speaks about code which is syntactically completely different but semantically does the same i.e. a re-implementation which can either - be still derived work, i.e. seen as you just obfuscating a copyright violation - be a new work doing the same nothing prevents an AI from producing a spec based on a API, API documentation and API usage/fuzzing and then resetting the AI and using that spec to produce a re…

No, that depends on whether or not the AI work product rests on key contributions to its training set without which it would not be able to the the work, see other comment. In that case it looks like 'a new work doing the same' but it still a derived work. Ted Nelson was years ahead of the future where we really needed his Xanadu to keep track of fractional copyright. Likely if we had such a mechanism, and AI authors…

No, training and inference are two separate processes. Training data is never redistributed, only obtained and analyzed. What matters is what data is put into context during inference. This is controlled by the user.

AI/ML is complex, so as a simpler analogy: If I watch The Simpsons, and I create an amusing infographic of how often Homer says "D'oh!" over time, my infographic would be an original work. AI training follows the same principle.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#173

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #160

jacquesm wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is about AI using code as input to produce similar code as output > not about AI being trained on code The two are very directly connected. The LLM would not be able to do what it does without being trained, and it was trained on copyrighted works of others. Giving it a piece of code for a rewrite is a clear case of transformation, no matter what, but now it also rests on a mountain of other copyrighted code.…

Every programmer is trained on the copyrighted works of others. there a vanishingly few modern programs with available source code in the public domain. it isn't clear how/if llm is different from the brain but we all have training by looking at copywrited source code at some time.

> it isn't clear how/if llm is different from the brain

It's very clear: the one is a box full of electronics, the other is part of the central nervous system of a human being.

> but we all have training by looking at copywrited source code at some time.

That may be so, but not usually the copyrighted source code that we are trying to reproduce. And that's the bit that matters.

You can attempt to whitewash it but at its core it is copyright infringement and the creation of derived works.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#174

Post by conartist6 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

d1sxeyes wrote: post #157

conartist6 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that this may be true, but I also don't think the law will fix this for us. I think this is down the community and the culture to draw our red lines on and enforce them. If we value open source, we will find a way to prevent its complete collapse through model-assisted copyright laundering. If not, OSS will be slowly enshittified as control of projects slowly flows to the most profit-motivated entities.

But what tools do we have to stop this happening? I agree, we can (and should) all refuse to participate in licence laundering, but there will always be folks less principled. I don’t know what happens next, honestly.

I don't either, but I guess we're both about to find out. There only surety is that there will be moves and countermoves. As far as I could tell the best thing we could do right now is fund software-legal organizations like the EFF which are likely to be the ones to litigate the test cases. What's hurting us most right now is we don't know what law means in this context, so we don't fully understand the scale of what we need to protect against or what tools we have that the courts will recognize

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#175

Post by graemep » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 12:51 PM UTC

dathinab wrote: post #141

kshri24 wrote: post #17

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no per…

> how does that work AI can't claim ownership, humans can't either as they haven't produced it. If there is guaranteed no one which can claim ownership it often seen as being in the public domain. In general it is irrelevant what the copyright of the AI training data is. At least in the US judges have been relevant clear about that. (Except if the AI reproduced input data close to verbatim. _But in general we aren't…

> humans can't either as they haven't produced it. If there is guaranteed no one which can claim ownership it often seen as being in the public domain.

Says who?. The US ruling the article refers to does not cover this.

It is different in other countries. Even if US law says it is public domain (which is probably not the case) you had better not distribute it internationally. For example, UK law explicitly says a human is the author of machine generated content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260110

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#176

Post by petercooper » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 12:51 PM UTC

danlitt wrote: post #134

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanish…

The actual meaning of a "clean room implementation" is that it is derived from an API and not from an implementation

I know you were simplifying, and not to take away from your well-made broader point, but an API-derived implementation can still result in problems, as in Google vs Oracle [1]. The Supreme Court found in favor of Google (6-2) along "fair use" lines, but the case dodged setting any precedent on the nature of API copyrightability. I'm unaware if future cases have set any precedent yet, but it just came to mind.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#177

Post by femto » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

danlitt wrote: post #134

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanish…

> If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy.

That's not what the law says [1]. If two people happen to independently create the same thing they each have their own copyright.

If it's highly improbable that two works are independent (eg. the gcc code base), the first author would probably go to court claiming copying, but their case would still fail if the second author could show that their work was independent, no matter how improbable.

[1] https://lawhandbook.sa.gov.au/ch11s13.php?lscsa_prod%5Bpage%...

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#178

Post by rswail » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

carlob wrote: post #102

kshri24 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your assessment. Which is why I was proposing a middle-ground where an agreement is setup between the model training company and the collective of developers/artists et all and come up with a license agreement where they are rewarded for their original work for perpetuity. A tiny % of the profits can be shared, which would be a form of UBI. This is fair not only because companies are using AI generated o…

Why settle on some private agreement between creators and ai companies where a tiny percentage is shared, let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute.

Because the authors of the original content deserve recompense for their work.

That's what the whole copyright and patent regimes are designed to achieve.

It's to encourage the creation of knowledge.

US Constitution, Article I, section 8:

    To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by
    securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
    exclusive Right to their respective Writings 
    and Discoveries;

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#179

Post by foltik » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

shevy-java wrote: post #94

> In traditional software law, a “clean room” rewrite requires two teams So, I dislike AI and wish it would disappear, BUT! The argument is strange here, because ... how can a2mark ensure that AI did NOT do a clean-room conforming rewrite? Because I think in theory AI can do precisely this; you just need to make sure that the model used does that too. And this can be verified, in theory. So I don't fully understand a…

Turns out there’s no need to speculate. Someone pointed out on GH [0] that the AI was literally prompted to copy the existing code:

> *Context:* The registry maps every supported encoding to its metadata. Era assignments MUST match chardet 6.0.0's `chardet/metadata/charsets.py` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chardet/chardet/f0676c0d6a...

> Fetch that file and use it as the authoritative reference for which encodings belong to which era. Do not invent era assignments.

[0] https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#180

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 12:54 PM UTC

uyzstvqs wrote: post #172

jacquesm wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that depends on whether or not the AI work product rests on key contributions to its training set without which it would not be able to the the work, see other comment. In that case it looks like 'a new work doing the same' but it still a derived work. Ted Nelson was years ahead of the future where we really needed his Xanadu to keep track of fractional copyright. Likely if we had such a mechanism, and AI authors…

No, training and inference are two separate processes. Training data is never redistributed, only obtained and analyzed. What matters is what data is put into context during inference. This is controlled by the user. AI/ML is complex, so as a simpler analogy: If I watch The Simpsons, and I create an amusing infographic of how often Homer says "D'oh!" over time, my infographic would be an original work. AI training fo…

> my infographic would be an original work.

> AI training follows the same principle.

If you really believe that then we can't have a meaningful conversation about this, that's not even ELIF territory, that's just disconnected. You should be asking questions, not telling people how it works.