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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

tuananh.net

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#181

Post by cxr »

samrus wrote: post #31

> 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. Im struggling to see where this conclusion came from. To me it sounds like the AI-written work can not be coppywritten, and so its kind of like a copy pasting the original code. Copy pasting the original code doesnt make it public domain.…

FYI: the concept is "copyright" not "copywrite". It doesn't turn into "copywritten" as an adjective. The adjective is "copyrighted".

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#182

Post by zabzonk »

bandrami wrote: post #171
zabzonk wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Well, I am not exactly a hotshot 8086 programmer (though I do alright) but if I was asked to reproduce the IBM BIOS (which I have seen) I think I would come up with something very similar but not identical - it is really not rocket science code, so the LLM replacing me would have rather few alternatives to choose from.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#183

Post by josephg »

amelius wrote: post #153
josephg wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't copyright those anymore (when written using AI), but you __can__ copyright the way they are put together. Sort of, but not really. Copyright usually applies to a specific work . You can copyright Harry Potter. But you can't copyright the general class of "Wizard boy goes to wizard school". Copyrights generally can't be applied to classes of works. Only one specific work. (Direct copies - eg made with a ph…

You have good points regarding how copyright works. > Software is usually obvious. Hardware and mechanical designs are usually described in CAD programs nowadays, so it comes pretty close to software; it's just that LLMs are not the right tool to "GenAI" them but I've seen plenty of these kinds of design that I know for sure that they are often not any less obvious than a lot of software. Treating software as "obviou…

> It is also not fair to claim that an AI-copy is fundamentally different from photocopying.

If you clean-room copy it, I think it is different. Eg, first get one agent to make a complete spec of what the program does. And a list of all the correctness guarantees it meets. Then feed that spec into another AI model to generate a program which meets that spec.

The second program will not be based on any of the code in the first program. They'll be as different as any two implementations of the same idea are. I don't think the second program should be copyrighted. If it should, why shouldn't one C compiler should be able to own a copyright over all C compilers? Why doesn't the first JSON parsing library own JSON parsing? These seem the same to me. I don't see how AI models change anything, other than taking human effort out of the porting process.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#184

Post by saagarjha »

GaryBluto wrote: post #165
mfabbri77 wrote: post #19

This has the potential to kill open source, or at least the most restrictive licenses (GPL, AGPL, ...): if a license no longer protects software from unwanted use, the only possible strategy is to make the development closed source.

If you'd be willing to close source your "libre" open source project because somebody might do something you don't like with it, you never wanted a "libre" project.

In this case someone is making a non-libre project with it.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#185

Post by pornel »

Generative AI changed the equation so much that our existing copyright laws are simply out of date.

Even copyright laws with provisions for machine learning were written when that meant tangential things like ranking algorithms or training of task-specific models that couldn't directly compete with all of their source material.

For code it also completely changes where the human-provided value is. Copyright protects specific expressions of an idea, but we can auto-generate the expressions now (and the LLM indirection messes up what "derived work" means). Protecting the ideas that guided the generation process is a much harder problem (we have patents for that and it's a mess).

It's also a strategic problem for GNU. GNU's goal isn't licensing per se, but giving users freedom to control their software. Licensing was just a clever tool that repurposed the copyright law to make the freedoms GNU wanted somewhat legally enforceable. When it's so easy to launder code's license now, it stops being an effective tool.

GNU's licensing strategy also depended on a scarcity of code (contribute to GCC, because writing a whole compiler from scratch is too hard). That hasn't worked well for a while due to permissive OSS already reducing scarcity, but gen AI is the final nail in the coffin.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#186

Post by brians »

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…

I do not agree with your interpretation of copyright law. It does ban copies: there has to be information flow from the original to the copy for it to be a "copy." Spontaneous generation of the same content is often taken by the courts to be a sign that it's purely functional, derived from requirements by mathematical laws.

Patent law is different and doesn't rely on information flow in the same way.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#187

Post by carlob »

rswail wrote: post #178
carlob wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;

Right, it says exclusive rights, which does not translate to "we siphon everything and you get a tiny percentage of our profits", it means I can choose to say no to all of this. To me the matter of compensation and that of authorship rights are mostly orthogonal.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#189

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

> Any developer could take a GPL-licensed project, feed it into an LLM with the prompt “Rewrite this in a different style,” and release it under MIT

Does this argument make sense? Even before LLMs, a developer could "rewrite this in a different style" and release it under a different license. Why are LLMs a new element in this argument?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#190

Post by s0ss »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #189

> Any developer could take a GPL-licensed project, feed it into an LLM with the prompt “Rewrite this in a different style,” and release it under MIT Does this argument make sense? Even before LLMs, a developer could "rewrite this in a different style" and release it under a different license. Why are LLMs a new element in this argument?

Because now with an LLM it’s almost trivial to do this? Before it was not.
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