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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

#181

Post by js8 »

zmmmmm wrote: post #162

The really interesting question to me is if this transcends copyright and unravels the whole concept of intellectual property. Because all of it is premised on an assumption that creativity is "hard". But LLMs are not just writing software, they are rapidly being engineered to operate completely generally as knowledge creation engines: solving math proofs, designing drugs, etc. So: once it's not "hard" any more, does…

It might unravel intellectual property, just not in a fair way. When capitalism started, public land was enclosed to create private property. Despite this being in many cases a quite unfair process, we still respect this arrangement.

With AI, a similar process is happening - publicly available information becomes enclosed by the model owners. We will probably get a "vestigial" intellectual property in the form of model ownership, and everyone will pay a rent to use it. In fact, companies might start to gatekeep all the information to only their own LLM flavor, which you will be required to use to get to the information. For example, product documentation and datasheets will be only available by talking to their AI.

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

#182

Post by nradov »

zmmmmm wrote: post #162

The really interesting question to me is if this transcends copyright and unravels the whole concept of intellectual property. Because all of it is premised on an assumption that creativity is "hard". But LLMs are not just writing software, they are rapidly being engineered to operate completely generally as knowledge creation engines: solving math proofs, designing drugs, etc. So: once it's not "hard" any more, does…

Nothing changes for drug patents regardless of whether an LLM was used in the discovery process.

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

#183

Post by serial_dev »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #158
sigmar wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

So if I read any LGPL code in my life, I can never think about working on something similar in my life?

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

#184

Post by kazinator »

harshreality wrote: post #157
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, b…

Token prediction is a form of "learning" that is reinforced by the goal of reproducing the correct next token of the work, rather that acquiring ideas and concepts. For instance, given the prefix "Four score and seven years", the weights are adjusted until "ago" is correctly predicted, which is a fancy way of saying that it was stored in the model in a lossy way. The model "learned" that "ago" follows "four score and seven years" exactly the way your hard drive "learns" the audio and video frames of a movie when you download a .mp4 file.

I dispute the idea that token sequences reproduced from the model are not derived works.

I predict, no pun intended, that a time is coming when the idea that it's not a derived work will be challenged in mainstream law.

The slop merchants are getting a free ride for the time being.

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

#185

Post by newyankee »

zmmmmm wrote: post #162

The really interesting question to me is if this transcends copyright and unravels the whole concept of intellectual property. Because all of it is premised on an assumption that creativity is "hard". But LLMs are not just writing software, they are rapidly being engineered to operate completely generally as knowledge creation engines: solving math proofs, designing drugs, etc. So: once it's not "hard" any more, does…

If you think about creative outcomes as n dimensional 'volumes', AI expressions can cover more than humans in many domains. These are precisely artistic styles, music styles etc. and tbh not everyone can be a Mozart but may be a lot more with AI can be Mozart lite. This begs the question how much of creativity is appreciated as a shared experience

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

#186

Post by socalgal2 »

davidw wrote: post #20
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…

> LLM as the main weapon 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 where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS. I don't think that's an exciting idea for the Free Software Foundation. Perhaps with time we…

Maybe a good open source idea is to "seti at home" style crowd-source training, assuming that's possible.

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

#187

Post by josephg »

johnofthesea wrote: post #40
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…

> AI is eroding copyright, so there may no longer be a need for the GPL. GNU should stop and rethink its stance, chuck away the GPL as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and embrace LLM as the main weapon. Is this LLM thing freely available or is it owned and controlled by these companies? Are we going to rent the tools to fight "evil software corporations"?

Open models do exist. They’re nowhere near aa good as frontier models, but they’re getting better all the time.

It’s probably only a matter of time before open models are as good as Claude code is today.

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

#188

Post by tty456 »

foresto wrote: post #180

From the article: > He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch. From GPL2: > The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compila…

Google v. Oracle ruled that use of APIs are fair game and could be argued that test cases are strictly a use of APIs and not implementation.

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

#189

Post by NewsaHackO »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

> Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Mi…

>This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Micky Mouse"

IANAL, but that analogy wouldn't work because Mickey Mouse is a trademark, so it doesn't matter how it is created.

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

#190

Post by crazygringo »

foresto wrote: post #180

From the article: > He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch. From GPL2: > The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compila…

It's transformative, so no.

Legally, using the tests to help create the reimplementation is fine.

However, it seems possible you can't redistribute the same tests under the MIT license. So the reimplementation MIT distribution could need to be source code only, not source code plus tests. Or, the tests can be distributed in parallel but still under LGPL, not MIT. It doesn't really matter since compiled software won't be including the tests anyways.

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