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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

tuananh.net

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#191

Post by orthoxerox »

Orygin wrote: post #161
orthoxerox wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean room is sufficient, but not necessary to avoid the accusations of license violation. a2mark has to demonstrate that v7 is "a work containing the v6 or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated straightforwardly into another language", which is different from demanding a clean-room reimplementation. Theoretically, the existence of a publicly available commit that is half v6 code an…

Please don't use loaded terms like "infect". The license does not infect, it has provisions and requirements. If you want to interact with it, you either accept them or don't use the project. In this case, the author of v7 is trying to steal the copyrighted work of other authors by re-licensing it illegally.

Is their work present in v7?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#192

Post by amelius »

josephg wrote: post #183
amelius wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 output will still be dependent on the input. And it is still copying even if you first lift the input to a different abstraction level.

Finally, even if your rationale is 99% correct, then there is still that 1% that makes the result a mechanistic copy.

And I see no way in which most people would 100% agree with your view.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#194

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#195

Post by Copyrightest »

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.

[dead]

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#196

Post by BoredPositron »

brians wrote: post #186
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.

Well discovery might be a fun exercise to see if the code is in the dataset of the llm.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#197

Post by Cantinflas »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #113
Cantinflas wrote: post #78

"If “AI-rewriting” is accepted as a valid way to change licenses, it represents the end of Copyleft. " Software in the AI era is not that important. Copyleft has already won, you can have new code in 40 seconds for $0.70 worth of tokens.

Let’s then abolish all copyright on all software, what ever could go wrong?

It doesn't matter any more! Software is a (very cheap) commodity now.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#198

Post by pocksuppet »

pornel wrote: post #185

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…

It's not a problem. If you give a work to an AI and say "rewrite this", you created a derivative work. If you don't give a work to an AI and say "write a program that does (whatever the original code does)" then you didn't. During discovery the original author will get to see the rewriter's Claude logs and see which one it is. If the rewriter deleted their Claude logs during the lawsuit they go to jail. If the rewriter deleted their Claude logs before the lawsuit the court interprets which is more likely based on the evidence.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#199

Post by leecommamichael »

pornel wrote: post #185

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…

“Changing the equation” by boldly breaking the law.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#200

Post by ajross »

pornel wrote: post #185

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…

> GNU's goal isn't licensing per se, but giving users freedom to control their software.

I think that's maybe misunderstanding. GNU wants everyone to be able to use their computers for the purposes they want, and software is the focus because software was the bottleneck. A world where software is free to create by anyone is a GNU utopia, not a problem.

Obviously the bigger problem for GNU isn't software, which was pretty nicely commoditized already by the FOSS-ate-the-world era of two decades ago; it's restricted hardware, something that AI doesn't (yet?) speak to.

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