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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

tuananh.net

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#201

Post by pocksuppet »

nairboon wrote: post #9

That code is still LGPL, it doesn't matter what some release engineer writes in the release notes on Github. All original authors and copyright holders must have explicitly agreed to relicense under a different license, otherwise the code stays LGPL licensed. Also the mentioned SCOTUS decision is concerned with authorship of generative AI products. That's very different of this case. Here we're talking about a tool t…

In the legal system there's no such thing as "code that is LGPL". It's not an xattr attached to the code.

There is an act of copying, and there is whether or not that copying was permitted under copyright law. If the author of the code said you can copy, then you can. If the original author didn't, but the author of a derivative work, who wasn't allowed to create a derivative work, told you you could copy it, then it's complicated.

And none of it's enforced except in lawsuits. If your work was copied without permission, you have to sue the person who did that, or else nothing happens to them.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#202

Post by pocksuppet »

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.

Programmer training and AI training are legally distinct processes.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#203

Post by gunapologist99 »

> the U.S. Supreme Court (on March 2, 2026) declined to hear an appeal regarding copyrights for AI-generated material. By letting lower court rulings stand, the Court effectively solidified a “Human Authorship” requirement.

Not quite. A cert denial isn’t a merits ruling and doesn’t "solidify" anything as Supreme Court precedent. It simply leaves the DC Circuit decision binding (within that circuit) and the Copyright Office’s human-authorship policy intact, for now.

SCOTUS doesn’t explain cert denials, so why they denied is guesswork. my guess: they’re letting it percolate while the tech matures and we all start to realize how deep this seismic fracture really is.

(For example: what does "ownership" of intellectual "property" even mean, once "authorship" is partly probabilistic/synthetic, and once almost everything humans create is AI assisted? Hard to draw bright lines.)

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#204

Post by pocksuppet »

kouteiheika wrote: post #46
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…

> I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code. That license is called "All Rights Reserved", in which case you wouldn't be able to legally use the output for anything. There are research models out there which are trained on only permissively licensed data (i.e. no "All Rights Reserved" data), but they're, colloquially speaking, d…

More precisely, "All Rights Reserved" is the explicit lack of any license.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#205

Post by thousand_nights »

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 whole concept of a "clean room" implementation sounds completely absurd.

a bunch of people get together, rewrite something while making a pinky promise not to look at the original source code

guaranteeing the premise is basically impossible, it sounds like some legal jester dance done to entertain the already absurd existing copyright laws

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#206

Post by SiempreViernes »

jacquesm wrote: post #173
bluGill wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

The single word "training" is here being used to describe two very different processes; what an LLM does with text during training is at basically every step fundamentally distinct from what a human does with text.

Word embedding and gradient descent just aren't anything at all like reading text!

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#207

Post by andai »

Well how did they rewrite it? If you do it in two phases, then it should be fine right?

Phase 1: extract requirements from original product (ideally not its code).

Phase 2: implement them without referencing the original product or code.

I wrote a simple "clean room" LLM pipeline, but the requirements just ended up being an exact description of the code, which defeated the purpose.

My aim was to reduce bloat, but my system had the opposite effect! Because it replicated all the incidental crap, and then added even more "enterprisey" crap on top of it.

I am not sure if it's possible to solve it with prompting. Maybe telling it to derive the functionality from the code? I haven't tried that, and not sure how well it would work.

I think this requirements phase probably cannot be automated very effectively.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#208

Post by bjord »

BoredPositron wrote: post #196
brians wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#209

Post by duskdozer »

user34283 wrote: post #73
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.

I find the wording "protect from unwanted use" interesting. It is my understanding that what a GPL license requires is releasing the source code of modifications. So if we assume that a rewrite using AI retains the GPL license, it only means the rewrite needs to be open source under the GPL too. It doesn't prevent any unwanted use, or at least that is my understanding. I guess unwanted use in this case could mean not…

Yeah, the GPL is deficient in that way and doesn't handle other hostile uses.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#210

Post by Forgeties79 »

thousand_nights wrote: post #205
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 whole concept of a "clean room" implementation sounds completely absurd. a bunch of people get together, rewrite something while making a pinky promise not to look at the original source code guaranteeing the premise is basically impossible, it sounds like some legal jester dance done to entertain the already absurd existing copyright laws

Halt and Catch Fire did a pretty funny rendition of this song and dance
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