Someone should put this to the test. Take the recently leaked Minecraft source code and have Copilot build an exact replica in another programming language and then publish it as open source. See if Microsoft believes AI is copyright infringement or not.
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
201–210 of 623 posts
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#202I 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…
Right now, we can get local models that you can run on consumer hardware, that match capabilities of state of the art models from two years ago. The improvements to model architecture may or may not maintain the same pace in the future, but we will get a local equivalent to Opus 4.6 or whatever other benchmark of "good enough" you have, in the foreseeable future.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#203Someone should put this to the test. Take the recently leaked Minecraft source code and have Copilot build an exact replica in another programming language and then publish it as open source. See if Microsoft believes AI is copyright infringement or not.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#204Someone should put this to the test. Take the recently leaked Minecraft source code and have Copilot build an exact replica in another programming language and then publish it as open source. See if Microsoft believes AI is copyright infringement or not.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been its maintainer for years. I would argue it's irrelevant if they looked or didn't look at the code. As well as weather he was or wasn't familiar with it. What matters is, that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it. How that tool works doesn't really matter. Neither does it make a difference if you obfuscate that…
>that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it Well, no. They fed the spec (test cases, etc) into a tool which made a new program matching the spec. This is not a copy of the original code. But also this feels like arguing over the color of the iceberg while the titanic sinks. If you have a tool that can make code to spec, what is the value in source code anymore? Even if your app…
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#206Someone should put this to the test. Take the recently leaked Minecraft source code and have Copilot build an exact replica in another programming language and then publish it as open source. See if Microsoft believes AI is copyright infringement or not.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#207Someone should put this to the test. Take the recently leaked Minecraft source code and have Copilot build an exact replica in another programming language and then publish it as open source. See if Microsoft believes AI is copyright infringement or not.
As described, this would not be the same thing. If the AI is looking at the source and effectively porting it, that is likely infringement. The idea instead should be "implement Minecraft from scratch" but with behavior, graphics, etc. identical. Note that you'll need to have an AI generate assets or something since you can't just reuse textures and models.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#208There's a Japanese version of that page, written in classical text writing direction, in columns. Which is cool. Makes me wonder, though - how readable is it with so many English loanwords which should be rotated sideways to fit into columns?
Total digression but yeah, that layout is stupid and the way those words are dropped in using Romaji makes no sense. That's not how Japanese people lay out pages on the web. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a Japanese web page laid out like a book like this, and in general I'd expect the English proper nouns and words that don't have obvious translations to get transliterated into Katakana. Smells like automatic…
Looks like Wikipedia has an example of Traditional Chinese vertical layout with the Latin letters rotated as in TFA's layout (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writin...)
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct. The human who shares the copy is the one who engages in copyright infringement.
So, let's say that rather than actually touching any copyrighted material, a human merely tells an AI about how to go onto the internet and find copyrighted material, download it, and ingest it for training. The AI, fully autonomously, does so, and after training itself on the material deletes it so no human ever downloads, consumes, or shares it. If we are saying AI is "more than a tool", which seems to be the case…
Even if the final output doesn't have copyright protection it might still be copyright violation. I think it could be reasonable to have work that itself violates copyright when distributed even if it does not have copy right itself.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ignoring the legal or ethical concerns. Let’s say we live in a world where the cost of copying code is so close to zero that it’s indistinguishable from a world without copyright. Anything you put out can and will be used by whatever giant company wants to use it with no attribution whatsoever. Doesn’t that massively reduce the incentive to release the source of anything ever?
No, because (most) people don't work on OSS for vanity, they do it to help other people, whether it's individuals or groups of individuals, ie corporations. It's the same question as, if an AI can generate "art", or photographers can capture a scene better than any (realistic) painter, then will people still create art? Obviously yes, and we see it of course after Stable Diffusion was released three years ago, people…
So ignoring people who are being paid by corporations directly to work on open source, in my experience the vast majority of contributors expect to be able to monetize their work eventually in a way that requires attribution. And out of the small number who don’t expect a monetary return of any kind, a still smaller number don’t expect recognition.
If this weren’t the case you’d see a much larger amount of anonymous contributions. There are people who anonymously donate to charity. The vast majority want some kind of recognition.
Obviously we still see art, if you greatly reduce the monetary benefit to producing art, you’ll see a lot less of it. This is especially true of non trivial open source software that unlike static artwork requires continual maintenance.