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

writings.hongminhee.org

201–210 of 623 posts

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

#201

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.

I’ve often thought that the key to fighting this is through this exact method. Turn the tool against them

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

#202
post #20
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…

>Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are 'good enough', but we're not there yet.

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

#203

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.

You will probably run into design patents.

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

#204

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.

The big question is: if copyrighted material was used in the training material, is the LLM's output copyright infringement when it resembles the training material? In your example, you are taking the copyrighted material and giving it to the LLM as input and instructing the LLM to process it. Regardless of where the legal cards fall, this is a much less ambiguous scenario.

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

#205

Earlier 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…

Everyone writes as if he just fed the spec and tests to Claude Code. Ignoring for now that the tests are under LGPL as well, the commit history shows that this has been done with two weeks of steering Claude Code towards the desired output. At every one of these interactions, the maintainer used his deep knowledge of the chardet codebase to steer Claude.

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

#206

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.

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

#207

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.

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.

AI models have already looked at the source of GPL software and contain it in their dataset. Adding the minecraft source to the mix wouldn't seem much different. Of course art assets and trade marks would have to be replaced. But an AI "clean room" implementation has yet to be legally tested.

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

#208

There'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…

He also has a Korean vertical layout that lays out Latin-character words the same way. Is this common in Korea when vertical layout is used? The author seems to be Korean.

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

#209

Earlier 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…

Someone would likely get prosecuted if they instructed AI agent to run say a pump and dump scheme...

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

#210

Earlier 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…

I don’t know what a world without copyright does to corporate sponsored open source. It certainly reduces it because there are many corporate sponsored projects that monetize through dual licensing. My guess is in a world where you can’t even guarantee attribution, it’s much harder to convince your boss to let you open source a project in the first place.

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.

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