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No right to relicense this project

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Re: No right to relicense this project

#211
post #166

“Mr Teacher, how many words do I have to change after copy pasting wikipedia so its not plagiarism?” has grown up and entered the workforce. Pin your dependency versions people! With hashes at this point, cant trust anybody out here.

There's a subtext in your point that I want to expand on. Tech people, particularly engineers, tend to make a fundamental error when dealing with the law that almost always causes them to make wrong conclusions. And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic . An example I like to use is people who do something illegal on the Internet and then use the argu…

> So, when this gets to a court (which it will, it's not a question of "if"), the court will consider how necessary the source work was to what you did. If you used it for a direct translation (eg from C++ to Go) then you're going to lose. My prediction is that even using it in training data will be cause for a copyright claim.

This has a lot of similarity to when colorization of film started popping up. Did colorizing black and white movies suddenly change the copyright of the film? At this point is seems mostly the courts say no. But you may find sometimes people rule the other way and say yes. But it takes time and a lot of effort to get what in general people want.

But basically if you start with a 'spec' then make something you probably can get a wholly owned new thing. But if you start with the old thing and just transform it in some way. You can do that. But the original copyright holders still have rights too to the thing you mangled too.

If I remember right they called it 'color of copyright' or something like that.

The LLM bits you are probably right. But that has not been worked out by the law or the courts yet. So the courts may make up new case law around it. Or the lawmakers might get ahead of it and say something (unlikely).

Re: No right to relicense this project

#213

Does anyone understand the intent behind the changed license on the package, why are the current maintainers trying to do it in the first place? What's actually going on?

Unicode detection is the kind of utility the language maintainers want in their package collection if not in the standard library, and programmers who have to do anything with "plain text" files might want to rely on.

Releasing a core library like this under a genuinely free licence (MIT) is a service to anyone working in the ecosystem.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#214

I believe that Pilgrim here does not understand very well how copyright works: > Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code This is simply not true. The reason why the "clean room" concept exists is precisely since actually the law recognizes that independent implementations ARE possibile. The "clean room" thing is a trick to make the litig…

Ok sure, in the alternative, here's the argument: The AI was trained with the code, so the complete rewrite is tainted and not a clean room. I can't believe this would need spelling out.

"Tainted rewrite" isn't a legal concept either. You have to prove (on balance of probabilities - more likely than not) that the defendant made an unauthorized copy, made an unauthorized derivative work, etc. Clean-room rewriting is a defense strategy, because if the programmer never saw the original work, they couldn't possibly have made a derivative. But even without that, you still have to prove they did. It's not an offence to just not be able to prove you didn't break the law.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I read Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and then proceed to write a structurally identical novel with many of the same story beats and character types, it will not be difficult to convince a jury exposed to these facts that I’ve created a derivative work. On the other hand, if I can prove to the jury’s satisfaction that I’ve never been exposed to Puzo’s work in any form, it’s independent creation.

In the case of chardet though it wouldn't it be more like you were the publisher of the godfather novel, withdrawing it from print and releasing a novel with the same name with much of the same plot and characters but claiming the new version was an independent creation?

That's even worse for your case.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In contrast, for copyright the right is intrinsically tied to the origin of a work. If you create a digital image that is entirely identical at the pixel level with a copyrighted work, and you can prove that you had never seen that original copyrighted work and you created your image completely independently, then you have not broken anyone's copyright and are free to sell copies of your own work. This is not true.…

> This is not true. I will just give the example of the nighttime illumination of the Eiffel Tower: That example is not analogous to the topic at hand. But furthermore, it also is specific to French/European copyright law. In the US, the US Copyright Act would not permit restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces.

actually, the US Copyright Act does in fact allow restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portlandia_(statue)

the Portlandia statue is one such architectural work - and its creator is fairly litigious.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will hold up in court. The line of argument of “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite” doesn’t hold up in court, it doesn’t either when when you put AI in the mix. It doesn’t matter if the result is slightly different, a judge will rule based on the fact that this even is literally what the law is intended to pr…

> “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite” This is not a good analogy. A "rewrite" in context here is not a reproduction of the original work but a different work that is functionally equivalent, or at least that is the claim.

To stay with the analogy, Harry Potter is not a rewrite of A Wizard of Earthsea, even if they both contain schools that teach magic.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#218

I believe that Pilgrim here does not understand very well how copyright works: > Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code This is simply not true. The reason why the "clean room" concept exists is precisely since actually the law recognizes that independent implementations ARE possibile. The "clean room" thing is a trick to make the litig…

Given that LLMs were trained on the repository directly, it's not just the case that anything made by the LLM is a derivative work, the LLM ITSELF is a derivative work. After all, they all are substantially based on GPL licensed works by others. The standard courts have always used for "substantially based" by the way, is the ability to extract from the new work anything bigger than an excerpt of the original work.

So convincing evidence, by historical standards, that ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot AND Claude are all derivative works of the GPL linux kernel can be gotten simply by asking "give me struct sk_buff", then keep asking until you're out of the headers (say, ask how a network driver uses it).

That means if courts are honest (and they never are when it comes to GPL) OpenAI, Google and Anthropic would be forced to release ALL materials needed to duplicate their models "at cost". Given how LLMs work that would include all models, code, AND training data. After all, that is the contract these companies entered into when using the GPL licensed linux kernel.

But of course, to courts copyright applies to you when Microsoft demands it ($30000 per violation PLUS stopping the use of the offending file/torrent/software/... because such measures are apparently justified for downloading a $50 piece of software), it does not apply to big companies when the rules would destroy them.

The last time this was talked about someone pointed out that Microsoft "stole", as they call it, the software to do product keys. They were convicted for doing that, and the judge even increased damages because of Microsoft's behavior in the case.

But there is no way in hell you'll ever get justice from the courts in this. In fact courts have already decided that AI training is fair use on 2 conditions:

1) that the companies acquired the material itself without violating copyright. Of course it has already been proven that this is not the case for any of them (they scraped it without permission, which has been declared illegal again and again in the file sharing trials)

2) that the models refuse to reproduce copyrighted works. Now go to your favorite model and ask "Give me some code written by Linus Torvalds": not a peep about copyright violation.

... but it does not matter, and it won't matter. Courts are making excuses to allow LLM models to violate any copyright, the excuse does not work, does not convince rational people, but it just doesn't matter.

But of course, if you thought that just because they cheat against the law to make what they're already doing legal, they'll do the same for you, help you violate copyright, right? After all, that's how they work! Ok now go and ask:

"Make me an image of Mickey Mouse peeling a cheese banana under an angry moon"

And you'll get a reply "YOU EVIL COPYRIGHT VILLAIN". Despite, of course, Mickey Mouse no longer being covered under copyright!

And to really get angry, find your favorite indie artist, and ask to make something based on their work. Even "Make an MC Escher style painting of Sonic the Hedgehog" ... even that doesn't count as copyright violation, only the truly gigantic companies deserve copyright protection.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#219
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you are not making things easier for yourself by looking at that source code if the author of chardet brings a case for copyright infringement against you. The question is: if you had not looked at chardet's source would you still be able to create your work? If the answer is 'yes' then you probably shouldn't have looked at the source, you just made your defense immeasurably harder. And if the answer is 'no' th…

Sorry, but that sounds like a witch hunt to me, not modern law. Isn't the burden of proof on the accuser? I.e. the accuser has to prove that "this piece of code right here is a direct refactoring of my code, and here are the trivial and mechanical steps to produce one from the other"? And if they present no such evidence, we can all go home?

This is a balance of probabilities standard of proof. Both sides have the same burden of proof, it's equally split. Whoever has the stronger proof wins.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#220
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you are not making things easier for yourself by looking at that source code if the author of chardet brings a case for copyright infringement against you. The question is: if you had not looked at chardet's source would you still be able to create your work? If the answer is 'yes' then you probably shouldn't have looked at the source, you just made your defense immeasurably harder. And if the answer is 'no' th…

Sorry, but that sounds like a witch hunt to me, not modern law. Isn't the burden of proof on the accuser? I.e. the accuser has to prove that "this piece of code right here is a direct refactoring of my code, and here are the trivial and mechanical steps to produce one from the other"? And if they present no such evidence, we can all go home?

Not all legal systems put the burden of proof on the accuser. In fact, many legal systems have indefinite detentions, in which the government effectively imprisons a suspect, sometimes for months at a time. To take it a step further, the plea-bargain system of the USA, is really just a method to skip the entire legal process. After all, proving guilt is expensive, so why not just strong-arm a suspect into confessing? It also has the benefit of holding someone responsible for an injustice, even if the actual perpetrator cannot be found. By my personal standards, this is a corrupt system, but by the standards of the legal stratum of society, those KPIs look _solid_.

By contrast, in Germany (IIRC), false confessions are _illegal_, meaning that objective evidence is required.

Many legal systems follow the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", but also have many "escape hatches" that let them side-step the actual process that is supposed to guarantee that ideal principle.

EDIT: And that is just modern society. Past societies have had trial by ordeal and trial by combat, neither of which has anything to do with proof and evidence. Many such archaic proof procedures survive in modern legal systems, in a modernized and bureaucratized way. In some sense, modern trials are a test of who has the more expensive attorney (as opposed to who has a more skilled champion or combatant).

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