Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

writings.hongminhee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 623 posts

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

#211

Post by robmccoll »

palmotea wrote: post #168
zmmmmm wrote: post #162

The really interesting question to me is if this transcends copyright and unravels the whole concept of intellectual property. Because all of it is premised on an assumption that creativity is "hard". But LLMs are not just writing software, they are rapidly being engineered to operate completely generally as knowledge creation engines: solving math proofs, designing drugs, etc. So: once it's not "hard" any more, does…

> So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial IP law - let's say, patents: it just becomes and input parameter that the AI needs to work around the patents like any other constraints. I think it still does: IIRC, the current legal situation is AI-output does not qualify for IP pr…

I think you have a rather idealized model of IP in mind. In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time.

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

#212

Post by foresto »

crazygringo wrote: post #190
foresto wrote: post #180

From the article: > He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch. From GPL2: > The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compila…

It's transformative, so no. Legally, using the tests to help create the reimplementation is fine. However, it seems possible you can't redistribute the same tests under the MIT license. So the reimplementation MIT distribution could need to be source code only, not source code plus tests. Or, the tests can be distributed in parallel but still under LGPL, not MIT. It doesn't really matter since compiled software won't…

> It's transformative, so no.

I'm not following your logic there, and I don't see any mention of "transformative" in the license. Can you explain what you mean?

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

#213

Post by sarchertech »

intrasight wrote: post #86
sarchertech wrote: post #37

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?

Most commercial software that I've used has the model of a legal moat around a pretty crappy database schema. The non IP protection has largely been in the effort involved in replicating an application's behavior and that effort is dropping precipitously.

You must not have used much commercial software outside of crappy business SaaS.

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

#214

Post by gspr »

crazygringo wrote: post #179
munk-a wrote: post #166

I think the missing thing here is that the license violation already happened. Most of the big models trained on data in a manner that violated terms of service. We'll need a court case but I think it's extremely reasonable to consider any model trained on GPL code to be infected with open licensing requirements.

You might wish that were true, but there are very strong arguments it's not. Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is. In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies. It's fair use. But agreed that we're waiting for a court case to confirm that. Although really, the main questions for any court cases are not going…

> Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is.

Some might hold that we've granted persons certain exemptions, on account of them being persons. We do not have to grant machines the same.

> In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies.

Has the model really performed an extreme transformation if it is able to produce the training data near-verbatim? Sure, it can also produce extremely transformed versions, but is that really relevant if it holds within it enough information for a (near-)verbatim reproduction?

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

#215

Post by Aozora7 »

johnofthesea wrote: post #40
ordu wrote: 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…

> AI is eroding copyright, so there may no longer be a need for the GPL. GNU should stop and rethink its stance, chuck away the GPL as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and embrace LLM as the main weapon. Is this LLM thing freely available or is it owned and controlled by these companies? Are we going to rent the tools to fight "evil software corporations"?

There already are LLMs with open weights that are better at code than state of the art closed source models from a year ago. For now, you most people may have to rent the hardware to run those models, since it's too expensive for most people to own something that can run inference on one trillion parameters, but I wouldn't consider LLMs to be controlled by "evil software corporations" at this point.

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

#216

Post by Aozora7 »

josephg wrote: post #187
johnofthesea wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is eroding copyright, so there may no longer be a need for the GPL. GNU should stop and rethink its stance, chuck away the GPL as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and embrace LLM as the main weapon. Is this LLM thing freely available or is it owned and controlled by these companies? Are we going to rent the tools to fight "evil software corporations"?

Open models do exist. They’re nowhere near aa good as frontier models, but they’re getting better all the time. It’s probably only a matter of time before open models are as good as Claude code is today.

With the release of GLM-5, I would say that they are pretty much almost as good. Basically 90% as good as Opus 4.6 on most tasks for 20% of inference cost, and open weights.

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

#217

Post by vbarrielle »

serial_dev wrote: post #183
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the clean room re-write was done entirely by Claude, then the result cannot be copyright in the USA, and thus there is no license at all. And if he was in fact more involved (which he appears to deny) that it's a bit weak to say that someone with huge familiarity with chardet could choose to reimplement chardet without the result being derivative.

So if I read any LGPL code in my life, I can never think about working on something similar in my life?

There's a difference between "I've read a LGPL code once, maybe I could do something similar" and "I've been reading this LGPL code for 12 years and now I'm going to do exactly the same thing".

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

#218

Post by miggol »

Wow, it feels like this argument rewired my brain.

When I first read about the chardet situation, I was conflicted but largely sided on the legal permissibility side of things. Uncomfortably I couldn't really fault the vibers; I guess I'm just liberal at heart.

The argument from the commons has really invoked my belief in the inherent morality of a public good. Something being "impermissible" sounds bad until you realize that otherwise the arrow of public knowledge suddenly points backwards.

Seeing this example play out in real life has had retroactive effects on my previously BSD-aligned brain. Even though the argument itself may have been presented before, I now understand the morals that a GPL license text underpins better.

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

#219

Post by lukev »

I agree with the thrust of this article, that norms and what we perceive as good or desirable extend considerably beyond the minimum established by law.

But a point that was not made strongly, which highlights this even more, is that this goes in every direction.

If this kind of reimplementation is legal, then I can take any permissive OSS and rebuild it as proprietary. I can take any proprietary software and rebuild it as permissive. I can take any proprietary software and rebuild it as my own proprietary software.

Either the law needs to catch up and prevent this kind of behavior, or we're going to enter an effectively post-copyright world with respect to software. Which ISN'T GOOD, because that will disincentivize any sort of open license at all, and companies will start protecting/obfuscating their APIs like trade secrets.

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

#220

Post by NewsaHackO »

munk-a wrote: post #199
NewsaHackO wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree there has to be a court case about it. I think the current argument, however, is that it is transformative, and therefore falls under fair use.

Yea, a finding that training is transformative would be pretty significant and it's likely that the precedent of thumbnail creation being deemed transformative would likely steer us towards such a finding. Transformative is always a hard thing to bank on because it is such a nebulous and judgement based call. There are excellent examples of how precise and gritty this can get in audio sampling.

Didn't know about thumbnails being fair use. In that case, I just don't see an argument that genAI training on source code is less transformative than thumbnails.
Post reply on HN