231–240 of 388 posts
Setting aside the legal questions, what a nasty thing to do. I would expect to see this kind of move from some big corpo, not an OSS maintainer. This feels like it runs counter to the whole open source ethos and undermines the idea that authorship means anything anymore.
I feel like the author is missing a huge point here by fighting this. The entire reason why GPL and any other copyleft license exists in the first place is to ensure that the rights of a user to modify, etc a work cannot be ever taken away. Before, relicensing as MIT - or any other fully permissive license - would've meant open doors to apply restrictions going forward, but with AI this is now a non-issue. Code is no…
If I release blub 1.0.0 under GPL, you cannot fork it and add features and release that closed-source, but I can certainly do that as I have ownership. I can't stop others continuing to use 1.0.0 and develop it further under the GPL, but what happens to my own 1.1.0 onwards is up to me. I can even sell the rights to use it closed-source.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic. I know it sounds like an oversimplification, but "got off on a technicality" is a common thing among the well-connected and well-heeled. Sure, us nerds probably focus too much on the "technicality" part, since we are by definition technical, but the rest is wishy-washy, unfair BS as far as many of our brain…
And if you get to trial (without being coerced into a guilty plea for something you may not have done [1]), the cops will lie constantly in police reports and even on the stand. It happens so often it has a name: testalying [2].
The well-connected don't really get off on a "technicality". They simply never get charged in the first place. Only two people were ever charged because of Jeffrey Epstein. One is Epstein, who died, and the other is Ghislane Maxwell who got convicted of trafficking minors to... nobody in particular... and is now in a low-security work camp it's technically illegal for sex offenders to be in.
And even if somehow you, as a connected person, are charged and convicted, well you just buy a pardon [3].
[1]: https://www.vera.org/news/how-the-criminal-legal-system-coer...
[2]: https://www.chicagoappleseed.org/2020/11/09/testilying/
[3]: https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-pardons-clemency-ge...
I wonder if LLMs will push the industry towards protecting their IP with patents like the other branches of engineering rather than copyright. If you patent a general idea of how your software works then no rewrite will be able to lift this protection.
General patents aren't allowed.
Either one would still have to meet the requirements like being sufficiently non-obvious. The first steam engine was patented, even though you couldn't patent one any more.
I feel like the author is missing a huge point here by fighting this. The entire reason why GPL and any other copyleft license exists in the first place is to ensure that the rights of a user to modify, etc a work cannot be ever taken away. Before, relicensing as MIT - or any other fully permissive license - would've meant open doors to apply restrictions going forward, but with AI this is now a non-issue. Code is no…
The user is the end-user of the product. If the relicensing means that someone down the line receives a close-down binary application that he cannot modify, that's a violation of the user's rights.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe. Enabling more GPL software to become proprietary isn't exactly a service.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very incorrect reading. AI can't be the author of the work. Human driving the AI can, unless they zero-shotted the solution with no creative input.
Only the authored parts can be copyrighted, and only humans can author [0]. "For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user." "In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient…
Actually this is very much how people think for code.
Consider the following consequence. Say I work for a company. Every time I generate some code with Claude, I keep a copy of said code. Once the full code is tested and released, I throw away any code that was not working well. Now I leave the company and approach their competitor. I provide all of the working code generated by Claude to the competitor. Per the new ruling, this should be perfectly legal, as this generated code is not copyrightable and thus doesn't belong to anyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GPL exists for the benefit of end users, not developers. It being a chore for developers who want to deny their users the software freedoms is a feature, not a bug.
How does the GPL help a user who doesn't write code themselves?
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.