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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#241

Post by kshri24 »

carlob wrote: post #162
kshri24 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute. That's not what I favor because you are inserting a middleman, the Government, into the mix. The Government ALWAYS wants to maximize tax collections AND fully utilize its budget. There is no concept of "savings" in any Government anywhere in the World. And Government spending is ALWAYS wasteful. Tenders floated by Government will ALWAYS go to companies t…

> What have Governments ever created except for laws that stifle innovation/progress every single time? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ In all seriousness without the government you would have no innovation and progress, because it's the public school system, functioning roads, research grants a stable and lawful society that allow you to do any kind of innovation. Apart from that, you have answered to a…

> Apart from that, you have answered to a strawman. I said redistribute, not give to the government

You said: "let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute.". Only the Government has the power to tax. Question of redistribution does not even arise without first having the power to the coffers of the Company. Which you nor I have. Government CAN have if it wants to by either Nationalizing the Company or as you said "taxing the hell out of" the company. Please explain how you would go about taxing and redistributing without involving the Government?

> In all seriousness without the government you would have no innovation and progress, because it's the public school system, functioning roads, research grants a stable and lawful society that allow you to do any kind of innovation.

These fall under the ambit of governance and hence why you have a Government. That's the only power Governments should have. Governments SHOULD NOT be managing private enterprises.

> I think we are moving to an economy where the share of profits taken by capital becomes much larger than the one take from labor. If that happens then laborers will have very little discretionary income to fuel consumption and even capitalists will end up suffering. We can choose to redistribute now or wait for it to happen naturally, however that usually happens in a much more violent way, be it hyperinflation, famine, war or revolution.

Agreed. Which is why I was proposing private agreements in the first place (without involving a third-party like the Government which, more often than not, mismanages funds).

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#242

Post by jerf »

femto wrote: post #177
danlitt wrote: post #134

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanish…

> If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. That's not what the law says [1]. If two people happen to independently create the same thing they each have their own copyright. If it's highly improbable that two works are independent (eg. the gcc code base), the first author would probably go to court claiming copying, but…

It is true that if two people happen to independently create the same thing, they each have their own copyright.

It is also true that in all the cases that I know about where that has occurred the courts have taken a very, very, very close look at the situation and taken extensive evidence to convince the court that there really wasn't any copying. It was anything but a "get out of jail free" card; it in fact was difficult and expensive, in proportion to the size of the works under question, to prove to the court's satisfaction that the two things really were independent. Moreover, in all the cases I know about, they weren't actually identical, just, really really close.

No rational court could possibly ever come to that conclusion if someone claimed a line-by-line copy of gcc was written by them, they must have independently come up with it. The probably of that is one out of ten to the "doesn't even remotely fit in this universe so forget about it". The bar to overcoming that is simply impossibly high, unlike two songs that happen to have similar harmonies and melodies, given the exponentially more constrained space of "simple song" as compared to a compiler suite.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#243

Post by orthoxerox »

duskdozer wrote: post #229
orthoxerox wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is their work present in v7?

Yes. The AI operator posted this as the prompt: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/f51f523506a73f89f0... which, minimally instructs it to directly examine the test suite: `4. High encoding accuracy on the chardet test suite`

So what? Is reading code the same as copying code or modifying existing code?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#244

Post by Orygin »

orthoxerox wrote: post #223
Orygin wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Commits clearly show in progress where both LGPL and MIT code was working together. This clearly show they are a derivative work and MUST follow the original license. Plus the argument put forth is that they can re-license the project. It's not a new one made from scratch.

So, if these commits were private and squashed together before 7.0 was published there would be no violation?

The commits being public or not does not change the fact the developement was made as a derivative work of the original version.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#245

Post by Orygin »

orthoxerox wrote: post #243
duskdozer wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The AI operator posted this as the prompt: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/f51f523506a73f89f0... which, minimally instructs it to directly examine the test suite: `4. High encoding accuracy on the chardet test suite`

So what? Is reading code the same as copying code or modifying existing code?

If you want to prove you did not make a derivative work, yes it helps if you never read the source code. Hence so call "clean room" implementations.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#246

Post by jerf »

"Accepting AI-rewriting as relicensing could spell the end of Copyleft"

True, but too weak. It ends copyright entirely. If I can do this to a code base, I can do it to a movie, to an album, to a novel, to anything.

As such, we can rest assured that for better or for worse this is going to be resolved in favor of this not being enough to strip the copyright off of something and the chardet/chardet project would be well advised not to stand in front of the copyright legal behemoth and defeat it in single combat.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#247

Post by wareya »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #237
brians wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not agree with your interpretation of copyright law. It does ban copies : there has to be information flow from the original to the copy for it to be a "copy." Spontaneous generation of the same content is often taken by the courts to be a sign that it's purely functional, derived from requirements by mathematical laws. Patent law is different and doesn't rely on information flow in the same way.

Derivative works can also run afoul of copyright. An LLM trained on a corpus of copyrighted code is creating derivative works no matter how obscure the process is.

This actually isn't what legal precedent currently says. The precedent is currently looking at actual output, not models being tainted. If you think this is morally wrong, look into getting the laws changed (serious).

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#248

Post by Georgelemental »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #237
brians wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not agree with your interpretation of copyright law. It does ban copies : there has to be information flow from the original to the copy for it to be a "copy." Spontaneous generation of the same content is often taken by the courts to be a sign that it's purely functional, derived from requirements by mathematical laws. Patent law is different and doesn't rely on information flow in the same way.

Derivative works can also run afoul of copyright. An LLM trained on a corpus of copyrighted code is creating derivative works no matter how obscure the process is.

What about a human trained on having 30 years of experience working with copyrighted codebases?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#249

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

ndriscoll wrote: post #235
jacquesm wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There already have been multiple documented cases of LLMs spitting out fairly large chunks of the input corpus. There have been some experiments to get it to replicate the entirety of 'Moby Dick' with some success for one model but less success with others most likely due to output filtering to prevent the generation of such texts, but that doesn't mean they're not in there in some form. And how could they not be, it…

Are you referring to this? https://osyuksel.github.io/blog/reconstructing-moby-dick-llm... I see a test where one model managed to 85% reproduce a paragraph given 3 input paragraphs under 50% of the time. So it can't even produce 1 paragraph given 3 as input, and it can't even get close half the time. "Contains Moby Dick" would be something like you give it the first paragraph and it produces the rest of the book. Wh…

I'm no longer certain what point you're trying to make.

Getting close less than half the time given three paragraphs as input still sounds like red-handed copyright infringement to me.

If I sample a copyrighted song in my new track, clip it, slow it down, and decimate the bit rate, a court would not let me off the hook.

It doesn't matter how much context you push into these things. If I feed them 50% of Moby Dick and they produce the next word, and I can repeatedly do that to produce the entire book (I'm pretty sure the number of attempts is wholly irrelevant: we're impossibly far from monkeys on typewriters) then we can prove the statistical model encodes the book. The further we are from that (and the more we can generate with less) then the stronger the case is. It's a pretty strong case!

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#250

Post by wareya »

jerf wrote: post #242
femto wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. That's not what the law says [1]. If two people happen to independently create the same thing they each have their own copyright. If it's highly improbable that two works are independent (eg. the gcc code base), the first author would probably go to court claiming copying, but…

It is true that if two people happen to independently create the same thing, they each have their own copyright. It is also true that in all the cases that I know about where that has occurred the courts have taken a very, very, very close look at the situation and taken extensive evidence to convince the court that there really wasn't any copying. It was anything but a "get out of jail free" card; it in fact was dif…

That's the "but their case would still fail if the second author could show that their work was independent, no matter how improbable" part of the post you're responding to.
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