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

writings.hongminhee.org

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

#241

Post by crazygringo »

foresto wrote: post #212
crazygringo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sorry, I misspoke. Transformation is what makes the LLM itself legal -- its training data is sufficiently transformed into weights.

And so, a work being sufficiently transformative is one way in which copyright no longer applies, but that's not the case here specifically. The specific case here is essentially just a clean-room reimplementation (though technically less "clean", but still presumably the same legally). But the end result is still a completely different expression of underlying non-copyrightable ideas.

And in both cases, it doesn't matter what the original license was. If a resulting work is sufficiently transformative or a reimplementation, copyright no longer applies, so the license no longer applies.

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

#242

Post by LPisGood »

peacebeard wrote: post #204
Gigachad wrote: post #197

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.

I think Disney ran into this with people generating Marvel characters etc

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

#243

Post by martin-t »

lukev wrote: post #219

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 rebuil…

I've been thinking this for over two years, that's why I stopped contributing to open source at that time - my work was only gonna be exploited to make rich people richer regardless of the license.

Crazy that only now we're seeing a bunch of articles coming to the same conclusion now.

I think copyright should still apply, but if it doesn't, we need new laws - ones which protect all human work, creative or not. Laws should serve and protect people, not algorithms and not corporations "owning" those algorithms.

I put owning in quotes because ownership should go to the people who did the work.

Buying/selling ownership of both companies and people's work should be illegal just like buying/selling whole humans is. Even if it took thousands of years to get here.

Money should not buy certain things because this is the root cause of inequality. Rich people are not getting richer at a faster rate by being more productive than everyone else but by "owning" other people's work and using it as leverage to extract even more from others.

Maybe LLM and mass unemployment of white collar workers will be the wakeup call needed for a reform. Or revolution.

Last time this happened was during the second industrial revolution and that's how communism got popular. We should do better this time because this is the last revolution which might be possible.

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

#244

Post by crazygringo »

Copyrightest wrote: post #231
crazygringo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The big difference between people reading code and LLMs reading code is that people have legal liability and LLMs do not. You can't sue an LLM for copyright infringement, and it's almost impossible for users to tell when it happens. BTW in 2023 I watched ChatGPT spit out hundreds of lines of F# verbatim from my own GitHub. A lot of people had this experience with GitHub Copilot. "98.7% unique" is still a lot of infri…

> people have legal liability and LLMs do not. You can't sue an LLM for copyright infringement

That's not relevant, because you can still sue the person using the LLM and publishing the repository. Legal liability is completely unchanged.

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

#245

Post by IshKebab »

VorpalWay wrote: post #235
amelius wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will probably run into design patents.

Software patents is not a thing in EU.

They absolutely are. That's a myth.

But also software patents and design patents are totally different things.

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

#246

Post by madeofpalk »

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…

A human reading a unit of work is not a “copy”. I’m pretty sure our legal systems agree that thought or sight is not copying something.

Training an LLM inherently requires making a copy of the work. Even the initial act of loading it from the internet and copying it into memory to then train the LLM is a copy that can be governed by its license and copyright law

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

#247

Post by crazygringo »

gspr wrote: post #214
crazygringo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We do not have to grant machines the same.

No we don't have to, but so far we do, because that's the most legally consistent. If you want to change that, you're going to need to pass new laws that may wind up radically redefining intellectual property.

> Has the model really performed an extreme transformation if it is able to produce the training data near-verbatim?

Of course it has, if the transformation is extreme, as it appears to be here. If I memorize the lyrics to a bunch of love songs, and then write my own love song where every line is new, nobody's going to successfully sue me just because I can sing a bunch of other songs from memory.

Also, it's not even remotely clear that the LLM can produce the training data near-verbatim. Generally it can't, unless it's something that it's been trained on with high levels of repetition.

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

#248

Post by martin-t »

Gigachad wrote: post #197

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.

They might not care. Products win not by quality or features but by advertisement, hype and network effects.

The original implementation would still have the upper hand here. OTOH if I as a nobody create something cool, there's nothing stopping a huge corporation from "reimplementing" (=stealing) it and and using their huge advertising budget to completely overshadow me.

And that's how they like it.

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

#249

Post by zmmmmm »

nradov wrote: post #182
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…

Nothing changes for drug patents regardless of whether an LLM was used in the discovery process.

Even if all I have to do is tell my agent, "here is a patent for a drug, analyse the patent and determine an equivalent but non-infringing drug" and it chugs away for a couple of hours and spits out a drug along with all the specifications to manufacture it?

I guess the state of play will be that for new drugs the original manufacturer will already have done that and ensured that literally anything that could be found as a workaround is included in the scope of the patent. But I feel like it will not be possible to keep that wartertight.

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

#250

Post by martin-t »

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…

This is naive. Advertisement and network effects win. Individuals cannot compete with corporations on equal ground here.
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