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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

tuananh.net

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#251

Post by gruez »

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…

All of this is moot for the purposes of LLM, because it's almost certain that the LLMs were trained on the code base, and therefore is "tainted". You can't do this with humans either. Clean room design requires separate people for the spec/implementation.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#252

Post by orthoxerox »

Orygin wrote: post #245
orthoxerox wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why should I prove that? Let those who claim the violation prove that.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#253

Post by [deleted] »

dspillett wrote: post #123

> Accepting AI-rewriting as relicensing could spell the end of Copyleft The more restrictive licences perhaps, though only if the rewriter convinces everyone that they can properly maintain the result. For ancient projects that aren't actively maintained anyway (because they are essentially done at this point) this might make little difference, but for active projects any new features and fixes might result in either…

[deleted]

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#254

Post by throwayaw84330 »

dspillett wrote: post #123

> Accepting AI-rewriting as relicensing could spell the end of Copyleft The more restrictive licences perhaps, though only if the rewriter convinces everyone that they can properly maintain the result. For ancient projects that aren't actively maintained anyway (because they are essentially done at this point) this might make little difference, but for active projects any new features and fixes might result in either…

This is super interesting. Exploring the basis for Free Software (the 4 liberties, Richard Stallman)... if AI-code is effectively under Public Domain, wouldn't that actually be even MORE defensive than relying on copyright to be able to generate copyleft? Wouldn't the rewrite of code (previously under any license, and maybe even unknown to the LLM) constitute a massive win for the population in general, because now their 4 liberties are more attainable through the extensive use of LLMs to generate code?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#255

Post by Orygin »

orthoxerox wrote: post #252
Orygin wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why should I prove that? Let those who claim the violation prove that.

There is plenty of evidence already. The claim has been substantiated.

You can't just dismiss it then say the claimant has to provide proof.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#256

Post by [deleted] »

satvikpendem wrote: post #238
pornel wrote: post #185

Generative AI changed the equation so much that our existing copyright laws are simply out of date. Even copyright laws with provisions for machine learning were written when that meant tangential things like ranking algorithms or training of task-specific models that couldn't directly compete with all of their source material. For code it also completely changes where the human-provided value is. Copyright protects…

Honestly, good. Copyright and IP law in general have been so twisted by corporations that only they benefit now, see Mickey Mouse laws by Disney for example, or patenting obvious things like Nintendo or even just patent trolling in general.

[deleted]

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#257

Post by ndriscoll »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #249
ndriscoll wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's... not how this works.

> 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... then we can prove the statistical model encodes the book.

It can't because it doesn't. That's what it means to say it diverges.

The "number of attempts" is you cheating. You're giving it the book when you let it try again word by word until it gets the correct answer, and then claiming it produced the book. That's exactly the residual that I said characterizes the extent to which it doesn't know the book. Trivially, no matter how bad the model is, if you give it the residual, it can losslessly compress anything at all.

If you had a simple model that just predicts next word given current word (trained on word pair frequency across all English text, or even all text excluding Moby Dick), and then give it retries until it gets the current word right, it will also quickly produce the book. Because it was your retry policy that encoded the book, not the model. Without that policy, it will get it wrong within a few words, just like these models do.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#258

Post by buckle8017 »

pocksuppet wrote: post #198
pornel wrote: post #185

Generative AI changed the equation so much that our existing copyright laws are simply out of date. Even copyright laws with provisions for machine learning were written when that meant tangential things like ranking algorithms or training of task-specific models that couldn't directly compete with all of their source material. For code it also completely changes where the human-provided value is. Copyright protects…

It's not a problem. If you give a work to an AI and say "rewrite this", you created a derivative work. If you don't give a work to an AI and say "write a program that does (whatever the original code does)" then you didn't. During discovery the original author will get to see the rewriter's Claude logs and see which one it is. If the rewriter deleted their Claude logs during the lawsuit they go to jail. If the rewrit…

Except Claude was for sure trained on the original work and when asked to produce a new product that does the same thing will just spit out a (near) copy

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#260

Post by calny »

The maintainer's response: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...

The second part here is problematic, but fascinating: "I then started in an empty repository with no access to the old source tree, and explicitly instructed Claude not to base anything on LGPL/GPL-licensed code." Problem - Claude almost certainly was trained on the LGPL/GPL original code. It knows that is how to solve the problem. It's dubious whether Claude can ignore whatever imprints that original code made on its weights. If it COULD do that, that would be a pretty cool innovation in explainable AI. But AFAIK LLMs can't even reliably trace what data influenced the output for a query, see https://iftenney.github.io/projects/tda/, or even fully unlearn a piece of training data.

Is anyone working on this? I'd be very interested to discuss.

Some background - I'm a developer & IP lawyer - my undergrad thesis was "Copyright in the Digital Age" and discussed copyleft & FOSS. Been litigating in federal court since 2010 and training AI models since 2019, and am working on an AI for litigation platform. These are evolving issues in US courts.

BTW if you're on enterprise or a paid API plan, Anthropic indemnifies you if its outputs violate copyright. But if you're on free/pro/max, the terms state that YOU agree to indemnify THEM for copyright violation claims.[0]

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms - see para. 11 ("YOU AGREE TO INDEMNIFY AND HOLD HARMLESS THE ANTHROPIC PARTIES FROM AND AGAINST ANY AND ALL LIABILITIES, CLAIMS, DAMAGES, EXPENSES (INCLUDING REASONABLE ATTORNEYS’ FEES AND COSTS), AND OTHER LOSSES ARISING OUT OF … YOUR ACCESS TO, USE OF, OR ALLEGED USE OF THE SERVICES ….")

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