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Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

lwn.net

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Re: Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

#31

Post by raggi »

bt1a wrote: post #20
g0xA52A2A wrote: post #8

Wow that thread just kept going. Whilst the LWN article covered most of the "highlights" I think this reply from Theo is pretty suscient on the topic at large [1]. [1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177425035627562&w=2

> Lacking Copyright (or similarily a Public Domain declaration by a human), we don't receive sufficient rights grants which would permit us to include it into the aggregate body of source code, without that aggregate body becoming less free than it is now. Thats awesome lmao

that's not a statement from a lawyer, and it's confused. there is one true thing in there which is that at least under US considerations the LLM output may not be copyrightable due to insufficient human involvement, but the rest of the implications are poorly extrapolated.

there are lots of portions of code today, prior to AI authorship, that are already not copyrightable due to the way they are produced. the existence of such code does not decimate the copyright of an overall collective work.

Re: Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

#32

Post by wongarsu »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #21
FeepingCreature wrote: post #7

> So as of today, the Copyright system does not have a way for the output of a non-human produced set of files to contain the grant of permissions which the OpenBSD project needs to perform combination and redistribution. This seems extremely confused. The copyright system does not have a way to grant these permissions because the material is not covered under copyright! You can distribute it at will, not due to any…

Eh … the argument will likely be things created by Thing at the behest of Author is owned by the Author. It’ll take a few cases going through the courts, or an Act of Congress to solidify this stuff.

Just like we settled on photographers havin copyright on the works created by their camera. The same arguments seem to apply

The US Copyright Office has published a piece that argues otherwise, but a) unless they pass regulation their opinion doesn't really matter, and b) there is way too much money resting on the assumption code can be copyrighted despite AI involvement.

Re: Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

#33

Post by tolciho »

nurettin wrote: post #4

It is amusing to see that the only concern seems to be about a confusion around licensing, not the validity or maintainability of the code itself.

Eh, well, if your guns are trained on the "copyright" portion of the ship and you can sink it from there, no need to waste ammo or time trying to figure out if code bits are as explosive as the copyright bits are. Probably the code is just as sinkable, e.g. here's a recent response to some other AI slop:

  I didn't look closely at most of the code but one thing that caught my eye, pid is not safe for tempfile name generation, another user of the system can easily generate files that conflict with this. Functions like mktemp and mkstemp are there for a reason. Some of the other "safety" checks make no sense. If the LLM code generator is coming up with things which any competent unix sysadmin (let alone programmer) can tell are obviously wrong, it doesn't bode well for the rest.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=177460682403496&w=2

The next AI winter can't come soon enough…

Re: Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

#35

Post by senko »

HappySweeney wrote: post #25
jagged-chisel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh … the argument will likely be things created by Thing at the behest of Author is owned by the Author. It’ll take a few cases going through the courts, or an Act of Congress to solidify this stuff.

Haven't there already been a few cases, each of which found that mechanically-produced works are not copywritable?

no

Re: Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

#36

Post by fragmede »

wongarsu wrote: post #32
jagged-chisel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh … the argument will likely be things created by Thing at the behest of Author is owned by the Author. It’ll take a few cases going through the courts, or an Act of Congress to solidify this stuff.

Just like we settled on photographers havin copyright on the works created by their camera. The same arguments seem to apply The US Copyright Office has published a piece that argues otherwise, but a) unless they pass regulation their opinion doesn't really matter, and b) there is way too much money resting on the assumption code can be copyrighted despite AI involvement.

It's not settled. The monkey selfie copyright dispute ruled that a monkey that pressed the button to take a selfie, does not and cannot open the copyright to that photo, and neither does the photographer who's camera it was. How that extends to AI generated code is for the courts to decide, but there are some parallels to that case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Re: Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

#38

Post by charcircuit »

fragmede wrote: post #36
wongarsu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like we settled on photographers havin copyright on the works created by their camera. The same arguments seem to apply The US Copyright Office has published a piece that argues otherwise, but a) unless they pass regulation their opinion doesn't really matter, and b) there is way too much money resting on the assumption code can be copyrighted despite AI involvement.

It's not settled. The monkey selfie copyright dispute ruled that a monkey that pressed the button to take a selfie, does not and cannot open the copyright to that photo, and neither does the photographer who's camera it was. How that extends to AI generated code is for the courts to decide, but there are some parallels to that case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

This filesystem driver was made by a human using AI, not a monkey.

Re: Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

#39

Post by wongarsu »

fragmede wrote: post #36
wongarsu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like we settled on photographers havin copyright on the works created by their camera. The same arguments seem to apply The US Copyright Office has published a piece that argues otherwise, but a) unless they pass regulation their opinion doesn't really matter, and b) there is way too much money resting on the assumption code can be copyrighted despite AI involvement.

It's not settled. The monkey selfie copyright dispute ruled that a monkey that pressed the button to take a selfie, does not and cannot open the copyright to that photo, and neither does the photographer who's camera it was. How that extends to AI generated code is for the courts to decide, but there are some parallels to that case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

But with the monkey there are two levels of separation from the artist: the human makes the creative decision to hand the camera to a monkey, who presses the trigger, and the camera makes the picture. Compared to the single layer of separation of a photographer choosing framing and camera parameters, pressing the trigger and the camera taking the picture. Or the zero levels of separation when the artist paints the picture.

A programmer writing code would be like the painter, and the programmer writing a prompt for Claude looks a lot like the photographer. The prompt is the creative work that makes it copyrightable, just like the artistic choices of the photographer make the photo copyrightable

You could argue that the prompt is more like a technical description than a creative work. But then the same should probably be true of the code itself, and consequently copyright should not apply to code at all

The copyright office's argument is that the AI is more like a freelancer than like a machine like a camera. Which you might equate to the monkey, who's also a bit freelancer like. But I have my doubts that holds up in court. Monkeys are a lot more sentient than AIs

Re: Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

#40

Post by ziml77 »

greyface- wrote: post #15
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #5

Can someone just copyright wash Windows already.

ReactOS did this without any need for an LLM.

No they didn't. It would be copyright washing if someone contributed to ReactOS who remembered large portions of the Windows code and wrote the ReactOS implementations based on that.
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