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No right to relicense this project

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Re: No right to relicense this project

#301

Post by CamperBob2 »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #295
CamperBob2 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I have now arose from processes of continuous improvement, carried out by smart people taking full advantage of the best available tools and technologies including all available means of automation. It'll be OK.

Ah well, I tried.. To paraphrase Nietzsche, a man can be measured by how well he sleeps at night. I can only hope you stay well rested into this future ;). And yes, it will be ok!

Ah, Nietzsche. "They call him Ubermensch, 'cause he's so driven." He told us that man is a thing that will be surpassed, and asked what we've done to surpass him. The last thing I want to do is get in the way of the people doing it.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#302

Post by pmarreck »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #156
pmarreck wrote: post #147

I have successfully reproduced a few projects with LLM assistance via strict cleanroom rules and only working off public specifications.

Once you use a LLM, the room is no longer clean.

Does that hold up if it’s in an entirely different language?

Because I don’t think so

Re: No right to relicense this project

#304

Post by maxerickson »

bandrami wrote: post #154
maxerickson wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I want to publish a project under some license and I put a comment in an AI generated file (never mind what I put in the comment), how do you go about proving which portion of that file is not protected under copyright? If the AI code isn't copyrightable, I don't have any obligations to acknowledge it.

You're looking at this as the infringer rather than the owner. How do you as a copyright owner prove you meaningfully arranged the work when you want to enforce your copyright?

I was looking at it from the perspective of an owner who simply wants to discourage use outside of some particular license.

There's close enough to zero enforcement of infringement, it's all self policing or violation.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#305

Post by beepbooptheory »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #301
beepbooptheory wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah well, I tried.. To paraphrase Nietzsche, a man can be measured by how well he sleeps at night. I can only hope you stay well rested into this future ;). And yes, it will be ok!

Ah, Nietzsche. "They call him Ubermensch, 'cause he's so driven." He told us that man is a thing that will be surpassed, and asked what we've done to surpass him. The last thing I want to do is get in the way of the people doing it.

Ah geeze don't lie down so easily! It's aspirational! You don't need to prefigure yourself as so impotent here... We can all find the courage to roar against the consensus of slave mentality, even those of us who are maybe quicker to give it all up at first for some new God. I think you have the right attitude, but you are going to end up on the side of losers either way if you don't even try to fight. Also, I am just an old man, so grain of salt and all that!

And fwiw, the idea he meant like literal people walking around being Uber is kinda nazi distortion anyway.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#307

Post by klustregrif »

markthered wrote: post #170

The copyright argument is a sidetrack both in the PR comment thread and here. The issue opened claims the new code is based on the old code, and therefore derivative, and therefore must be offered in a modified version of the source code under the previous license, LGPL. The complaint is the maintainers violated the terms of LGPL, that they must prove no derivation from the original code to legally claim this is a le…

> Claim is if they or Claude read the old code (or of course directly use any of it) it is a license violation

The original code is part of claude's training material. With that intepretation of the LGPL AI is incapable of writing non LGPL derivatives. I like that interpretation.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#308

Post by jasomill »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #184
Roritharr wrote: post #13

As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context. A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern. One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical. Took him a week after work. I…

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?" You can try patenting; but not after the fact. Copyright won't help you here. You can't copyright an algorithm or idea, just a specific form or implementation of it. And there is a lot of legal history about what is and isn't a derivative work here. Some companies try to forbid reverse engineering in their licensing. But of course that might be a bit ha…

IBM never open sourced their BIOS, but they did publish complete source code listings:

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/pc/6025008_PC_Technical_Ref...

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/xt/1502237_PC_XT_Technical_...

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/at/1502494_PC_AT_Technical_...

Between this and the fact that their PC-DOS (née MS-DOS) license was nonexclusive, I'm honestly not sure what they expected to happen.

The nature of early IBM PC advertising suggests to me that they expected the IBM name and established business relationships to carry as much weight as the specifications itself, and that "IBM PC compatible" systems would be no more attractive than existing personal computers running similar if not identical third-party software (PC-DOS wasn't the only example of IBM reselling third-party software under nonexclusive license), and would perhaps even lead to increased sales of first-party IBM PCs.

Which, in fact, they did, leading me to believe the actual result may have been not too far from their original intent, only with IBM capturing and holding a larger share of the pie.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#309

Post by kahnclusions »

antirez wrote: post #116

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…

I’m surprised they think the AI generated rewrite is even copyrightable.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#310

Post by jasomill »

orthoxerox wrote: post #281
dredmorbius wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which are those?

Afaik, the EU and Russia says that observing/experimenting with the external behavior of the program to determine its internal logic is legal. Russia even allows to decompile object code if you have to solve private compatibility issues.

Even in the US, are there any non-DRM examples where reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability in violation of a license agreement have been used as the basis for copyright claims, even when the results are incorporated into a competing product?

For example, I don't recall Microsoft ever being sued by WordPerfect or Lotus for reading and writing their applications' unpublished file formats, which wouldn't have necessarily involved disassembly or decompilation, but was still the result of reverse engineering that almost certainly involved using a licensed or unlicensed copy of the competitor's product.

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