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

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

#301

Post by fruitworks »

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.

this is the question of the hour. Imagine using this LLM proxy to license-strip major parts of leaked Windows source code to produce code for WINE.

On top of all of this, there are the attempts at binary decompilation using LLMs and other new tools that have been discussed on this site recently.

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

#302

Post by foresto »

crazygringo wrote: post #267
foresto wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, but it misses my point: The library's test suite and interfaces were apparently used directly, not transformed. If either of those are considered part of the library's source code, as the license's wording seems to suggest, then I think output from their use could be considered a work based on the library as defined in the license.

Legally that's been established as acceptable. Google LLC v Oracle America assumed (though didn't establish) that API's are copyrightable... BUT that developing against them falls under fair use , as long as the function implementations are independent. Test suites are again generally considered copyrightable... but the behavior being tested is not . So no, it's not considered to be a work based on the library. This…

> Also, the LGPL text doesn't say "work based on the library".

It does, about a dozen times.

Are you perhaps referring to LGPL3? I think the license under discussion here is LGPL2.1.

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/6.0.0/LICENSE

I'm not well versed in copyright case law, so I won't argue with the rest of what you wrote. Thanks for elaborating on your thoughts.

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

#303

Post by panny »

Both sides are wrong on this actually. Computer generated code has no copyright protection.

>The U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) and federal courts have consistently ruled that AI-generated works—where the expressive elements are determined by the machine, even in response to a human prompt—lack the necessary human creative input and therefore cannot be copyrighted.

All this code is public domain. Your employees can publish "your" AI generated code freely and it won't matter how many tokens you spent generating it. It is not covered by copyright.

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

#304

Post by paxys »

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…

Until there is a capable open source open weight AI that is easily hostable by an average person - no, we still have a long way to go. You aren't going to have software freedom when the tool that enables it is controlled by a handful of powerful tech companies.

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

#305

Post by intrasight »

sarchertech wrote: post #213
intrasight wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most commercial software that I've used has the model of a legal moat around a pretty crappy database schema. The non IP protection has largely been in the effort involved in replicating an application's behavior and that effort is dropping precipitously.

You must not have used much commercial software outside of crappy business SaaS.

Truth

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

#306

Post by alterom »

crazygringo wrote: post #244
Copyrightest wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Legal liability is completely unchanged.

It's changed completely, from your own example.

If you comission art from an artist who paints a modified copy of Warhol's work, the artist is liable (even if you keep that work private, for personal use).

If you commission it from OpenAI (by sending a query to their ChatGPT API), by your argument, you are the person liable — and OpenAI is off the hook even if that work is distributed further.

I'm not going to argue about the merits of creativity here, or that someone putting a prompt into ChatGPT considers themselves an artist.

That's irrelevant. The work is created on OpenAI servers, by the LLMs hosted there, and is then distributed to whoever wrote the prompt.

Models run locally are distributed by whoever trained them.

If you train a model on whatever data you legally have access to, and produce something for yourself, it's one thing.

Distribution is where things start to get different.

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

#307

Post by Marsymars »

cubefox wrote: post #178
Marsymars wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just like rephrasing A Song ot Ice and Fire a bit, and switching to a different language, doesn't remove its copyright. There is some precedent for this, e.g. Alchemised is a recent best seller that had just enough changed from its Harry Potter fan fiction source in order to avoid copyright infringement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemised (I avoided the term “remove copyright” here because the new work is sti…

That's apparently a different story with different plot, so that's not comparable.

Plots are broadly not copyrightable, “different plot” is less important than “different characters”.

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

#308

Post by jazzyjackson »

reverius42 wrote: post #288
nkmnz wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI-output does not qualify for IP protections I beg to differ. AI-output did not entitle the person creating the prompt for IP protections, so far – but my objection is not directed towards the "so far", but towards your omission of "the person creating the prompt", because if an AI outputs copyrighted material from the training data, that material is still copyrighted. AI is not a magical copyright removal machine…

The U.S. Supreme Court just declined to hear a case, thus upholding a lower court precedent that LLM output are not copyrightable: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de... What this means in practice is that (currently), all output of an LLM is legally considered to not be copyrightable (to the extent that it's an original work). If it happens to regurgitate an existing copyrighted work, though…

There’s several large settlements that say Anthropomorphic/OAI didn’t want to have legal precedent. In general if it’s not outright regurgitated it would be derivative.

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

#309

Post by minimaltom »

dathinab wrote: post #134
nicole_express wrote: post #27

Not a lawyer, but my understanding is: In theory, copyright only protects the creative expression of source code; this is the point of the "clean room" dance, that you're keeping only the functional behavior (not protected by copyright). Patents are, of course, an entirely different can of worms. So using an LLM to strip all of the "creative expression" out of source code but create the same functionality feels like…

> this is the point of the "clean room" dance which is the actual relevant part: they didn't do that dance AFIK AI is a tool, they set it up to make a non-verbatim copy of a program. Then they feed it the original software (AFIK). Which makes it a side by side copy, as in the original source was used as reference to create the new program. Which tend to be seen as derived work even if very different. IMHO They would…

Is your (1) description of clean room implementation, and (2) description of what was done, actually correct?

(1): my understanding was that a party _with access to copyrighted material_ made the functional spec, which was communicated to a party without access [1]. Under my understanding, theres no requirement for the authors of the functional spec to be 'clean'.

(2) Afaict, they limited the AI to access of just the functional spec and audited that it did not see the original source.

Edit: Not sure if sharing the 'test suite' matters, probably something for the courts in the unlikely event this ever gets there.

[1] Following the definition of clean room re implementation as it relates to US precedent, ie that described in the wikipedia page.

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

#310

Post by jazzyjackson »

hyperman1 wrote: post #226
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…

I've always thought the opposite: IP law was created to make sure creativity stays hard, and hence controllable by the elites. Patents came along when farmers started making city goods, threatening guilds secrets. Copyright came when the printing press made copying and translating the bible easy and accessible to all. (Trademark admittedly does not fit this view, but doesn't seem all that damaging either) To Protect…

:/ before copyright you just had patrons, which looks a lot more like the rich controlling what art gets made than what we have today
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