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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#311

Post by calny »

aeon_ai wrote: post #297
calny wrote: post #260

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 prob…

You've likely paid attention to the litigation here. Regardless of what remains to be litigated, the training in and of itself has already been deemed fair use (and transformative) by Alsup. Further, you know that ideas are not protected by copyright. The code comparison in this demonstrates a relatively strong case that the expression of the idea is significantly different from that of the original code. If it were…

You're right, I've followed the litigation closely. I've advocated for years that "training is fair use" and I'm generally an anti-IP hawk who DEFENDS copyright/trademark cases. Only recently have I started to concede the issue might have more nuance than "all training is fair use, hard stop." And I still think Judge Alsup got it right.

That said, even if model training is fair use, model output can still be infringing. There would be a strong case, for example, if the end user guides the LLM to create works in a way that copies another work or mimics an author or artist's style. This case clearly isn't that. On the similarity at issue here, I haven't personally compared. I hope you're right.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#312

Post by danlitt »

femto wrote: post #177
danlitt wrote: post #134

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". 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. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanish…

> 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…

Thank you for providing a reference! I certainly admit that "very similar photographs are not copies" as the reference states. And certainly physical copying qualifies as copying in the sense of copyright. However I still think copying can happen even if you never have access to a copy.

I suppose a different way of stating my position is that some activities that don't look like copying are in fact copying. For instance it would not be required to find a literal copy of the GCC codebase inside of the LLM somehow, in order for the produced work to be a copy. Likewise if I specify that "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the text file with hash 165hdm655g7wps576n3mra3880v2yzc5hh5cif1x9mckm2xaf5g4" and then someone else uses a computer to brute force find a hash collision, I suspect this would still be considered a copy.

I think there is a substantial risk that the automatic translation done in this case is, at least in part, copying in the above sense.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#314

Post by MrManatee »

airza wrote: post #163
pmarreck wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With LLMs, the probability is much higher (since in truth they are very much not a "clean room" at all). I beg to differ. Please examine any of my recent codebases on github (same username); I have cleanroom-reimplemented par2 (par2z), bzip2 (bzip2z), rar (rarz), 7zip (z7z), so maybe I am a good test case for this (I haven't announced this anywhere until now, right here, so here we go...) https://github.com/pmarrec…

By what means did you make sure your LLM was not trained with data from the original source code?

Exactly - it very likely was trained on it. I tried this with Opus 4.6. I turned off web searches and other tool calls, and asked it to list some filenames it remembers being in the 7-zip repo. It got dozens exactly right and only two incorrect (they were close but not exact matches). I then asked it to give me the source code of a function I picked randomly, and it got the signature spot on, but not the contents.

My understanding of cleanroom is that the person/team programming is supposed to have never seen any of the original code. The agent is more like someone who has read the original code line by line, but doesn't remember all the details - and isn't allowed to check.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#315

Post by mftrhu »

Georgelemental wrote: post #248
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Derivative works can also run afoul of copyright. An LLM trained on a corpus of copyrighted code is creating derivative works no matter how obscure the process is.

What about a human trained on having 30 years of experience working with copyrighted codebases?

Said human would likely not be able to create a clean-room implementation of any of the codebases they worked on.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#316

Post by danlitt »

brians wrote: post #186
danlitt wrote: post #134

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". 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. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanish…

I do not agree with your interpretation of copyright law. It does ban copies : there has to be information flow from the original to the copy for it to be a "copy." Spontaneous generation of the same content is often taken by the courts to be a sign that it's purely functional, derived from requirements by mathematical laws. Patent law is different and doesn't rely on information flow in the same way.

I disagree that information flow is required. Do you have a reference for that? Certainly it is an important consideration. But consider all the real literary works contained in the infinite library of babel.[1] Are they original works just because no copy was used to produce them?

[1]: https://libraryofbabel.info/

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#317

Post by danlitt »

zabzonk wrote: post #170
danlitt wrote: post #134

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". 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. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanish…

> It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours" I think there is precedence that says exactly this - for example the BIOS rewrites for the IBM PC from people like Phoenix. And it would be trivial to instruct an LLM to prefer to use (say, in assembler) register C over register B wherever that was possible, resulting in different code.

As long as you never read the original code, it is very likely that whatever you write is yours. So I would not be surprised to read judges indicating in this direction. But I would be a little surprised to find out this was an actual part of the test, rather than an indication that the work was considered to have been copied. There are for instance lots of ways of reproducing copyrighted work without using a copy directly, but naive methods like generating random pieces of text are very time consuming, so there is not much precedence around them. LLMs are much more efficient at it!

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#318

Post by umvi »

What if you throw a transformation step into the mix? i.e. "Take this python library and rewrite it in Rust". Now 0% of the code is directly copied since python and Rust share almost no similarities in syntax.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#319

Post by jacquesm »

ndriscoll wrote: post #268
jacquesm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the AI's themselves and their backers are on the record as saying that the AI could reproduce copyrighted works in their entirety but that there are countermeasures in place to stop them from doing so. I wonder what the results would be if I spent time to train a model up from scratch without any such constraints. But I'm much too busy with other stuff right now, but that would be an interesting cha…

Yeah just like a star could appear inside of Earth from quantum pair production at any given moment. But realistically, it can't. And you can't even show a test where any model can get more than a few tokens in a row correct. These companies just don't want to deal with people complaining that it reproduces something when they don't understand that they're literally giving it the answer.

You do realize you are now arguing against your own case don't you?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#320

Post by [deleted] »

calny wrote: post #260

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 prob…

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