Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

I don't believe this, and I doubt that the sense of copying in copyright law is so literal. For instance, if I generated the exact text of a novel by looking for hash collisions, or by producing random strings of letters, or by hammering the middle button on my phone's autosuggestion keyboard, I would still have produced a copy and I would not be safe to distribute it. There need not have been any copy anywhere near me for this to happen. Whether it is likely or not depends on the technique used - naive techniques make this very unlikely, but techniques can improve.

It is also true that similarity does not imply copying - if you and I take an identical photograph of the same skyline, I have not copied you and you have not copied me, we have just fixed the same intangible scene into a medium. The true subjective test for copying is probably quite nuanced, I am not sure whether it is triggered in this case, but I don't think "clean room LLMs" are a panacea either.

> dirty phase produces a specification ... it is NOT defined as producing an API

This does not really sound like "the opposite of correct". APIs are usually not copyrightable, the truth is of course more complicated, if you are happy to replace "API" with "uncopyrightable specification" then we can probably agree and move on.

> it's probably not as dramatic as you think it is

In reality I am very cynical and think nothing will come of this, even if there are verbatim snippets in the produced code. People don't really care very much, and copyright cases that aren't predicated on millions of dollars do not survive the court system very long.

This is the "Don't think of a pink elephant" fallacy all over again.

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

Is it? I think the law is truly undeveloped when it comes to language models and their output.

As a purely human example, suppose I once long ago read through the source code of GCC. Does this mean that every compiler I write henceforth must be GPL-licensed, even if the code looks nothing like GCC code?

There's obviously some sliding scale. If I happen to commit lines that exactly replicate GCC then the presumption will be that I copied the work, even if the copying was unconscious. On the other hand, if I've learned from GCC and code with that knowledge, then there's no copyright-attaching copy going on.

We could analogize this to LLMs: instructions to copy a work would certainly be a copy, but an ostensibly independent replication would be a copy only if the work product had significant similarities to the original beyond the minimum necessary for function.

However, this is intuitively uncomfortable. Mechanical translation of a training corpus to model weights doesn't really feel like "learning," and an LLM can't even pinky-promise to not copy. It might still be the most reasonable legal outcome nonetheless.

It is actually that literal, really.

> For instance, if I generated the exact text of a novel by looking for hash collisions,

This is a copyright violation because you're using the original to construct the copy. It's not a pure RNG.

> or by producing random strings of letters,

This wouldn't be a copyright violation, but nobody would believe you.

> or by hammering the middle button on my phone's autosuggestion keyboard, I would still have produced a copy and I would not be safe to distribute it.

This would probably be a copyright violation.

You probably think that this is hypothetical, but problems like this do actually go to court all the time, especially in the music industry, where people try to enforce copyright on melodies that have the informational uniqueness of an eight-word sentence.

> APIs are usually not copyrightable,

This was commonly believed among developers for a long time, but it turned out to not be true.

> This does not really sound like "the opposite of correct".

The important part is that information about the implementation can absolutely be in the spec without necessarily being copyrightable (and in real world clean room RE, you end up with a LOT of implementation details). You were saying the opposite, that it was a spec of the API as opposed to a spec of the implementation.