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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

tuananh.net

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#331

Post by calny »

layer8 wrote: post #322
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…

> Is anyone working on this? There was recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131225 .

Thanks! I missed that. The attribution by training data source category (arxiv vs wikipedia vs nemotron etc.) is an interesting approach.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#332

Post by calny »

Lerc wrote: post #302
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…

There was a paper that proposed a content based hashing mask for traning The idea is you have some window size, maybe 32 tokens. Hash it into a seed for a pseudo random number generator. Generate random numbers in the range 0..1 for each token in the window. Compare this number against a threshold. Don't count the loss for any tokens with a rng value higher than the threshold. It learns well enough because you get th…

Thanks! Appreciate the response and will look into this

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#333

Post by DannyBee »

DrammBA wrote: post #6

I like the idea of AI-generated ~code~ anything being public domain. Public data in, public domain out.

Lawyer here. Its not. This article is highly confused. The case was about whether an AI could be considered an author for copyright purposes. Mainly as a way of arguing for robot rights, not copyright. The person listed the AI as the sole author: On the application, Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author and himself as just the work’s owner.

This is not the first time someone tried to say a machine is the author. The law is quite clear, the machine cant be an author for copyright purposes. Despite all the confused news articles, this does not mean if claude writes code for you it is copyright free. It just means you are the author. Machines being used as tools to generate works is quite common, even autonomously. ill steal from the opinion here:

In 1974, Congress created the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (“CONTU”) to study how copyright law should accommodate “the creation of new works by the application or intervention of such automatic systems or machine reproduction.”

...

This understanding of authorship and computer technology is reflected in CONTU’s final report: On the basis of its investigations and society’s experience with the computer, the Commission believes that there is no reasonable basis for considering that a computer in any way contributes authorship to a work produced through its use. The computer, like a camera or a typewriter, is an inert instrument, capable of functioning only when activated either directly or indirectly by a human. When so activated it is capable of doing only what it is directed to do in the way it is directed to perform.

...

IE When you use a computer or any tool you are still the author.

The court confirms this later:

Contrary to Dr. Thaler’s assumption, adhering to the human-authorship requirement does not impede the protection of works made with artificial intelligence. Thaler Opening Br. 38-39. First, the human authorship requirement does not prohibit copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being—the person who created, operated, or used artificial intelligence—and not the machine itself. The Copyright Office, in fact, has allowed the registration of works made by human authors who use artificial intelligence.

There are cases where the use of AI made something uncopyrightable, even when a human was listed as the author, but all of the ones i know are image related.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#334

Post by softwaredoug »

> If AI-generated code cannot be copyrighted (as the courts suggest), then the maintainers may not even have the legal standing to license v7.0.0 under MIT or any license.

Does this mean company X using AI coding to build their app, that they have no copyright over their AI coded app's code?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#335

Post by jcranmer »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #300
amelius wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this clause even legally valid? How can the user know if the LLM produces anything that violates copyright? (Of course they shouldn't have trained it on infringing content in the first place, and perhaps used a different model for enterprise, etc.)

"... If AI-generated code cannot be copyrighted (as the courts suggest) ". So, Supreme Court has said that. AI-produced code can not be copyrighted. (Am I right?). Then who's to blame if AI produces code large portions of which already exist coded and copyrigted by humans (or corporations). I assume it goes something like this: A) If you distribute code produced by AI, YOU cannot claim copyright to it. B) If you dist…

SCOTUS hasn't ruled on any AI copyright cases yet. But they've said in Feist v Rural (1991) that copyright requires a minimum creative spark. The US Copyright Office maintains that human authorship is required for copyright, and the 9th Circuit in 2019 explicitly agreed with the law that a non-human animal cannot hold any copyright.

Functionally speaking, AI is viewed as any machine tool. Using, say, Photoshop to draw an image doesn't make that image lose copyright, but nor does it imbue the resulting image with copyright. It's the creativity of the human use of the tool (or lack thereof) that creates copyright.

Whether or not AI-generated output a) infringes the copyright of its training data and b) if so, if it is fair use is not yet settled. There are several pending cases asking this question, and I don't think any of them have reached the appeals court stage yet, much less SCOTUS. But to be honest, there's a lot of evidence of LLMs being able to regurgitate training inputs verbatim that they're capable of infringing copyright (and a few cases have already found infringement in such scenarios), and given the 2023 Warhol decision, arguing that they're fair use is a very steep claim indeed.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#336

Post by hamdingers »

satvikpendem wrote: post #238
pornel wrote: post #185

Generative AI changed the equation so much that our existing copyright laws are simply out of date. Even copyright laws with provisions for machine learning were written when that meant tangential things like ranking algorithms or training of task-specific models that couldn't directly compete with all of their source material. For code it also completely changes where the human-provided value is. Copyright protects…

Honestly, good. Copyright and IP law in general have been so twisted by corporations that only they benefit now, see Mickey Mouse laws by Disney for example, or patenting obvious things like Nintendo or even just patent trolling in general.

The biggest recording artist in the world right now had to re-record her early albums because she didn't own the copyright, imagine how many artists don't get that big and never have that opportunity.

That individual artists are still defending this system is baffling to me.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#337

Post by larodi »

jcranmer wrote: post #335
galaxyLogic wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... If AI-generated code cannot be copyrighted (as the courts suggest) ". So, Supreme Court has said that. AI-produced code can not be copyrighted. (Am I right?). Then who's to blame if AI produces code large portions of which already exist coded and copyrigted by humans (or corporations). I assume it goes something like this: A) If you distribute code produced by AI, YOU cannot claim copyright to it. B) If you dist…

SCOTUS hasn't ruled on any AI copyright cases yet. But they've said in Feist v Rural (1991) that copyright requires a minimum creative spark. The US Copyright Office maintains that human authorship is required for copyright, and the 9th Circuit in 2019 explicitly agreed with the law that a non-human animal cannot hold any copyright. Functionally speaking, AI is viewed as any machine tool. Using, say, Photoshop to dra…

The lack thereof (of human use). Prompts are not copyrightable thus the output also - not. Besides retelling a story is fair use, right? Otherwise we should ban all generative AI and prepare for Dune/Foundation future. But we not there, and we perhaps never going to be.

So the LLM training first needs to be settled, then we talk whether retelling a whole software package infringes anyone's right. And even if it does, there are no laws in place to chase it.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#338

Post by Filligree »

danlitt wrote: post #316
brians wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Yes; the works are original.

However, describing the path you need to get there requires copyright infringement.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#339

Post by sarchertech »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #304
ostacke wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bu that's not really what danlitt said, right? They did not claim that it's impossible for an LLM to generate something different, merely that it's not a clean room implementation since the LLM, one must assume, is trained on the code it's re-implementing.

BUt LLM has seen millions (?) of other code-bases too. If you give it a functional spec it has no reason to prefer any one of those code-bases in particular. Except perhaps if it has seen the original spec (if such can be read from public sources) associated with the old implementation, and the new spec is a copy of the old spec.

Yes if you are solving the exact problem that the original code solved and that original code was labeled as solving that exact problem then that’s very good reason for the LLM to produce that code.

Researchers have shown that an LLM was able to reproduce the verbatim text of the first 4 Harry Potter books with 96% accuracy.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#340

Post by tzs »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #300
amelius wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this clause even legally valid? How can the user know if the LLM produces anything that violates copyright? (Of course they shouldn't have trained it on infringing content in the first place, and perhaps used a different model for enterprise, etc.)

"... If AI-generated code cannot be copyrighted (as the courts suggest) ". So, Supreme Court has said that. AI-produced code can not be copyrighted. (Am I right?). Then who's to blame if AI produces code large portions of which already exist coded and copyrigted by humans (or corporations). I assume it goes something like this: A) If you distribute code produced by AI, YOU cannot claim copyright to it. B) If you dist…

The Supreme Court has not ruled on this issue. An appeal of a lower court's ruling on this issue was appealed to the Supreme Court but the Supreme Court declined to accept the case.

The Supreme Court has "original jurisdiction" over some types of cases, which means if someone brings such a case to them they have to accept it and rule on it, and they have "discretionary jurisdiction" over many more types of cases, which means if someone brings one of those they can choose whether or not they have to accept it. AI copyright cases are discretionary jurisdiction cases.

You generally cannot reliable infer what the Supreme Court thinks of the merits of the case when they decline to accept it, because they are often thinking big picture and longer term.

They might think a particular ruling is needed, but the particular case being appealed is not a good case to make that ruling on. They tend to want cases where the important issue is not tangled up in many other things, and where multiple lower appeals courts have hashed out the arguments pro and con.

When the Supreme Court declines the result is that the law in each part of the country where an appeals court has ruled on the issue is whatever that appeals court ruled. In parts of the country where no appeals court has ruled, it will be decided when an appeal reaches their appeals courts.

If appeals courts in different areas go in different directions, the Supreme Court will then be much more likely to accept an appeal from one of those in order to make the law uniform.

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