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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

#331

Post by crazygringo »

alterom wrote: post #306
crazygringo wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 di…

> 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.

Let's distinguish two different scenarios here:

1) Your prompt is copyright-free, but the LLM produces a significant amount of copyrighted content verbatim. Then the LLM is liable, and you too are liable if you redistribute it.

2) Your prompt contains copyrighted data, and the LLM transforms it, and you distribute it. Then if the transformation is not sufficient, you are liable for redistributing it.

The second example is what I'm referring to, since the commercial LLM's are now very good about not reproducing copyrighted content verbatim. And yes, OpenAI is off the hook from everything I understand legally.

Your example of commissioning an artist is different from LLM's, because the artist is legally responsible for the product and is selling the result to you as a creative human work, whereas an LLM is a software tool and the company is selling access to it. So the better analogy is if you rent a Xerox copier to copy something by Warhol. Xerox is not liable if you try to redistribute that copy. But you are. So here, Xerox=OpenAI. They are not liable for your copyrighted inputs turning into copyrighted outputs.

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

#332

Post by jongjong »

There is a definite issue in terms of legitimacy and I also think there are some issues in the wording of certain open source licenses like MIT which give rights to 'Any person obtaining a copy of this software'.

Firstly, an AI agent is not a person. Secondly, the MIT license doesn't offer any rights to the code itself; it says a 'copy of the software' - That's what people are given the right to. It says nothing about the code and in terms of the software, it still requires attribution. Attribution of use and distribution of the software (or parts) is required regardless of the copyright aspect. AI agents are redistributing the software, not the code.

The MIT license makes a clear distinction between code and software. It doesn't cede any rights to the code.

And then, in the spirit of copyright; it was designed to protect the financial interests of the authors. The 'fair use' carve-out was meant for cases which do not have an adverse market impact on the author which it clearly does; at least in the cases highlighted in this article.

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

#333

Post by GuB-42 »

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.

I think it will become interesting when AI will be able to decompile binaries.

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

#334

Post by effank »

My view is that the current discourse surrounding AI reimplementation is trapped in an antiquated, atomistic model of authorship. What is fundamentally lacking in this debate is a systemic framework for trust, transparency, and the effective traceability of value creation.

Our legal and ethical frameworks including both copyleft and permissive licenses operate under the illusion of discrete, bounded attribution. They assume we can draw a clean perimeter around 'the code' and its 'author.' In reality, software production is a highly complex socio-technical network characterized by deep epistemic opacity. We are arguing over who holds the title to the final output while completely ignoring the vast, distributed network of inputs that made it possible.

Furthermore, because end-users face massive transaction costs and a general lack of incentive to evaluate the granular utility of their consumption, we have no reliable market mechanism to signal value back up the supply chain. Consequently, we fail to effectively compensate the true chain of biological and artificial contributors that facilitate downstream consumption.

In a rigorously mapped value-system, attribution would not stop at the keyboard; it would extend to all nodes of enablement. This includes what sociologists and economists term 'reproductive labor' or 'invisible labor' such as the developer’s partner who cooked them breakfast, thereby sustaining the biological and cognitive infrastructure necessary for the developer to contribute to the repository in the first place. The AI model is merely another node of aggregated external labor in this exact same web - both by its upward 'training' and downward utilization.

Until we develop an economic and technological ontology capable of tracing and rewarding this entire ecosystem of adjacent contributions, our debates over LGPL versus MIT will remain myopic. We are trying to govern a distributed, interconnected web of collective labor using property tools designed for solitary craftsmen.

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

#335

Post by phendrenad2 »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #225
Gigachad wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI models have already looked at the source of GPL software and contain it in their dataset. Adding the minecraft source to the mix wouldn't seem much different. Of course art assets and trade marks would have to be replaced. But an AI "clean room" implementation has yet to be legally tested.

That's why he is saying it's not equivalent. For it to be the same, the LLM would have to train on/transform Minecraft's source code into its weights, then you prompt the LLM to make a game using the specifications of Minecraft solely through prompts. Of course it's copyright infringement if you just give a tool Minecraft's source code and tell it to copy it, just like it would be copyright infringement if you used a…

It's not equivalent, but it's close enough that you can't easily dismiss it.

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

#336

Post by RhythmFox »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #330
alpaca128 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Copilot was already trained with Minecraft code in the dataset? Should be possible to test by telling the model to continue a snippet from the leaked code, the same way a news website proved their articles were used for training.

I feel as though the fact that you are asking a valid question shows how transformative it is; clearly, while the LLM gets a general ability to code from its training corpus, the data gets so transformed that it's difficult to tell what exactly it was trained on except a large body of code.

Then the training itself is the legal question. This doesn't seem all that complicated to me.

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

#337

Post by phendrenad2 »

drnick1 wrote: post #25

It should be noted that the Rust community is also guilty of something similar. That is, porting old GPL programs, typically written in C, to Rust and relicensing them as MIT.

And BSD drivers are "clean-room reimplementations" of the GPL drivers from Linux (but we all know they aren't).

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

#338

Post by sobellian »

alterom wrote: post #289
jrochkind1 wrote: post #279

> If source code can now be generated from a specification, the specification is where the essential intellectual content of a GPL project resides. Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-like to corporate software packages, even if the so-called owners did not like it. We're ready to throw it all away, and let intellectual property owners get so much more control. The implications will not end up b…

>Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-like to corporate software packages, even if the so-called owners did not like it Our "foreparents" weren't competing with corporations with unlimited access to generative AI trained on their work . The times, they're-a-changin'. You're rehashing the argument made in one of the articles which this piece criticizes and directly addresses, while ignoring the en…

I think the article in fact reaches the exact opposite conclusion it should. I'm not really sure how useful it is to talk about sharing and commons and morals when the point raised was about what is possible. The prescription includes copyleft APIs. These are not possible under Oracle v Google. And you could point it out if I'm wrong but the article doesn't discuss what would happen if Congress acted to reverse Oracle v Google (IMO a cosmically bad idea).

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

#339

Post by wvenable »

makerofthings wrote: post #282
j-bos wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ultimate form of piracy Nothing was stolen, not even copied, lamest piracy I've heard of.

I take your point, but if the re-implementation looks the same, I would say it’s a form of copying. (Which I don’t think is a problem, I don’t think you should be able to own sequences of numbers.)

What does it mean to look the same? Just look at modern automobiles:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENE01g6X0AA7w5r?format=jpg

Are they copies? Can all these car companies sue each other?

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

#340

Post by gowld »

GuB-42 wrote: post #333
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.

I think it will become interesting when AI will be able to decompile binaries.

Decompiling binaries is easy when they are C# or Java, even before AI. C# is a Microsoft language, and C# games have thriving mod communities with deep hooks into the core game, and detailed documentation reverse-engineered from the binary.
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