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No right to relicense this project

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Re: No right to relicense this project

#341

Post by dragonwriter »

spwa4 wrote: post #218
antirez wrote: post #116

I believe that Pilgrim here does not understand very well how copyright works: > Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code This is simply not true. The reason why the "clean room" concept exists is precisely since actually the law recognizes that independent implementations ARE possibile. The "clean room" thing is a trick to make the litig…

Given that LLMs were trained on the repository directly, it's not just the case that anything made by the LLM is a derivative work, the LLM ITSELF is a derivative work. After all, they all are substantially based on GPL licensed works by others. The standard courts have always used for "substantially based" by the way, is the ability to extract from the new work anything bigger than an excerpt of the original work. S…

> Given that LLMs were trained on the repository directly, it's not just the case that anything made by the LLM is a derivative work, the LLM ITSELF is a derivative work.

That’s not how “derivative works”, well, work.

First of all, a thing can only be a derivative work if it is itself an original work of authorship.

Otherwise, it might be (or contain) a complete copy or a partial copy of one or more source works (which, if it doesn't fall into a copyright exception, would still be a at least a potential violation), but its not a derivative work.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#342

Post by rmast »

therealpygon wrote: post #291
maybewhenthesun wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the legal interpretations, I think it's very worrying if an automated AI rewrite of GPLed code (or any code for that matter) could somehow be used to circumvent the original license. That kinda takes out the one stick the open source community has to force soulless multinationals to contribute back to the open source projects they use.

Take AI out…if a person can do it, which they can, the situation hasn’t changed. Further, it was a person who did it, with the assistance of AI. Also, the concept that you “can’t be exposed to the code before writing a compatible alternative” is utterly false in their arguments. In fact, one could take every single interface definition they have defined to communicate and use those interfaces directly to write their…

As part of the relicensing ZeroMQ did a few years ago, they sought permission from all previous contributors (yes, it was a multi-year effort). Code contributions that they weren’t able to get permission to relicense resulting in the corresponding lines being removed (or functionality rewritten from scratch).

Re: No right to relicense this project

#343

Post by rmast »

pocksuppet wrote: post #214
TZubiri wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok sure, in the alternative, here's the argument: The AI was trained with the code, so the complete rewrite is tainted and not a clean room. I can't believe this would need spelling out.

"Tainted rewrite" isn't a legal concept either. You have to prove (on balance of probabilities - more likely than not) that the defendant made an unauthorized copy, made an unauthorized derivative work, etc. Clean-room rewriting is a defense strategy, because if the programmer never saw the original work, they couldn't possibly have made a derivative. But even without that, you still have to prove they did. It's not…

If you wanted to do the clean-room approach for something like chardet in a less controversial way, instead of having the AI do all the work couldn’t the AI generate the spec and then a human (with no exposure to the original code) do an initial implementation based on the spec?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#344

Post by hoopyKt »

malklera wrote: post #287

You have to look from two sides this Moral: What is right or wrong? If they wanted to change the license, they could have made another project with another name, and nobody would care, but they wanted the reputation of the project. Legal: How much are you willing to spend on litigation? The only real "protection" by copyright is in court.

Further, while the copyright of the original code and its derivatives are still owned by the original author does that hold true to the rights to the name and package namespace? Supposing this were indisputably a clean room implementation instead of an unclear one, would the maintainers then have a right to relicense under the same name? I would imagine that yes, they do have the right to relicense in that case because the copyright only applies to the code, not the project itself.

Other questions that haven't really been explored before also are maintained: the original author hasn't been involved in some time, technically the copyright of all code since still belongs to those authors who might be bound by LGPL but are also the only ones with the right to enforce it and could simply choose not to. What then?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#345

Post by hoopyKt »

amtamt wrote: post #278

Maintainers must not be able to change the license that original author chose, and based on which contributors made contributions. When one stepped up to be maintainer, it was a trustee role, not owner role. It should be perfectly ok (by maintainer or anyone for that mater) to be inspired from a community project and build something from scratch hand-crafting/ AI sloping, as long as the imitation is given a new name/…

A distinction should be made between ownership of the code and its copyright and ownership of the repository and associated distribution channels. As far as I know, there's no precedent to state that owning the former means ownership of the latter. The original author abandoned this project years ago and likely has no legal basis to maintain that the project itself stays LGPL, only that their code and derivatives of it stay LGPL. Unless it could be proven otherwise, a rewrite of the project under a different license made without directly referencing the original is likely well within the rights of the owners of the repository to do.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#346

Post by cubefox »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #280
cubefox wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you let an LLM merely rephrase the codebase, that's like letting it rephrase the Harry Potter novels. Which, I'm pretty sure, would still be considered a copy under copyright law, not an original work, despite not copying any text verbatim.

But what if it didn’t summarize Harry Potter? What if it analyzed Harry Potter and came back with a specification for how to write a compelling story about wizards? And then someone read that spec and wrote a different story about wizards that bears only the most superficial resemblance to Harry Potter in the sense that they’re both compelling stories about wizards? This is legitimately a very weird case and I have n…

That seems unrelated to what happened.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#347

Post by nothrabannosir »

joquarky wrote: post #316
nothrabannosir wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By allowing them to benefit from the work of others who do. Directly or indirectly. I’m not good at car maintenance but I would benefit from an environment where schematics are open and cars are easy to maintain by everyone: there would be more knowledge around it, more garages for me to choose from, etc.

In context of your metaphor: what if we didn't need cars anymore?

Then we would stop checking them into our source control repositories.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#348

Post by nailer »

gpm wrote: post #332
nailer wrote: post #249

> chardet 7.0 is a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API Licensing aside, morally you don't rewrite someone else's project with the same package name.

I've got some serious moral questions about "rewrite your own widely used project from scratch with the same package name"... but I don't think it's fair to call this "someone else's project" when the OP has apparently been the only maintainer working on the project for 13 years...

Creator is still the creator and retains rights to the name.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#349

Post by robinsonb5 »

luma wrote: post #335
maybewhenthesun wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the legal interpretations, I think it's very worrying if an automated AI rewrite of GPLed code (or any code for that matter) could somehow be used to circumvent the original license. That kinda takes out the one stick the open source community has to force soulless multinationals to contribute back to the open source projects they use.

If automated AI rewrites are generally feasible, then the marginal price of nearly all software trends to zero.

If code becomes essentially free (ignoring for a moment the environmental cost or the long term cost of allowing code generation to be tollboothed by AI megacorps) the value of code must lie in its track record.

The 5-day-old code in chardet has little to no value. The battle-tested years-old code that was casually flushed away to make room for it had value.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#350

Post by simiones »

camgunz wrote: post #294
simiones wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO this is pretty common sense. No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it. Actually this is very much how people think for code. Consider the following consequence. Say I work for a company. Every time I generate some code with Claude, I keep a copy of said code. Once the full code is tested and released, I throw away any code that was not working well. Now I leave the…

No software company thinks this, not Oracle, not Google, not Meta, no one. See: the guy they sued for taking things to Uber.

The person I replied to said "No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it.". My point was that people absolutely do think and believe strongly they are authoring code when they are generating it with AI - and thus they are claiming ownership rights over it.
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