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

writings.hongminhee.org

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

#341

Post by eru »

zmmmmm wrote: post #162

The really interesting question to me is if this transcends copyright and unravels the whole concept of intellectual property. Because all of it is premised on an assumption that creativity is "hard". But LLMs are not just writing software, they are rapidly being engineered to operate completely generally as knowledge creation engines: solving math proofs, designing drugs, etc. So: once it's not "hard" any more, does…

There's different kinds of intellectual property.

Copyright might rest on 'creativity is hard'. But patents and trademarks do not.

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

#342

Post by eru »

rlpb wrote: post #283
palmotea wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial IP law - let's say, patents: it just becomes and input parameter that the AI needs to work around the patents like any other constraints. I think it still does: IIRC, the current legal situation is AI-output does not qualify for IP pr…

What if a person puts in the work, but the work was worthless or can be trivially reproduced without effort? See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

You mean like when I take a photo?

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

#343

Post by wvenable »

arjie wrote: post #171

Well, the license change sounds pretty strange, but to be honest if I were to use this software I would use it without adhering to the MIT. It's machine-created content which is not, in general, copyrightable. You can assert whatever license you want on such content, but I am not going to adhere to it. For example, I declare you may use the following under the Elastic License The

I wonder how one proves that the software is machine created.

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

#344

Post by eru »

reverius42 wrote: post #290
jbergqvist wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this matter in practice though? By modifying some of the generated code and not taking a solution produced by an LLM end-to-end but borrowing heavily from it, can't a human claim full ownership of the IP even though in reality the LLM did most of the relevant work?

I think as long as the human puts in substantial and transformational effort, they can claim to be the copyright holder of the entire work, yes.

Compare taking snapshots with a camera.

Because some photographer somewhere can claim to have put in a lot of effort, we all get IP protection for photographs by default.

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

#345

Post by wvenable »

t43562 wrote: post #39

Why does anyone need his new library? They can do what he did and make their own. I'm glad we can fork things at a point and thumb our noses at those who wish to cash in on other's work.

Consider it an LLM cache. The result has already been cached so you don't have to generate it again.

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

#346

Post by minimaltom »

nicole_express wrote: post #136
dathinab wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is the point of the "clean room" dance which is the actual relevant part: they didn't do that dance AFIK AI is a tool, they set it up to make a non-verbatim copy of a program. Then they feed it the original software (AFIK). Which makes it a side by side copy, as in the original source was used as reference to create the new program. Which tend to be seen as derived work even if very different. IMHO They would…

Well sure they didn't do the dance, but you don't have to do the dance. The reason to do it is that it's a good defense in a lawsuit. Like you say, all of this is a legal minefield. So my understanding was that the original code was specifically not fed into Claude. But was almost certainly part of its training data, which complicates things, but if that's fair use then it's not relevant? If training's not fair use a…

Strong agree on it all being a legal minefield / new grass.

> But was almost certainly part of its training data, which complicates things

On this point specifically, my read of the Anthropic lawsuit was one of the precedents was that if it trains on something but does not regurgitate it, its fair use? Might help the argument that it was clean-room but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#347

Post by chrischen »

eru wrote: post #342
rlpb wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if a person puts in the work, but the work was worthless or can be trivially reproduced without effort? See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

You mean like when I take a photo?

A photo is easy to take but hard to reproduce.

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

#348

Post by joshjob42 »

sarchertech wrote: post #37
logicprog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't see how it's relevant whether he did look or didn't. In my opinion, it's not just legally valid to make a re-implementation of something if you've seen the code as long as it doesn't copy expressive elements. I think it's also ethically fine as well to use source code as a reference for re-implementing something as long as it doesn't turn into an exact translation.

Ignoring the legal or ethical concerns. Let’s say we live in a world where the cost of copying code is so close to zero that it’s indistinguishable from a world without copyright. Anything you put out can and will be used by whatever giant company wants to use it with no attribution whatsoever. Doesn’t that massively reduce the incentive to release the source of anything ever?

If the cost to copying code based on specifications, tests, etc is so close to zero as to be functionally zero cost, then any user can simply turn their AI on any library for which there is documentation and any ability to generate tests, have it reverse engineer it, and release their reverse engineered copy on GitHub for others to use as they like.

So I'm not sure it matters whether a giant company uses it because random users can get the same thing for ~ free anyway.

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

#349

Post by wvenable »

martin-t wrote: post #234

1) Legality and morality are obviously different and unrelated concepts. More people should understand that. 2) Copyright was the wrong mechanism to use for code from the start, LLMs just exposed the issue. The thing to protect shouldn't be creativity, it should be human work - any kind of work. The hard part of programming isn't creativity, it's making correct decisions. It's getting the information you need to make…

> If LLMs are not derivative works of the training data then why is so much training data needed?

If you went to school for 12-16 years, that's a lot of training. Does that mean anything you produce is a derivative work?

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

#350

Post by nkmnz »

reverius42 wrote: post #326
jazzyjackson wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s several large settlements that say Anthropomorphic/OAI didn’t want to have legal precedent. In general if it’s not outright regurgitated it would be derivative.

The out of court settlements that avoid precedent don't mean anything in a broader legal context. Legally speaking, right now in the USA, output of LLMs is not copyrighted and cannot be copyrighted (without substantial transformation by a human). I don't think this means the same thing as whether or not LLM output can infringe on someone else's copyright though (that does pose an interesting question -- can something…

Of course. I cannot claim copyright on a poem that I have memorized as a child and written down as an adult. The original author can, though.
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