No right to relicense this project

The core feature of generative AI is the human isn't the author of the output. Authoring something and generating something with generative AI aren't equivalent processes; you know this because if you try and get a person who's fully on board w/ generative AI to not use it, they will argue the old process isn't the same as the new process and they don't want to go back. The actual output is irrelevant; authorship is a process.

But, to your point, I think you're right: companies super think their engineers have the rights to the output they assign to them. If it wasn't clear before it's clear now: engineers shouldn't be passing off generated output as authored output. They have to have the right to assign the totality of their output to their employer (same as using MIT code or whatever), so that it ultimately belongs to them or they have a valid license to use it. If they break that agreement, they break their contract with the company.

I'm most familiar with the "right to repair" situation with John Deere, which occasionally pops up on HN. The spirit of someone who releases something under GPL seems the opposite of that?

No, I'm saying that your explanation of what makes something a derivative work is wrong. Now, personally, I think there is a very good argument that LLMs and similar models, if they have a copyright at all, do so only because of whatever copyright can be claimed on the training set as a work of its own (which, if ti exists, would be a compilation copyright), as a work of authorship of which it is a mechanical transformation (similar to object code having a copyright as a consequence of the copyright on the source code, which is a work of authorship.) Its also quite arguable that they are not subject to copyright, and many have made that argument.

> So anyone running those models can just freely copy them if they have access to them?

I'm not arguingn for that, but yes that is the consequence if they are not subject to copyright, assuming no other (e.g., contractual) prohibition binds the parties seeking to make copies.

> And, of course, it means distillation attacks, even if they do turn out to copy the OpenAIs/Anthropic/... model are just 100% perfectly legal?

Distillation isn't an “attack” and probably isn't a violation of copyright even if models are protected, they are literally interacting with the model through its interface to reproduce its function; they are functional reverse engineering.

Distillation is a violation of ToS, for which there are remedies outside of copyright.

> I mean paying someone to break into the DC and then putting the model on torrent would allow anyone downloading it to use it, legally.

Paying someone to break into the DC and do that would subject you to criminal charges for burglary and conspiracy, and civil liability for the associated torts as well as for theft of trade secrets covering the resulting harms, even without copyright protection.

> Plus, if this is true, it would be a loophole. Plus this is totally crazy.

Its not a “loophole” that copyright law only covers works of original authorship, it is the whole point of copyright law.

> It would be great if courts declared WHAT is the case.

If there is a dispute which turns on what is the case, courts will rule one way or the other on the issues necessary to resolve it. Courts (in the US at least) do not rule on issues not before them, except to the extent that a general rule which resolves but covers somewhat more than the immediate case can usefully be articulated by an appellate court.)

> But they won't, because copyright only protects massive companies.

Leaving out any question of whether the premise of this claim is true, the conclusion doesn't follow from it, since “what is the case” here is the kind of thing that is quite likely to be an issue between massive companies at some point in the not too distant future, requiring courts to resolve it even if they only address the meaning of copyright law for that purpose.

If you'd want to correct the metaphor, this is a more accurate understanding of the situation:

Is the maintainer obligated to the terms of the original license? yes

Does the original IP holder have any rights beyond that license? no

Is the maintainer free to raze the current hall, as long as the IP-holder's property is appropriately removed first? YES

Now if it were to come out that ownership of the chardet name, pip package, or github organization were transferred to the maintainer under an agreement that the project always stay LGPL regardless of the actual terms of the license that's a whole other thing, but nobody has stated that is the case. The only contention is whether LGPL was violated by the rewrite under a new license, but if that's not the case it is entirely the prerogative of the project maintainers to do as they wish.

That's what free software is all about.

If the community wants the old "community hall" it still exists, they can still use it and do what they want with it. They have a right to the hall, but the maintainer has a right to the repository and the package name and one does not nullify the other.

First reason would be use the "name recall", and second guess would be to do another rug-pull to re-licence under some other conditions.

> It's owned by the maintainer

This is completely in-correct. GPL and variants (FOSS, not OSS) were meant to make software free of "any ownership".