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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

#361

Post by Copyrightest »

crazygringo wrote: post #331
alterom wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.…

The most salient difference is that it's impossible to tell if an LLM is plagiarizing, whereas Xeroxing something implies specific intent to copy. It makes no sense to push liability onto LLM users.

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

#362

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #287
munk-a wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely prohibited to copy and redistribute for commercial purposes materials that you're unlicensed to do so with. This isn't an issue when it comes to the copy-left scenario (though it may potentially enforce transitive licensing requirements on the copier that LLM runners don't want to follow) but it is a huge issue that has come up with LLM training. LLM training involves ingesting works (in a potentially…

> It's absolutely prohibited to copy and redistribute for commercial purposes materials that you're unlicensed to do so with. Sure, but that's not what LLM's generally do, and it's certainly not what they're intended to do. The LLM companies, and many other people, argue that training falls under fair use . One element of fair use is whether the purpose/character is sufficiently transformative , and transforming text…

[deleted]

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

#363

Post by metalcrow »

smsm42 wrote: post #354

> Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch. I don't see how it matters what he looked at. If I took a copyrighted code and run it through a script that replaces all variable names, and then claimed copyright on the result because it's an entirely new work and I did not look on…

> AI is a more complex machine, but still a machine. If you feed somebody'd work into a machine, what comes out is a derivative work.

I'm not sure that's true, legally speaking. If you fed it into a PRNG, the output seems to me like it would not be an obviously derivative work (i doubt you could copyright it but that's a separate question). So we have 1 machine that can transform something into non-derivative work, and another that leaves the result derivative. The line isn't likely going to be drawn as "did a machine do it or not", but on a fuzzy human line of how close the output seems to be to the original (IANAL).

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

#364

Post by pphysch »

makerofthings wrote: post #286
paxys wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just described why every SaaS stock has taken a beating in the last 6 months.

How long until this thing is good enough to clone photoshop? Or Skyrim? I think all bets are off for the software world.

Automatic QA/testing becomes the main challenge, so probably a ways off. How do you "specify" Skyrim?

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

#365

Post by esrauch »

palmotea wrote: post #236
robmccoll wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have a rather idealized model of IP in mind. In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time.

> In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time. Then fix that instead of blowing it up. Because IP law is also literally the only thing that protects the little guy's work in many cases. Arguments like yours are kinda unfathomably incomplete to me, almos…

It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy.

It definitely does some of both, and we have no obvious measure or counterfactual to know otherwise.

You also have to take into account not just if optimal reform or optimal dismantle is better, but the realistic likelihood of each, and the risk of the bad outcomes from each.

Protect even more conceptual product ideas seems pretty strongly like it will result in more of a tool for big guys only, it's patents on crack and patents are already nearly exclusively "big guy crushes small guy" tool, versus copyright is at least debatably mixed.

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

#366

Post by [deleted] »

cortesoft wrote: post #256
madeofpalk wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human reading a unit of work is not a “copy”. I’m pretty sure our legal systems agree that thought or sight is not copying something. Training an LLM inherently requires making a copy of the work. Even the initial act of loading it from the internet and copying it into memory to then train the LLM is a copy that can be governed by its license and copyright law

I think you are confusing two different meanings of the word ‘copy’. The fact that a computer loads it into memory does not make it automatically a ‘copy’ in the copyright sense.

[deleted]

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

#367

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

eru wrote: post #341
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.

Trademarks don't, patents do. Different kind of creativity but still.

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

#368

Post by lkjdsklf »

Aozora7 wrote: post #215
johnofthesea wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is eroding copyright, so there may no longer be a need for the GPL. GNU should stop and rethink its stance, chuck away the GPL as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and embrace LLM as the main weapon. Is this LLM thing freely available or is it owned and controlled by these companies? Are we going to rent the tools to fight "evil software corporations"?

There already are LLMs with open weights that are better at code than state of the art closed source models from a year ago. For now, you most people may have to rent the hardware to run those models, since it's too expensive for most people to own something that can run inference on one trillion parameters, but I wouldn't consider LLMs to be controlled by "evil software corporations" at this point.

> There already are LLMs with open weights that are better at code than state of the art closed source models from a year ago.

A year ago, the "state of the art" models were total turds. So this isn't exactly good news

Not to mention the performance of local LLMs makes them utterly unusable unless you have multiple tens of thousands to invest in hardware (and that was before the recent price spike). If you're using commodity hardware, they're just awful to use.

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

#369

Post by madeofpalk »

cortesoft wrote: post #256
madeofpalk wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human reading a unit of work is not a “copy”. I’m pretty sure our legal systems agree that thought or sight is not copying something. Training an LLM inherently requires making a copy of the work. Even the initial act of loading it from the internet and copying it into memory to then train the LLM is a copy that can be governed by its license and copyright law

I think you are confusing two different meanings of the word ‘copy’. The fact that a computer loads it into memory does not make it automatically a ‘copy’ in the copyright sense.

It absolutely does! In law and the courts

> The court held that making RAM copies as an essential step in utilizing software was permissible under §117 of the Copyright Act even if they are used for a purpose that the copyright holder did not intend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_Corp._v._Quaid_Software_....

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

#370

Post by justinclift »

> The dispute drew responses from two prominent figures in the open source world.

Sure, but neither of those is an IP Lawyer.

The actual IP Lawyer who turned up and tried to engage, Richard Fontana, had his issue closed:

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/334

Richard's point was this (quoted below):

---

FWIW, that case is not really relevant to what we are/were talking about here.

The question is whether you are truly an "author", or whether there was no (human) author.

The general legal consensus has been that generative AI output is not copyrightable (without some special facts of some sort, perhaps).

> If all of this code was somehow not copyrightable because someone wrote a prompt instead of directly editing the code, that would have pretty huge implications.

That's exactly it. Your act of applying the MIT license with your copyright notice to code that you did not "directly edit" has enormous implications.

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