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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

#371

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

Adding even more intellectual property nonsense isn't going to work. The real solution is to force AI companies to open up their models to all. We need free as in freedom LLMs that we can run locally on our own computers.

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

#372

Post by Sleaker »

Isn't the whole thing sidestepping another issue? If the code was rewritten with an AI, then it becomes a non-copyrightable work? Hasn't this already gone through the courts? So isn't the resulting library de facto public domain, even if the maintainer wants to try and attach a license to it?

Edit: looks like an IP lawyer had this exact issue on the GitHub and it was closed.

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

#373

Post by internet2000 »

I stopped reading here:

> The ethical force of that project did not come from its legal permissibility—it came from the direction it was moving, from the fact that it was expanding the commons. That is why people cheered.

How is this not just relitigating GPL vs MIT? By now you know which side of that argument you are in. The AI component is orthogonal.

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

#374

Post by larodi »

mirashii wrote: post #273
larodi wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this question should've been posed earlier when first LLMs were training. many people chose to ignore the question, and now, several distillation epochs later, it is not a question that matters, as both yes/no are true, and not true. is it legitimate for millions of people to exploit, expound on knowledge that was perhaps, to begin with, not legitimate to use? well they did already, who's to judge the commons now?

What a ridiculous take. Many people loudly raised the question and objected to the practice from the beginning, but a handful of companies ignored the objections and ran faster than the legal system. If they were in the wrong, legally or morally, they still deserve to face repercussions for it.

it is a take, ridiculous or not. the fact you rage against it implies its not as improbable as you may want it to be. besides ridiculousness is a very subjective matter, right? many things are super ridiculous in 2026 from 2020s perspective, and this just piles on top.

to me is superb ridiculous to shun the comment though. but we'll be having this split for a while, that for sure.

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

#375

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

justinclift wrote: post #370

> 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 a…

I don't think Fontana's reasoning holds up.

I think it is more like photography.

The case law is that a camera can't own a copyright, but a human can, even though all the pixels were produced by the camera with very little involvement at the pixel level by the human.

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

#376

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

Intellectual property never made any sense to begin with. It is logically reducible to ownership of numbers. It is that absurd. Computers made the entire concept irrelevant the second they were invented but they kept holding on via lobbying power. Maybe AI will finally put the final nail on the coffin of intellectual property.

Sure, it's disgusting and hypocritical how these corporations enshrined all this nonsense into law only to then ignore it all the second LLMs were invented. It's ultimately a good thing though. The model weights are all that matters. All we need to do is wait for the models to hit diminishing returns, then somehow find a way to leak them so that everyone has access. If they refuse, then just force them. By law or by revolution.

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

#377

Post by tzs »

The GPL's conditions are triggered only by distribution. If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms.

Offering as a networked service is not distribution. That was why they had to make AGPL to put conditions on use in networked services.

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

#378

Post by yunnpp »

robmccoll wrote: post #206
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.

As described, this would not be the same thing. If the AI is looking at the source and effectively porting it, that is likely infringement. The idea instead should be "implement Minecraft from scratch" but with behavior, graphics, etc. identical. Note that you'll need to have an AI generate assets or something since you can't just reuse textures and models.

> Note that you'll need to have an AI generate assets or something since you can't just reuse textures and models.

As far as I know, you can as long as you own a copy of the original. In other words, you can't redistribute the assets, but you can distribute the code that works with them. This is literally how every free/libre game remake works. The copyright of your new, from-scratch code, is in no way linked to that of the assets.

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

#379

Post by cubefox »

Marsymars wrote: post #307
cubefox wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's apparently a different story with different plot, so that's not comparable.

Plots are broadly not copyrightable, “different plot” is less important than “different characters”.

I'm pretty sure the plot is copyrightable, otherwise you could just translate Harry Potter to a different language and change the names of the characters.
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