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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

#381

Post by waterTanuki »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #375
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.

A camera doesn't use unlicensed IP from other sources to produce an image. The makers of the camera explicitly gave you a right to own the photograph taken with the parts used to assemble the camera.

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

#382

Post by kg »

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.

> The fact that a computer loads it into memory does not make it automatically a ‘copy’ in the copyright sense.

IIRC this exact argument was made in the Blizzard vs bnetd case, wasn't it? Though I can't find confirmation on whether that argument was rejected or not...

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

#383

Post by dogcomplex »

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…

We should be removing IP law entirely, not strengthening it to cover entire classes of problem even when implemented entirely differently. Same for anyone trying to claim "colorful monster creatures" as innately Pokemon IP. Just because someone climbed a mountain first doesn't mean they own it forever. Nobody should be honouring any of these claims.

Nor should we be treating AI models themselves as respected IP. They're built on everyone else's data. Throw away this whole class of law, it's irrelevant in this new world.

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

#384

Post by treyd »

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…

> if this transcends copyright and unravels the whole concept of intellectual property.

I have been saying this for years. Intellectual property is based on the concept that ideas can be owned, which is fundamentally a contradiction with how reality operates. We've been able to write laws that paper over that contradiction by introducing concepts like "fair use", but it doesn't resolve it.

AI is just making the conflict arising out of that contradiction more intense in new ways and forcing us to reckon with it in this new technological landscape. You can follow two perfectly reasonable lines of logic and end up with contradictory solutions. So how are we going to get out of this mess? I don't know, not without rolling back (at least parts of) what intellectual property is in the first place.

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

#385

Post by crazygringo »

Copyrightest wrote: post #361
crazygringo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Are you following the distinction between my scenarios (1) and (2)?

In scenario (1) the LLM is plagiarizing. But that's not the scenario we're discussing. And I already said, this is where the LLM is liable. Whether a user should be too is a different question.

But scenario (2) is what I'm discussing, as I already explained, and it's very possible to tell, because you yourself submitted the copyrighted content. All you need to do is look at whether the output is too similar to the input.

If there's some scenario where you input copyrighted material and it transforms it into different material that is also copyrighted by someone else... that is a pretty unlikely edge case.

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

#386

Post by kindkang2024 »

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…

At some level, IP makes sense — creators should be rewarded. But IP only benefits those who claim it. The benefits rarely flow back to humanity who made it all possible. Every LLM was trained on humanity's collective knowledge. The value was created collectively, then captured privately.

That's the reason I like the idea of DUKI/dju:ki/ — Decentralized Universal Kindness Income, similar to UBI but driven by voluntary kindness and sincere marketing rather than taxation. If AI makes creation trivially easy and IP loses its justification, the question becomes: how do we ensure a tiny part of the wealth generated flows back to everyone?

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

#387

Post by Gigachad »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #330
alpaca128 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Copilot was already trained with Minecraft code in the dataset? Should be possible to test by telling the model to continue a snippet from the leaked code, the same way a news website proved their articles were used for training.

I feel as though the fact that you are asking a valid question shows how transformative it is; clearly, while the LLM gets a general ability to code from its training corpus, the data gets so transformed that it's difficult to tell what exactly it was trained on except a large body of code.

This would still be true of the case where you ask an LLM to rewrite a program while referencing the source. Unless someone was in the room watching or the logs are inspected, how would they know if the LLM was referencing the original source material, or just using general programing knowledge to build something similar.

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

#388

Post by keeda »

A large part of our industry is experiencing significant cognitive dissonance and articles like this are a symptom of that. AI is not really changing things, it's simply forcing us to question a lot of things we took for granted.

One of those things is that we assumed that the code embodied most of the value it offered. That it was the code that contained the creativity and expressiveness and usefulness. And we thought only we could write code. And so we thought we only needed to protect the code to protect our efforts and investments. Which is also why we accepted copyright as an appropriate legal protection for software, or of enforcing an ethos of sharing, as with copyleft.

But the code itself was never the valuable aspect; it was the functionality it provided.

And now AI is making that starkly apparent, while undermining a lot of other presumptions. Including about copyright.

Copyright protection for software is a historical hack because people didn’t want to figure out an appropriate legal framework from scratch. You “wrote” books, you "wrote" code, let’s shoehorn software into copyright and go get lunch! Completely overlooking the fact that copyright explicitly does not cover functional aspects (that is the realm of patents) which is the entire raison d'etre of code.

Sure, copyright covers “expressive elements”, but again those are properties of the source code, not the functionality. In fact, expressiveness is BAD for code (cf “code should be boring”)! Copyright will protect whether you used a streams API or a for-loop for iteration, which is absolutely irrelevant to the technical functionality that actually solves user problems, which has always been the only thing users really cared about.

In fact, if you look at significant copyright-related cases for software now (e.g. Oracle vs Google), you'll realize they have twisted themselves into knots trying to apply laws intended for expressive creativity to issues that were essentially about technical creativity.

I have no hopes that we will figure out an appropriate IP framework for software, so I expect people will move towards other things like patents, trade secrets and trademarks. Which have their own problems, but at least they already exist and are more suitable than copyright, especially in the age of AI.

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

#389

Post by pessimizer »

crazygringo wrote: post #179
munk-a wrote: post #166

I think the missing thing here is that the license violation already happened. Most of the big models trained on data in a manner that violated terms of service. We'll need a court case but I think it's extremely reasonable to consider any model trained on GPL code to be infected with open licensing requirements.

You might wish that were true, but there are very strong arguments it's not. Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is. In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies. It's fair use. But agreed that we're waiting for a court case to confirm that. Although really, the main questions for any court cases are not going…

> Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is. In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies. It's fair use.

This is just an assertion that you're making. There's no argument here. I'm aware that this is also an assertion that some judges have made.

My claim is that LLMs are not human, therefore when you apply words like "training" to them, you're only doing it metaphorically. It's no more "training" than copying code to a different hard drive is training that hard drive. And it's no more "transformative" than rar'ing or zipping the code, then unzipping it. I can't sell my jpgs of pngs I downloaded from Getty.

I have no idea how LLMs can be considered transformative work that immunizes me from owing the least bit of respect to the source material, but if I sample 2-6 second snatches from 10 different songs, put them through over 9000 filters and blend them into a new work, I owe money to everyone involved. I might even owe money to the people who wrote the filters, depending on the licensing.

> 98.7% unique.

This doesn't mean anything. This is a meaningless arrangement of words. The way we figure out things are piracy is through provenance, not bizarre ad hoc measurements. If I read a book in Spanish and rewrite it in English, it doesn't suddenly become mine even though it's 96.6492387% unique. Not even if I drop a few chapters, add in a couple of my own, and change the ending.

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

#390

Post by [deleted] »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #371
alterom wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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