Live data from Hacker News

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

writings.hongminhee.org

401–410 of 623 posts

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

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Adding even more intellectual property nonsense isn't going to work. [citation needed] Where does your confidence come from? GPL itself was precisely the "intellectual property nonsense" adding which made FOSS (free as in freedom) software possible . The copyright law was awfully broken in the 1980s too. Adding "nonsense" then was the only solution that proved viable. Historically, nothing but adding "more IP nonsen…

> Where does your confidence come from?

From the fact that copyright infringement is trivial and done at massive scales by pretty much everyone on a daily basis without people even realizing it. You infringe copyright every time you download a picture off of a website. You infringe copyright every time you share it with a friend. Everybody does stuff like this every single day. Nobody cares. It is natural.

> GPL itself was precisely the "intellectual property nonsense"

Yes. In response to copyright protection being extended towards software. It's a legal hack, nothing more. The ideal situation would have been to have no copyright to begin with. The corporation can copy your code but you can copy theirs too. Fair.

> Pray tell how you would do that without some "intellectual property nonsense".

Intellectual property is irrelevant to AI companies.

Intellectual property is built on top of a fundamental delusion: the idea that you can publish information and simultaneously control what people do with it. It's quite simply delusional to believe you can control what people do with information once it's out there and circulating. The tyranny required to implement this amounts to totalitarian dictatorships.

If you want to control information, then your only hope is to not publish it. Like cryptographic keys, the ideal situation is the one where only a single copy of the information exists in the entire universe.

AI companies are not publishing any information. They are keeping their models secret, under lock and key. They need exactly zero intellectual property protection. In fact such protections have negative value to them since it restricts the training of their models.

> We don't exactly get to hold Sam Altman at gunpoint to dictate our terms.

Sure you do. The whole point of government is to do just that. Literally pass some kind of law that forces the corporations to publish the model weights. And if the government refuses to do it, people can always rise up.

> Even if all models were open, we're not at the point where it would create an equal playing field.

Hopefully we will be, in the future.

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

#402
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why he is saying it's not equivalent. For it to be the same, the LLM would have to train on/transform Minecraft's source code into its weights, then you prompt the LLM to make a game using the specifications of Minecraft solely through prompts. Of course it's copyright infringement if you just give a tool Minecraft's source code and tell it to copy it, just like it would be copyright infringement if you used a…

Is there a legal distinction between training, post-training, fine tuning and filling up a context window? In all of these cases an AI model is taking a copyrighted source, reading it, jumbling the bytes and storing it in its memory as vectors. Later a query reads these vectors and outputs them in a form which may or may not be similar to the original.

The context window is quite literally not a transformation of tokens or a "jumbling of bytes," it's the exact tokens themselves. The context actually needs to get passed in on every request but it's abstracted from most LLM users by the chat interface.

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

#403

> 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…

> own it forever

Well we could try fixing the forever part. Copyright is out of control. I’d like to see a world with much less power given to IP. Sometimes I even say I want it eradicated entirely. But realistically we should start by cutting things back. Maybe give software an especially short copyright period.

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

#404
post #400

If you can prove the LLM was not trained on the code it is reproducing, and has never seen the code as part of a spec to follow, I don't see a problem. Proving this is going to be hard with current "open source" models.

Indeed, you have to prove that the LLM is generating code from a specification. Right now they don’t do that; what they do is regurgitate portions of their training data based on correlations with input tokens.

Put the programmer’s reference for the Digital Equipment DEQNA QBus Ethernet adapter in your favorite slop tool and tell it to make a C or C++ implementation for an emulator, and you know what you get? Code from SIMH. That’s not “generating,” that’s “copying.”

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

#405

> 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 This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Mi…

Can anyone find the actual quote where Blanchard said this? My understanding was that his claim was that Claude was not looking at the existing source code while writing it.

That is what he claimed. However, his design document instructs the AI to download the codebase, references specific files in the codebase, and to create a rewrite of the same project by name. It seems very unlikely it didn't look at the code while working, even forgetting that it had already likely been trained on it.

He would have had a better argument if he created a matching spec from scratch using randomized names.

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

#406
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not if they weren't taken by a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

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

#407
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think you are quite incorrect, at least on the latter point: "Lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection because it did not have a human creator." Not eligible for copyright protection does not mean it can be copyrighted "under the human creator's name". It means there is no creative work at all. No copyright.

No, you're still missing the point. Did you even read the court's opinion?

No, just news articles. Perhaps the news media have misrepresented the outcome here.

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

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it Well, no. They fed the spec (test cases, etc) into a tool which made a new program matching the spec. This is not a copy of the original code. But also this feels like arguing over the color of the iceberg while the titanic sinks. If you have a tool that can make code to spec, what is the value in source code anymore? Even if your app…

Everyone writes as if he just fed the spec and tests to Claude Code. Ignoring for now that the tests are under LGPL as well, the commit history shows that this has been done with two weeks of steering Claude Code towards the desired output. At every one of these interactions, the maintainer used his deep knowledge of the chardet codebase to steer Claude.

Is this perspective implying that the maintainer might be legally culpable because he, the *human*, was trained on the codebase?

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

#409

> 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…

Good news! LLM output cannot be copyrighted. Everything that an LLM produces is automatically, irrevocably, in the public domain.

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

#410
post #218

Wow, it feels like this argument rewired my brain. When I first read about the chardet situation, I was conflicted but largely sided on the legal permissibility side of things. Uncomfortably I couldn't really fault the vibers; I guess I'm just liberal at heart. The argument from the commons has really invoked my belief in the inherent morality of a public good. Something being "impermissible" sounds bad until you rea…

FWIW I like to explain it to folks like this: ignore all of your moral baggage around licensing and just focus on the fact that licensing is a legal tool of art that pretty much only becomes relevant in the context of threatening lawsuits. BSD-type stuff is very simple because it says "here is this stuff. you can use it as long as you promise not to sue me. I promise not to sue you too." Very simple. GPL-type stuff i…

I'm sure they wouldn't mind marking it as public domain. MIT is just the go-to license for things like this since it forces other people to notify others it came from an MIT repo if substantial parts of the original repo was used.
Post reply on HN