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Malus – Clean Room as a Service

malus.sh

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Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#411

Post by eru »

Ethee wrote: post #374
dymk wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The courts? Google “examples of GPL enforced in court” for a few Yeah it requires finding out, but how do you prove a whistleblower broke their NDA?

Your point is circular, let me bring it all around. If I make a 'clean-room' implementation using an LLM of a software that has a GPL license. How does the court enforce that my black box didn't use the original software in any way if there's no way to know? Does having that software as part of it's training corpus automatically enroll all output as GPL enforceable? This is essentially the question some courts are at…

LLM doesn't add anything new to the table here in terms of legal arguments. See how people did and do clean room implementations without any AI involved, and what lengths they go to.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#412

Post by softgrow »

acuozzo wrote: post #349
tinier_subsets wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “wife giving birth” exception for speeding is always so amusing to me. In the U.S., the average distance from a hospital is 10 miles (in a rural area). Assuming 55 mph speed limits, that means most people are 11 minutes from a hospital. Realistically, “speeding” in this scenario probably means something like 80 mph, so you cut your travel time to 7.5 minutes. In other words, you just significantly increased your…

I live 1.6 miles from my county hospital. If my wife is having a stroke, I can definitely pick her up, toss her in the car, and get to the ER faster than an ambulance can reach my house. As I'm sure you know, every second counts when it comes to recovery from a stroke. What kind of first aid do you give to someone having a stroke anyway?

If you ring for the ambulance, (Australian context), you will be told what to do! The telephony scripts have first aid baked in. The paramedic will come (not necessarily with an ambulance) and start appropriate definitive treatment as good as what you will get in a hospital. A consequence of a stroke is a cardiac arrest. If you are driving you won't know and won't do CPR.

The 1996 movie Transpotting still gives me shivers up my spine by putting someone in a car and drop at ER rather than calling for help. Too many people die needlessly, even today, when well meaning people load shooting victims, stroke victims and heart attacks etc into their car and drive to ER without asking their local emergency services for advice.

PS. You can't 100% of the time get to ER faster than the ambulance. There are more ambulances than emergency rooms by number. If an ambulance is at the county hospital they'll be faster than you.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#413

Post by metalcrow »

aero_code wrote: post #357
metalcrow wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a misreading of the law. Court cases say that AI cannot own copyright, not that AI output cannot be copyrighted.

No, according to everything I've read before, the parent post was correct and you're not. This article clearly says "art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law": https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-co...

Reading the linked Court of Appeals document in that post, the question is posted in the opening: "Can a non-human machine be an author under the Copyright Act of 1976?", which it then answers as no. It doesn't mention elsewhere that i can see that this means the output of the tool itself is not copyrightable. I would not trust the Reuters interpretation without a direct reference to a court document.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#414

Post by microflash »

tavavex wrote: post #155

This is extremely good satire. Question is, why hasn't anyone done this for real? There's enough people with the right knowledge and who would love to destroy open source for personal gain. Is it that this kind of service would be so open to litigation that it would need a lot of money upfront? Or is someone already working on this, and we're just living out the last good days of OSS?

At some level people are already doing this through LLMs. But large orgs are extremely risk averse to do such things. There’s a reason why we have “security audits” and “compliance certifications”. It’s not like organizations are not capable of securing or standardizing their systems, just they do want to point fingers to somebody when legal proceedings happens.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#415

Post by softgrow »

jerf wrote: post #75

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…

To understand speeding you need to understand the concept of "speed choice". Everyone chooses how fast to drive, only those who choose above the speed limit are speeding. If your environment gets you to choose a speed below the speed limit you won't break the law. Your choice can be influenced by many factors such as:

* narrow looking roadway * speed limit signs * your car has self driving * what everybody else is doing * speed limiter on your car * curvy road * bad weather * male or female * risk appetite * driving experience * experience of that route * perceived risk of getting caught

If you fix "speed choice" the problem of speeding diminishes.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#417

Post by gault8121 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #404
gault8121 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.

Being real doesn't make it not satire.

Yes but all of the commenters think this is a fake site created ironically. It isn't. It is a company doing the evil thing it is mocking.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#418

Post by gault8121 »

yonz wrote: post #333
devy wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL. Same here. But the footer disclaimer and testimonials gave it away immediately: > "We had 847 AGPL dependencies blocking our acquisition. MalusCorp liberated them all in 3 weeks. The due diligence team found zero license issues. We closed at $2.3B." - Marcus Wellington III, Former CTO, Definitely Real Corp (Acquired) > © 2024 MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. Registered in [JURISDICTION WITHHELD]. > This ser…

I almost lost it, didn't realize it was satire until I came back to these comments

This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#420

Post by ylere »

codethief wrote: post #343
ylere wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also shows why this approach is questionable. Opus 4.6 without tool use or web access can provide chardets source code in full from memory/training data (ironically, including the licensing header): https://gist.github.com/yannleretaille/1ce99e1872e5f3b7b133e...

Wow, I did not expect such perfect reproduction. Link to the actual source code (before being rewritten): https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/5.0.0/chardet/mbchar...

Indeed, and that's through the API. If you use Claude Chat/Code and even if you then turn off web search, it still has access to some of its tools (for doing calculations, running small code snippets etc.) and that environment contains chardets code 4 times:

  /home/claude/.cache/uv/archive-v0/nZCy52fMCgTsNaLySn0xf/chardet
  /home/claude/.cache/uv/wheels-v6/pypi/chardet
  /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_vendor/chardet
  /usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/chardet
It's not surprising that they were able to create a new, working version of chardet this quickly. It seems the author just told Claude Code to "do a clean room implementation" and to make sure the code looks different from the original chardet (named several times in the prompt) without considering the training set and the tendency for LLMs to "cheat".
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