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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

#431

Post by skydhash »

colmmacc wrote: post #427

The four essential freedoms of the Free Software movement are ... 1. The freedom to run the program as you wish 2. The freedom to study how it works and modify it (which requires access to source code) 3. The freedom to redistribute copies to help others 4. The freedom to distribute modified versions, so the whole community benefits from your improvements To my mind ... GenAI coding make all of these far more realiza…

Unless your idea of software is reduced to the set of todo app, I don’t see how your points hold. AI won’t give you Blender, Inkscape, Kicad, Emacs,… And the algorithms behind those are not secrets, it’s the cohesive vision behind the whole system that is hard.

People will still pay for Matlab, SolidWorks, and Maya because no one who need those will vibe-code a solution. And there’s plenty of good OSS versions for the others.

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

#432

Post by shagie »

eru wrote: post #344
reverius42 wrote: post #290

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.

In the US it isn't the sweat of the brow, but rather a minimal threshold of human creativity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

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

#433

Post by eru »

reverius42 wrote: post #406
eru wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, I didn't include the monkey in my 'we'.

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

#434

Post by fc417fc802 »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #403
dogcomplex wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reset it back to 20 years and make that a hard limit for both patents and copyright. No renewals. Zero exceptions. Let the market sort the rest out.

There's always going to be downsides and edgecases when granting any party a monopoly over anything. At least if it's limited to 2 decades any unintended consequences, philosophical objections, and etc are hopefully kept within reason.

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

#436

Post by tw1984 »

bmcahren wrote: post #99
sigseg1v wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM and it was trained on the existing work, that's a derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.

LLMs do not encode nor encrypt their training data. The fact they can recite training data is a defect not a default. You can understand this more simply by calculating the model size as an inverse of a fantasy compression algorithm that is 50% better than SOTA. You'll find you'd still be missing 80-90% of the training data even if it were as much of a stochastic parrot as you may be implying. The outputs of AI are n…

> This is Google v Oracle all over again - are APIs copyrightable?

No, it is completely different.

Claude was trained on chardet, anything built by Claude would fail the clean-room reimplementation test.

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

#437

Post by fc417fc802 »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #311
halJordan wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the whole Adobe pdf thing and the whole Microsoft word thing. And the whole ibm pc thing. Imagine if we were forced to keep using ibm from when they lost their way until now simply because anti-ai luddites were able to scare monger

I would wager that the vast majority of people commenting here about the pitfalls of AI, especially as it relates to governance and laws, are heavy users of AI, recognize the import and value it brings, and find ways to utilize it more themselves, so not sure using an ad-hominem dismissal of very valid objections are going to be effective. (side bar: the phrase "anti- luddites" is way, way overused, especially here.…

And yet the term luddite seems to fit the anti-ai crowd perfectly. They are largely concerned about employment (and more generally economic stability) and to that end seek measures intended to protect workers.

There's also some environmentalist concerns which the term luddite again fits perfectly. You just have to generalize, transferring laterally from economic wellbeing to environmental wellbeing.

So I don't think GP qualified as an ad hominem dismissal but rather an accurate description of the situation. Take what's being discussed (restrictions on specifications and interoperability), project it backwards in history, and imagine what an alternate present day would look like. I think it would be pretty bad.

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

#438

Post by antonio-mello »

The practical tension I see: I build open source tools and use AI heavily in the process (Claude as a coding assistant). Every commit has "Co-Authored-By: Claude" in it. The code is MIT-licensed and genuinely mine in terms of architecture and intent, but the line-by-line generation is clearly AI-assisted.

This creates an odd situation where the "reimplementation via AI" concern cuts both ways. If someone feeds my MIT repo to an LLM and gets a copyleft-violating derivative, that's one problem. But if I use an LLM trained on copyleft code to write my MIT-licensed tool, am I the one laundering licenses without knowing it?

I think the article's core point holds: legitimacy and legality are diverging fast. The open source community built norms around intent and reciprocity, and those norms are now being stress-tested by tools that can reimplement anything from a spec. No license text can fully encode "don't be a free rider."

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

#439

Post by aaron695 »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #311
halJordan wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the whole Adobe pdf thing and the whole Microsoft word thing. And the whole ibm pc thing. Imagine if we were forced to keep using ibm from when they lost their way until now simply because anti-ai luddites were able to scare monger

I would wager that the vast majority of people commenting here about the pitfalls of AI, especially as it relates to governance and laws, are heavy users of AI, recognize the import and value it brings, and find ways to utilize it more themselves, so not sure using an ad-hominem dismissal of very valid objections are going to be effective. (side bar: the phrase "anti- luddites" is way, way overused, especially here.…

[dead]

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

#440

Post by Eridrus »

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…

The point of IP is to encourage the creation of new things.

Not all protections have to be ones that give total control like copyright.

I think it's a mistaken assumption that costs will fall to zero. The low hanging fruit will get picked, and then we'll be doing expensive combined AI/wetlab search for new drugs.

If there is any meaningful headroom we will keep doing expensive things to make progress.

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