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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

#441

Post by matheusmoreira »

salawat wrote: post #422
matheusmoreira wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 its…

So... People are going to rise up? What makes you think most of them have enough slack in their finances to pack up and haul off to D.C.? Only the Elites do, and they pay full time lobbyists to do exactly that to make sure laws like you mention never pass. Not saying it can't work. Just saying it the game is rigged against the very people you want to rise up and in favor of the ones who'd rather you stayed in bed.

If people don't rise up they will become soylent green. Over the long term, AI threatens to replace all human labor. It cannot remain locked away in corporate servers. This is an existential issue. The ultimate logic of capitalism is that unproductive people need not be kept alive since they add nothing but cost. So either we free AI, collapse the very idea of having an economy and transcend capitalism into a post-scarcity society, or we will be enslaved and genocided by those who control the AIs.

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

#442

Post by cubefox »

Marsymars wrote: post #430
cubefox wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well the general guideline is that copyright covers the *expression of an idea*, not the idea itself. Translations are pretty much the textbook example of a derivative work in copyright. Your jurisdiction may vary, of course, but it's pretty well established in mine (Canada) that "plot" is an idea, and can't be copyrighted, only the expression of the idea (e.g. the written novel) falls under copyright.

If I translate Harry Potter to another language and change all the names, the resulting book clearly expresses the same ideas as the original.

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

#443

Post by dataflow »

lurk2 wrote: post #419
marcus_holmes wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What if you used the LLM to generate works that were already copyrighted?

IMO the bigger question is how would you even tell if a work was generated by an LLM? There's a ton of code being written out there; the folks who generated it are going to claim they authored it for copyright purposes, and those who want to use it are going to claim it was LLM-generated. So what happens?

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

#444

Post by sarchertech »

joshjob42 wrote: post #348
sarchertech wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the legal or ethical concerns. Let’s say we live in a world where the cost of copying code is so close to zero that it’s indistinguishable from a world without copyright. Anything you put out can and will be used by whatever giant company wants to use it with no attribution whatsoever. Doesn’t that massively reduce the incentive to release the source of anything ever?

If the cost to copying code based on specifications, tests, etc is so close to zero as to be functionally zero cost, then any user can simply turn their AI on any library for which there is documentation and any ability to generate tests, have it reverse engineer it, and release their reverse engineered copy on GitHub for others to use as they like. So I'm not sure it matters whether a giant company uses it because r…

You can mostly stop that with enoiugh lawyers and requiring and agreement not to reverse engineer to access documentation or use the software.

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

#445

Post by blurbleblurble »

If specifications become IP? Reboot the pirate parties. Authoritarianism is what it is. The exploitation isn't coming from the tools, it's coming from the economic structures and forces of exploitation being brought to their natural limits. We should learn from the luddites, the actual luddites. They weren't anti-technology, they were against the insane consolidation of power. This proposal might seem radical but all it would really do is reify intellectual property at exactly the wrong moment, a game over moment. Feed local LLMs. Feed peoples' movements around these technologies, so that people bring agency into how we use the tech, so that we don't get dominated by the laws that form around it.

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

#446

Post by LegionMammal978 »

tw1984 wrote: post #436
bmcahren wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The clean-room reimplementation test" isn't a legal standard, it's a particular strategy used by would-be defendants to clearly meet the standard of "is the new work free of copyrightable expression from the original work".

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

#447

Post by reverius42 »

shagie wrote: post #432
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.

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...

Oh, good point. It's not related at all to effort then. Either way it still has to be a human.

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

#448

Post by vips7L »

cozzyd wrote: post #62
johnofthesea wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is eroding copyright, so there may no longer be a need for the GPL. GNU should stop and rethink its stance, chuck away the GPL as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and embrace LLM as the main weapon. Is this LLM thing freely available or is it owned and controlled by these companies? Are we going to rent the tools to fight "evil software corporations"?

easy, we ask Claude to write an open-source freely-available version of Claude with equal or better capabilities.

Make no mistakes.

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

#449

Post by heavyset_go »

crazygringo wrote: post #267
foresto wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, but it misses my point: The library's test suite and interfaces were apparently used directly, not transformed. If either of those are considered part of the library's source code, as the license's wording seems to suggest, then I think output from their use could be considered a work based on the library as defined in the license.

Legally that's been established as acceptable. Google LLC v Oracle America assumed (though didn't establish) that API's are copyrightable... BUT that developing against them falls under fair use , as long as the function implementations are independent. Test suites are again generally considered copyrightable... but the behavior being tested is not . So no, it's not considered to be a work based on the library. This…

> Google LLC v Oracle America assumed (though didn't establish) that API's are copyrightable... BUT that developing against them falls under fair use, as long as the function implementations are independent.

That was only one prong of the four fair use considerations in that case. Look at Breyer's opinion, it does not say that copying APIs is fair use if implementations are independent, just that Google's specific usage in that instance met the four fair use considerations.

There are likely situations in which copying APIs is not fair use even if function implementations are independent, Breyer looked at substantiality of the code copied from Java, market effects and purpose and character of use.

If your goal is to copy APIs, and those APIs make up a substantial amount of code, and reimplement functions in order to skirt licenses and compete directly against the source work, or replace it, those three considerations might not be met and it might not be fair use. Breyer said Google copied a tiny fraction of code (<1%), its purpose was not to compete directly with Oracle but to build a mobile OS platform, and Google's reimplementation was not considered a replacement for Java.

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

#450

Post by devonkelley »

thayne wrote: post #420
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…

Yeah, I really don't think we want APIs to be protected by IP. But in this case it isn't just the API, there were also tests involved. I think you could make a pretty strong argument that if you used a test suite to get an agent to implement some code, the code is a derivative product of the test code.

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