Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

writings.hongminhee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 623 posts

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

#481

Post by matheusmoreira »

throwaway290 wrote: post #469
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…

> You infringe copyright every time you download a picture off of a website. You infringe copyright every time you share it with a friend. respectfully yoy have no idea what you are talking about here.

Try replacing "picture" with "music file".

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

#482

Post by strogonoff »

munk-a wrote: post #297
crazygringo wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's absolutely prohibited to copy and redistribute for commercial purposes materials that you're unlicensed to do so with. Sure, but that's not what LLM's generally do, and it's certainly not what they're intended to do. The LLM companies, and many other people, argue that training falls under fair use . One element of fair use is whether the purpose/character is sufficiently transformative , and transforming text…

Yea, at the end of the day a big part of this question comes down to whether that copying is fair use and that is an open question with the transformative nature being the primary point in favor of the LLM. But it is copying from some works to another - if it doesn't have some fair use exception it is absolutely violating the licensing of most of the training data. It's a bit different from previous settled case law…

Would it be fair to say that if you steal from enough people then it becomes OK? I can’t see it—especially considering this is IP law, expected to grant people confidence in their authorship rights and thus encourage innovation and creativity.

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

#483

Post by primenum »

I'm a bit shocked by how people are equating recreating from copyright with recreating from copyleft. It's not the same thing... copyleft code is out in the open on purpose, with the condition that you share back in kind. People are latching onto the intellectual property angle of this article, but the point is way simpler than that: "The terms of that compact were: if you take this and build on it, you share back under the same terms."

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

#484

Post by Qwertious »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #434
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That would be insane for aerospace software, where you might spend most of that time getting the code certified (required to break the $0 revenue threshold), let alone paying back your costs and then making an actual profit.

Meanwhile, there are cases where copyright of more than 2 years is overkill.

I don't know what, but it seems like we need some sort of mechanism for variable-length IP duration is needed.

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

#485

Post by eru »

bandrami wrote: post #418
eru wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents do to a small extent, maybe. But eg medical patents are a lot about protecting all the 'sweat' you put in, not so much the creativity.

You don't need a realization to receive a patent, just the drawing.

I'm not quite so sure for medical patents.

I mean, why are patent trolls not getting patents for all compounds under the sun for all conceivable medical uses?

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

#486

Post by Qwertious »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #437
dimitrios1 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>They are largely concerned about employment (and more generally economic stability) and to that end seek measures intended to protect workers.

Pffft no. Most of us think that AI is being used as a political trick - like firing unionized workers "to replace them with AI" and then hiring new un-unionized workers to replace them, 2 weeks later. Replace the AI with an empty cardboard box labeled "AI" in black marker, and nothing changes.

See also: using AI to launder pirated material, for big businesses.

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

#487

Post by dataflow »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #468
LtWorf wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You used an illegal leak to train your llm

What makes the leak illegal other than copyright? The occasional piece of software might be a trade secret, but a person downloading a preexisting leak isn't affected by those laws.

> What makes the leak illegal other than copyright? The occasional piece of software might be a trade secret, but a person downloading a preexisting leak isn't affected by those laws.

I think 18 U.S.C. § 1832 (a) (3) might answer your question? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1832

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

#488

Post by fc417fc802 »

Qwertious wrote: post #484
fc417fc802 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be insane for aerospace software, where you might spend most of that time getting the code certified (required to break the $0 revenue threshold), let alone paying back your costs and then making an actual profit. Meanwhile, there are cases where copyright of more than 2 years is overkill. I don't know what, but it seems like we need some sort of mechanism for variable-length IP duration is needed.

Is copyright meaningful for aerospace software? I'm largely unfamiliar with that domain but I have trouble imagining that (for example) Boeing cares much about people redistributing or hacking on the control software for a 777. How would that impact their bottom line?

I could understand for medical devices maybe but even then it seems like the software is a tiny part of the overall cost of a given design. A competitor could already do a clean room reimplementation in that case.

But I guess it wouldn't be all that bad if there were a carefully crafted extension for government certified software that was explicitly tied to the length of the certification process.

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

#489

Post by wolvesechoes »

bananamogul wrote: post #425
drnick1 wrote: post #25

It should be noted that the Rust community is also guilty of something similar. That is, porting old GPL programs, typically written in C, to Rust and relicensing them as MIT.

...and the main distros are enthusiastically adopting them. Within a relatively short time frame, expect everything in your Linux distro other than the kernel to be MIT-licensed because everything that is FSF-maintained will be rewritten in Rust with the MIT license. The kernel will then be next, though it'll take a longer timeframe. The GPL just didn't win in the marketplace of ideas.

People criticized Stallman et al. for being ideological, but popularity of permissive licenses is actually pure ideology, in Marxian sense - people doing without knowing, and conflating their interests with interests of big capital. You can see the same with people defending AI-laundering.

Stallman's proposal is opposite of ideology, it is conscious political project. And thus it is failing.

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

#490

Post by duskdozer »

strogonoff wrote: post #482
munk-a wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, at the end of the day a big part of this question comes down to whether that copying is fair use and that is an open question with the transformative nature being the primary point in favor of the LLM. But it is copying from some works to another - if it doesn't have some fair use exception it is absolutely violating the licensing of most of the training data. It's a bit different from previous settled case law…

Would it be fair to say that if you steal from enough people then it becomes OK? I can’t see it—especially considering this is IP law, expected to grant people confidence in their authorship rights and thus encourage innovation and creativity.

it's "if you steal fast enough and ubiquitously enough, then you win" where the goal is you've so entrenched your position that by the time a lawsuit rolls around, there isn't any real remedy. ideally, there would have been a day 1 lawsuit and injunction.
Post reply on HN