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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

tuananh.net

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#51

Post by progval »

kouteiheika wrote: post #46
kshri24 wrote: post #17

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no per…

> I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code. That license is called "All Rights Reserved", in which case you wouldn't be able to legally use the output for anything. There are research models out there which are trained on only permissively licensed data (i.e. no "All Rights Reserved" data), but they're, colloquially speaking, d…

> There are research models out there which are trained on only permissively licensed data

Models whose authors tried to train only on permissively licensed data.

For example https://huggingface.co/bigcode/starcoder2-15b tried to be a permissively licensed dataset, but it filtered only on repository-level license, not file-level. So when searching for "under the terms of the GNU General Public License" on https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigcode/search-v2 back when it was working, you would find it was trained on many files with a GPL header.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#52

Post by nubg »

miroljub wrote: post #42
zozbot234 wrote: post #38

If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in all clean room rewrites) t…

The new agent who writes code has probably at least parts of the original code as training data. We can't speak about clean room implementation from LLM since they are technically capable only of spitting their training data in different ways, not of any original creation.

Only in the case of open source code

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#53

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

anilgulecha wrote: post #3

This is precedent setting. In this case the rewrite was in same language, but if there's a python GPL project, and it's tests (spec) were used to rewrite specs in rust, and then an implementation in rust, can the second project be legally MIT, or any other? If yes, this in a sense allows a path around GPL requirements. Linux's MIT version would be out in the next 1-2 years.

> but if there's a python GPL project, and it's tests (spec) were used to rewrite specs in rust, and then an implementation in rust, can the second project be legally MIT, or any other?

Isn't that what https://github.com/uutils/coreutils is? GNU coreutils spec and test suite, used to produce a rust MIT implementation. (Granted, by humans AFAIK)

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#54

Post by himata4113 »

kshri24 wrote: post #21
himata4113 wrote: post #20

I mean in my opinion GPL licensed code should just infect models forcing them to follow the license. You can do this a lot by saying things like: complete the code " ". And if now the models are GPL licensed the problem of relicensing is gone since the code produced by these models should in theory be also GPL licensed. Unfortunately, there is a dumb clause that computer generated code cannot be copyrighted or licens…

> Unfortunately, there is a dumb clause that computer generated code cannot be copyrighted or licensed to begin with. Can you point to the clause? I have never seen it in any GPL license.

it's the general copyright protection 'law' fair use and all that, varies by country tho.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#55

Post by spwa4 »

Can we do the same with universal music? Because that's easy and already possible. Or Microsoft Windows? Because we all know the answer: if it works, essentially any government will immediately call it illegal.

Because if this isn't allowed, that makes all of the AI models themselves illegal. They are very much the product of using others' copyrighted stuff and rewriting it.

But of course this will be allowed because copyright was never meant to protect anyone small. And that it's in direct contradiction with what applies to large companies? Courts won't care.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#56

Post by thedevilslawyer »

kshri24 wrote: post #39
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/07/fair-u... Both Meta and Anthropic were vindicated for their use. Only for Anthropic was their fine for not buying upfront.

This hasn't gone to Supreme Court yet. And this is just USA. Courts in rest of the World will also have to take a call. It is not as simple as you make it out to be. Developers are spread across the World with majority living outside USA. Jurisdiction matters in these things.

Copyright's ambit has been pretty much defined and run by US for over a century.

You're holding out for some grace on this from the wrong venue. The right avenue would be lobbying for new laws to regulate and use LLMs, not try to find shelter in an archaic and increasingly irrelevant bit of legalese.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#57

Post by foota »

kouteiheika wrote: post #46
kshri24 wrote: post #17

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no per…

> I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code. That license is called "All Rights Reserved", in which case you wouldn't be able to legally use the output for anything. There are research models out there which are trained on only permissively licensed data (i.e. no "All Rights Reserved" data), but they're, colloquially speaking, d…

I don't know how far it would get, but I imagine that a FAANG will be able to get the farthest here by virtue of having mountains of corporate data that they have complete ownership over.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#58

Post by foota »

benob wrote: post #22
foota wrote: post #12

I think the more interesting question here would be if someone could fine tune an open weight model to remove knowledge of a particular library (not sure how you'd do that, but maybe possible?) and then try to get it to produce a clean room implementation.

I don't think this would qualify as clean room (the Library was involved in learning to generate programs as a whole). However, it should be possible to remove the library from the OLMO training data and retrain it from scratch. But what about training without having seen any human written program? Coul a model learn from randomly generated programs?

> I don't think this would qualify as clean room (the Library was involved in learning to generate programs as a whole)

Hm... I mean this is really one for the lawyers, but IMO you would likely successfully be able to argue that the marginal knowledge of general coding from a particular library is likely close to nil.

The hard part here imo would be convincingly arguing that you can wipe out knowledge of the library from the training set, whether through fine tuning or trying to exclude it from the dataset.

> But what about training without having seen any human written program? Coul a model learn from randomly generated programs?

I think the answer at this point is definitely no, but maybe someday. I think it's a more interesting question for art since it's more subjective, if we eventually get to a point where a machine can self-teach itself art from nothing... first of all how, but second of all it would be interesting to see the reaction from people opposed to AI art on the basis of it training off of artists.

Honestly given all I've seen models do, I wouldn't be too surprised if you could somehow distill a (very bad) image generation model off of just an LLM. In a sense this is the end goal of the pelican riding a bicycle (somewhat tongue in cheek), if the LLM can learn to draw anything with SVGs without ever getting visual inputs then it would be very interesting :)

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#59

Post by NitpickLawyer »

samrus wrote: post #31

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. Im struggling to see where this conclusion came from. To me it sounds like the AI-written work can not be coppywritten, and so its kind of like a copy pasting the original code. Copy pasting the original code doesnt make it public domain.…

> To me it sounds like the AI-written work can not be coppywritten

I think we didn't even began to consider all the implications of this, and while people ran with that one case where someone couldn't copyright a generated image, it's not that easy for code. I think there needs to be way more litigation before we can confidently say it's settled.

If "generated" code is not copyrightable, where do draw the line on what generated means? Do macros count? Does code that generates other code count? Protobuf?

If it's the tool that generates the code, again where do we draw the line? Is it just using 3rd party tools? Would training your own count? Would a "random" code gen and pick the winners (by whatever means) count? Bruteforce all the space (silly example but hey we're in silly space here) counts?

Is it just "AI" adjacent that isn't copyrightable? If so how do you define AI? Does autocomplete count? Intellisense? Smarter intellisense?

Are we gonna have to have a trial where there's at least one lawyer making silly comparisons between LLMs and power plugs? Or maybe counting abacuses (abaci?)... "But your honour, it's just random numbers / matrix multiplications...

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#60

Post by kshri24 »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #56
kshri24 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hasn't gone to Supreme Court yet. And this is just USA. Courts in rest of the World will also have to take a call. It is not as simple as you make it out to be. Developers are spread across the World with majority living outside USA. Jurisdiction matters in these things.

Copyright's ambit has been pretty much defined and run by US for over a century. You're holding out for some grace on this from the wrong venue. The right avenue would be lobbying for new laws to regulate and use LLMs, not try to find shelter in an archaic and increasingly irrelevant bit of legalese.

I don't disagree. However, just because your assertion of copyright being initially defined by US (which is not the fact. It was England that came up with it and was adopted by the Commonwealth which US was also a part of until its independence) does not mean jurisdiction is US. Even if US Supreme Court rules one way or the other, it doesn't matter as the rest of the World have its own definitions and legalese that need to be scrutinized and modernized.
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