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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

#501

Post by rstuart4133 »

largbae wrote: post #38

This is only worth arguing about because software has value. Putting this in context of a world where the cost of writing code is trending to 0, there are two obvious futures: 1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world, proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not…

I came here to say a similar thing.

There would be no GPL if anybody could have cheaply and trivially reproduced the software for printers and Lisp machines Stallman was denied access to. There is no reason to force someone to give you the source code if takes no effort to reproduce.

Mind you, that isn't what happened here. The effort involved in getting a LLM to write software comes from three things: writing a clear unambiguous spec that also gives you a clean exported API, more clean unambiguous specs for the APIs you use, and a test suite the LLM can use to verify it has implemented the exported API correctly. Dan got them all for free, from the previous implementation which I'm sure included good documentation. That means his contribution to this new code consisted of little more than pressing the button.

Sadly, if you wrote some GPL software with excellent documentation, a thorough test suite, clean API, and implemented using well understood library the cost of creating a cleanroom reproduction has indeed gone to near zero over the past 24 months. The GPL licence is irrelevant.

Welcome to the brave new world.

PS: Sqlite keeping their test suite proprietary is looking like a prescient masterstroke.

PPS: The recent ruling that an API isn't copyrightable just took on a whole new dimension.

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

#502

Post by scheeseman486 »

bandrami wrote: post #414
nkmnz wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI-output does not qualify for IP protections I beg to differ. AI-output did not entitle the person creating the prompt for IP protections, so far – but my objection is not directed towards the "so far", but towards your omission of "the person creating the prompt", because if an AI outputs copyrighted material from the training data, that material is still copyrighted. AI is not a magical copyright removal machine…

I'm afraid as of last week this is now as settled as it gets in US law: the output of LLMs is not per se copyrightable, though arrangements and modifications of it can be. It's like a producer who made a song entirely with public domain audio samples: he can't then demand the compulsory license when someone resamples that song.

They actually wouldn't, since they'd be sampling the new arrangement. They could reconstruct a new, similar sounding arrangement based on the original samples, but it'd be have to be different enough to that new arrangement so as not to be considered derivative of it.

That also applies to generative AI, pure output may not be copyrightable but as soon as you do something beyond type some words and press a button, like doing area-specific infills and paintovers, which involve direct and deliberate choices by a human, the copyrighted human-driven arrangement becomes so deeply intertwined with the generative work that it's effectively inseperable.

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

#503

Post by pu_pe »

If anyone can go in, take a GPL project like chardet and reimplement it using LLMs, then the current maintainer just saved everyone time by making their implementation publicly available.

Our legal framework wasn't built for a situation where reimplementing complex software is trivial, much less almost completely automated.

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

#504

Post by stalfie »

davidw wrote: post #79
jacquesm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations. This was already the case and it just got worse, not better.

At a certain point, I think we had reached a kind of equilibrium where some corporations were decent open source citizens. They understood that they could open source things like infrastructure or libraries and keep their 'crown jewels' closed. And while Stallman types might not have been happy with that, it seemed to work out for people. Now they've just hoovered up all the free stuff into machines that can mix it u…

To be fair to the companies, the machine was pretty hard to make, and expensive. Its not exactly unreasonable to charge for it.

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

#505

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

It is not aout throwing the right to implement things away. As long as it is done according to the license of the works modified or copied, one can do that. What this is against is, that people wash away a license, that is meant to keep things open, transparent and free. It enables businesses to go back to completely proprietary systems, which will impact your rights.

I am for keeping the licenses in place, as long as there is any copyright at all on software. If we get rid of that, then we can get rid of copyleft licenses and all others too. But of course businesses and greedy people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want copyleft to disappear, but _their_ software, oh no, no one may copy that! Double standards at their best.

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

#506

Post by greyface- »

dataflow wrote: post #443
lurk2 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The alleged author, when bringing a copyright infringement suit, will submit testimony claiming they wrote it. Parties to the suit will have a chance to present arguments and evidence. Then, the claim will be adjudicated by a judge and/or jury.

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

#507

Post by rcxdude »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #505
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…

It is not aout throwing the right to implement things away. As long as it is done according to the license of the works modified or copied, one can do that. What this is against is, that people wash away a license, that is meant to keep things open, transparent and free. It enables businesses to go back to completely proprietary systems, which will impact your rights. I am for keeping the licenses in place, as long a…

You're asking for exactly the same cake. You want for the GPL to pass through this process, but not the proprietary licenses that the original GNU tools were washing away.

(the paradox of copyleft is that it does tend to push free software advocates in a direction of copyright maximalism)

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

#508

Post by xyzal »

vbarrielle wrote: post #497
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.

Not quite in my opinion. The output of an LLM from a simple prompt falls into the public domain, but if you also give a copyrighted work as input, the mechanistic transformation performed will not alter the original license (same as encoding a video does not change its license).

Are training data counted as input?

It would be interesting to see a court ruling that the output of LLMs trained on copyleft code are licensed under the GPL ... and all other viral licenses simultaneously

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

#509

Post by ncruces »

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.

If certification is the actual cost, you don't need copyright, at all. SQLite is in the public domain. Your moat is the certification itself, not the code.

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

#510

Post by rob74 »

> Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch. The resulting code shares less than 1.3% similarity with any prior version, as measured by JPlag. His conclusion: this is an independent new work, and he is under no obligation to carry forward the LGPL. Mark Pilgrim, the library's original author, opened a GitHub issue to object. The LGPL requires that modifications be distributed under the same license, and a reimplementation produced with ample exposure to the original codebase cannot, in Pilgrim's view, pass as a clean-room effort.

Another question which as far as I can see isn't addressed in the article: even if you accept that the AI-driven reimplementation is an independent new work, can you (even as a maintainer) simply "hijack" the old LGPL-licensed project and overwrite it (if the new code is 98,7% different from the existing code, it's essentially overwriting) with your MIT-licensed code? You're free to start a new MIT-licensed project with your reimplementation, but putting the new code into the old project like some kind of cuckoo's egg seems wrong to me...

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