In Germany we call this 'Beißreflex'. It's all good, when someone reimplements something in Rust, no one asks for the license, but as soon someone uses AI to reimplement something, the search for something to complain about begins.
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
521–530 of 623 posts
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#522Someone be brave, and do this to ZFS. Poke the Oracle bear!
Please don't. I don't trust AI code when we talk about my filesystem and data.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#523Claude must be trained on chardet already, it worked on chardet's code to optimize or rewrite it to be much better. This is the textbook definition of derivative works.
There is fewer then 2% of code a copy of chardet. When the developer of chardet had done it without AI, whats then? He is trained on the same code too.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If I build a museum full of stolen art it can still be hard to make and expensive. It would be entirely unreasonable to charge for it.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Unless your llm works by quoting large parts of copyrighted works, reinterpretations of them aren't copyrighted. Because it's not a copy.
What if the output regurgitates some other legal entity’s boilerplate licence agreement? Is the output automatically licensed to that entity?
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you used the LLM to generate works that were already copyrighted?
There was a recent case that everyone has been describing as "LLM output can't be copyrighted" but what it actually said was you can't register the AI as the author.
Powerful interests want it to be true.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless your llm works by quoting large parts of copyrighted works, reinterpretations of them aren't copyrighted. Because it's not a copy.
What if the output regurgitates some other legal entity’s boilerplate licence agreement? Is the output automatically licensed to that entity?
No, the copyright is the colour of the bits, and red bits with a comment saying "these bits are blue" are not blue bits, but you may be prosecuted for fraud.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#528Earlier 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.
Or maybe it shouldn't take 10+ years to certify aerospace software.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#529> 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.
I really don't think a book is a derivative work of the AI model you used to proofread it.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless your llm works by quoting large parts of copyrighted works, reinterpretations of them aren't copyrighted. Because it's not a copy.
What if the output regurgitates some other legal entity’s boilerplate licence agreement? Is the output automatically licensed to that entity?
It's wild to me that there haven't been more court cases to answer questions like those being asked in this thread.
No one knows.