While no fan of AI slop, is there any difference between this and musl/busybox/etc, minus the addition of AI? Did anyone get mad at busybox before AI?
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
541–550 of 623 posts
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#542I wonder what value gpl even has in a world where i can trivially reimplement whatever a company builds on a permissive license and does not share. I see still a place for things that are low level, algo heavy, real world test heavy and critical eg. kernel, cryptography, storage engine, filesystems all the rest of userland and web not so much
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#543Earlier 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
> Are training data counted as input? It is quantum legality, to use copyright input is legal or illegal depending on the observer.
Schrodinger's Chat
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 competito…
The only problem with this certified software exception is I foresee they'll write the law as "expiration timer starts when software has finished certification" then some lobby group will get the regulatory departments to adopt a new process of partial certification where said software is usable in devices but the 'finished certification' never gets reached so the copyright gets dragged out forever.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#545Earlier 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).
But we also know from other research that LLMs don't actually do mechanistic translations. Even when they are asked to and say that they did, they're basically rewriting the code from their training data
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#546One thing I don't understand is what was so bad about having an LGPL license. You are allowed to do `import chardet` in a MIT-licensed or a proprietary program.
That is also my understanding. My personal theory is that many corporate compliance departments (or whoever is in charge of this at a particular place) just disallow any *GPL use in their company, regardless of whether it would actually cause problems, so this is an attempt to "unblock" the library for those. Instead of, you know, educating people about the nuances of different copyleft licenses.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, an…
>a political trick - like firing unionized workers
1. Since when have companies needed trillions of dollars of AI to do that? In the US they've been able to get away with getting rid of unions for decades now.
2. Since when has HN given a shit about unions. Posting about unions, at least till recently has been a great way of getting your comment downvoted to [dead] in one easy step. For longer than LLMs have existed the HN answer to unions was "They are just there to keep me as an SWE from making as much money as I can". Only now do we see a little bit of pushback now that their heads may be next on the chopping block.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#548Earlier 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.
Why don't they, there have been lawsuits over just these behaviors in the past. Hell, even the multiple representations of the picture in computer memory have had to have allowances.
Copyright is a gigantic fucking mess that the US has forced over a large chunk of the world.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#549Theseus ship, anyone?
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-sc…
Hence why we see more and more pushes control communication on the internet. Going to be hard to free AI when a panopicon is turned against us to prevent exactly that.