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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#541

Post by d0mine »

vablings wrote: post #469
cestith wrote: post #461

I find it distasteful and disturbing that copyright infringement by the people training the LLM in violation of a license is considered contamination by the licensed code. It’s not contamination. The code didn’t seep into your codebase. If the LLM was trained in such a way that portions of code long enough to be protectable then the license was violated by humans. The liability for the problem doesn’t lie on the shou…

It is probably fair that a huge share of code that is Foss is licensed under GPL, much larger than the share of source available proprietary licensed code

Here's github statistics from 2015 https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on...

MIT is used by more projects than GPL.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#542

Post by Dylan16807 »

greendestiny wrote: post #312
aeon_ai wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one defines 'flying' to be a bird's endeavor, then humans can't fly. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to catch a metal shuttle that chucks itself through the air on wings.

Sure as a word it can be broad, as a concept in our legal system that should be much more nuanced. The relevant extension of your analogy is should birds be required to obey FAA rules? Or should plane factories be protected as nesting sites?

It's a relevant extension if you think the ability to learn from a work is a right people have that exempts them from the more general lockdown copyright would impose.

If you come at it from the view of copyright being a limited set of control over some areas but not others, then if copyright doesn't block human learning it shouldn't affect anything similar either, unless a specific rule is added to make those situations be handled differently.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#543

Post by Dylan16807 »

boh wrote: post #216
tensor wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find the idea that "learning" from code is "stealing" kind of ridiculous.

Yes I guess there's also no such thing as stealing in torrents since the computer "learns" the data and returns it in a transcoded fashion so it's technically not a reproduction. Yes LLMs can reproduce passages from copyrighted works verbatim but that's only because it "learned" it and it's just telling you what it "knows". The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting.

> Yes LLMs can reproduce passages from copyrighted works verbatim but that's only because it "learned" it and it's just telling you what it "knows".

Are you finding people that actually say this?

When it can quote something like that, it's a training error. A popular enough work gets quoted and copied by people online, and then it's not properly deduplicated. It's a very small fraction of works it can do that with, and the cleaner your data the less it happens.

I'll once again quote that stable diffusion launched with fewer weights than training images. It had some accidental memorizations, but there wasn't room for its core functionality to be memorization-based.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#544

Post by Dylan16807 »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #494
inexcf wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not your point. You're just arguing about a strawman that holds both of those contradictory positions.

You are attempting to invoke strawman. So is your point that there is not a significant overlap between posters who think that AI companies should not be allowed to pirated use copyrighted material in their training corpus and posters who themselves pirated copyrighted material such as movies, music, games, etc.?

Yes, that is their point. Do you have evidence against it?

I'm sure you can find some overlap, but I bet the vast majority is caused by people making a distinction between commercial and noncommercial piracy. I don't think there's a big cohort of piracy hypocrites.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#545

Post by Dylan16807 »

winstonwinston wrote: post #211
mattmanser wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of how AI works is that it's just really complicated compression, you can get AI to write out Harry Potter novels word for word with the right prompting. When it picks out a rare bit of code, it will be simply copying that code, illegally, and presenting it without attribution or any licenses which is in fact breaking the law but AI companies are too important for the law to apply to them. There's been instances…

> There's nothing anyone can do about it, but the suspicion is that the big companies have taken everyone's code on GitHub, without consent, and trained on it. I asked agent X what is the source of training data it generated code from, it couldn’t say. Then I asked why the code implementation is exactly the same as the output of agent Y. It said they were trained on the same ‘high-quality library’, and still couldn’t…

You asked a machine that makes things up when it doesn't know the answer a question that it has no way of knowing the answer to. I don't know why you bothered to relay its response.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#546

Post by Dylan16807 »

Aerroon wrote: post #229
jacquesm wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you are responsible for the consequences. Liability is simply a different thing than copyright.

The copyright office says that you don't get copyright because you're not considered the author: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ > The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts…

Imagine you cut the sentence "I'm going to kill you, this is an imminent threat." out of a book and hand it to someone.

It would be silly to consider you the author of that sentence in a copyright sense.

It would be equally silly to say you have no liability from that sentence.

Looking back at the boulder example, that LLM output has no consequences to be liable for if you throw it immediately into the trash bin. It's when you take boulder.txt and use it to do things that you have liability despite not having copyright.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#547

Post by gspr »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #475
gspr wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure where in our lawbooks there are laws that specifically target humans to the exclusion of human-operated tools. If we take the point of view that LLMs are tools (I agree), then people need to be absolutely certain that these tools don't contain (compressed) representations of copyrighted works. People seem not to want to do that. And they argue that the LLMs have "learned" or "been inspired" by the copy…

If we take the point of view that LLMs are tools (I agree), then people need to be absolutely certain that these tools don't contain (compressed) representations of copyrighted works. I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread that this is the opposite of how the real world works. In actual fact, people who need software built hire a tool (e.g., a software developer like me) to build it for them. That tool - me or you…

> In actual fact, people who need software built hire a tool (e.g., a software developer like me) to build it for them. That tool - me or you - has inside it a tremendous library of copyrighted works represented.

Humans are distinct from tools, both ethically (to most people) and legally. You may not see it this way, but it is the majority opinion and the stance of the law in most jurisdictions. The rest of your paragraph falls apart without considering humans as tools.

(Incidentally: you can own tools. I don't think you want to open that door…)

> Is your position that this is OK so long as it's stuff that I can keep in my squishy brain, but the moment that mechanism moves to silicon, it somehow becomes fundamentally different?

Yes. We, humans, structured our laws because we consider ourselves and our squishy brains special.

This is, for example, why you don't get charged with murder for terminating a computer program. We, the humans, have decided that the right not to be terminated only applies to humans (and other animals, but then because we grant them that protection).

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#548

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #502
sylware wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think with that massive amount of open code, some would not be injected in windows kernel (or even .net with mono, or even windows userland with wine)? It is easier to hide it: it is closed source, and they are probably using the same hiding tricks than those used to hide coding AI generated code (usually some level of refactoring to adapt to windows data structures).

Seems like way more effort reading the linux code, copying and adapting it to windows, and actively "hiding" it, than just writing code that fits your situation from the get go. In my experience, reading and understanding code takes a lot more time than writing from scratch, so I don't really see what windows developers (assuming they are somewhat competent coders, this assumption may not hold after around 2010 or so…

If you write from scratch, you reintroduce "solve" problems. Which it is why its https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#549

Post by superfrank »

cestith wrote: post #515
superfrank wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have the exact ruling in front of me, but IIRC the judge pretty clearly said that training a model was fair use. IIRC, he declared it "quintessentially transformative". The case by case basis was about acquisition and possession of the copyrighted material. Anthropic pirated a large number of books and illegally stored digital copies of many that they did purchase legally. The training being protected doesn't…

Whether or not you’re pirating and making illegal copies of something depends greatly on the terms under which you’re allowed to make those copies. You can copy GPL-licensed code all day every day so long as you abide by the license. The same is true of the BSD licenses, MIT, ISC, Apache, et cetera. If you’re copying or making substantially derivative works of them outside the terms of the license, you’re violating t…

> If you’re copying or making substantially derivative works of them outside the terms of the license, you’re violating the copyright

I don't disagree with that.

What I'm saying is that the judge ruled that training a model using copyrighted books wasn't derivative. It was transformative, so the training wasn't a copyright violation.

He then went on to say that the way Anthropic acquired and handled that material was a copyright violation because Anthropic pirated and copied a large number of books that were not under a license like the ones you mentioned. The downloaded a bunch of books you would find at most bookstores and then actually purchased copies of them much later once they were accused of violation copyrights.

I'm just trying to make that clear because I've heard a lot of people who don't understand that the violation wasn't about the act of training or material they used, it was just how they acquired the training material.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#550

Post by lelanthran »

inexcf wrote: post #452
lelanthran wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, I do understand it - laws are contradictory and can do whatever people shout out the most that they should do (but they don't always work that way). I just think that it is extremely bad when laws work this way. You are completely misunderstanding GP's distinction between ownership and liability. In short, if you use someone else's car to kill someone, you are still liable for killing that person even though yo…

Aren't you agreeing with him? He pushed the boulder up the hill, thus he is responsible and liable for what happens. He is the author of the work of pushing the boulder up the hill. In your analogy: He was driving the car, he is liable for the death. He is the author of the work of driving the car. You are kinda unnecessarily introducing the creation of an object used for the work. Whoever did create the car/boulder…

> Aren't you agreeing with him?

No. His claim is:

>>>> If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it?

And all his arguments after that are to support that claim. His claim is wrong.

Ownership and liability are independent of each and all his supporting arguments are dismissing this fact.

> Whoever did create the car/boulder is not liable for what happened.

Incorrect; whoever owns the car/boulder is not liable. The creator doesn't even enter this argument.

> So whoever made the LLM is not the author but the one who used it to create the code.

No; whoever created the LLM is irrelevant. The author who creates the code is similarly irrelevant. What matters in his argument is who owns the code, and this is also irrelevant to his argument, because ownership does not mean liability.

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