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

> It implicitly assumes that humans and algorithms are the same. They are not - humans have rights and free will, algorithms don't. Humans cannot be bought or sold, etc.

I don't think that's a necessary condition for that argument. You're making the implicit assumption that humans are special snowflakes and anything that we do cannot be replicated by computers, in any form. That's a very strong position to make without evidence. Is an LLM even an algorithm in the traditional sense? Is human cognition not an algorithm of some sort? I studied cogitative science decades ago and these questions weren't clear then, they're certainly even less clear now.

It's also somewhat begs the question; this isn't even relevant to what we are talking about. Whether something is a derivative work or not does not require this discussion.

Teachers are not relevant to conversation. You can learn by reading books, watching TV, using and reading software. Basically all of copyrighted and non-copyrighted human expression is available for you to consume and then creatively produce your own works using that knowledge.

> Do you think people should be compensated for the full transitive value of their work?

The short answer is no. Not everything that someone simply dreams up can or should be monetized forever when sampled by other people. That sounds like a radical position but actually the current state of "intellectual property" has only existed for an extremely brief bit of human history. What has most greatly shaped our culture and knowledge has been effectively free for anyone to use, modify, and reproduce for hundreds of years.

That's not to say I don't support copyright as a means to support creative works but I would argue that it's an imperfect system. We're starving human minds of modern culture and knowledge often not even for someone's monetary gain but simply because the system demands it. It's ironic that artificial intelligence might actually free us from these constraints.

I purposefully choose a license (Apache) for my open source work to make it widely and freely available.

Clean room is merely a defence in case you get sued by someone saying that you copied the work. It's not legally necessary.

If the presumption is that LLM training, despite reading all the source code of everything everywhere, ultimately doesn't actually contain that source code (in a compressed form) then that is the significant bit.

If training is truly doing something transformative, maybe even a machine analogy to human learning, then anything produced directly by that LLM without another work in it's context is an entirely new work. That's all that is important.

> I think the practical answer is that clean room as a legal concept was designed for a world where reimplementation was expensive and intentional.

Whether or not it's expensive or intentional is immaterial. It always was and it's still true now. All that matters is that the actual expression, the real source code, is not copied. Clean room is just one way to have evidence that you didn't copy.

It'd be interesting (earnestly!) to see someone make a solid case for AI reimplementation being bad but that the original (afaik) "clean room" project, Compaq's reimplementation of IBM's PC BIOS (something most people seem to see as a righteous move toward openness and freedom), was good.

> This is just an assertion that you're making. There's no argument here.

...OK? Was somebody asking me for an "argument"? I'm just stating how things are currently understood.

> And it's no more "transformative" than rar'ing or zipping the code, then unzipping it.

That's obviously false, so I'm not sure what to tell you.

> but if I sample 2-6 second snatches from 10 different songs, put them through over 9000 filters and blend them into a new work, I owe money to everyone involved

You don't, actually, if they're no longer recognizable -- which they wouldn't be after "9000 filters". I don't know where you got that idea that you'd still owe money. And I've certainly never heard of an audio filter license that was contingent on commerical distribution.

> This doesn't mean anything. This is a meaningless arrangement of words.

Statistics are meaningful. Obviously you need to look at the actual identical lines. But if they're a bunch of trivial things like initializing variables with obvious names, then they don't count for much. And if you're adhering to the same API, you would expect to have some small percentage of lines happen to match. So the fact that this is hugely significant as a first step of analysis.

I suggest you might find conversations here on HN more productive if you soften your tone a bit. Saying things like "this is just an assertion that you're making" or "this is a meaningless arrangement of words" is not generally going to make people want to respond to you.

The labor theory of value is bunk economics anyway.