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

writings.hongminhee.org

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

#571

Post by gbacon »

rfw300 wrote: post #253
zmmmmm wrote: post #162

The really interesting question to me is if this transcends copyright and unravels the whole concept of intellectual property. Because all of it is premised on an assumption that creativity is "hard". But LLMs are not just writing software, they are rapidly being engineered to operate completely generally as knowledge creation engines: solving math proofs, designing drugs, etc. So: once it's not "hard" any more, does…

More likely: this is a transitional phase where our previously hard problems become easy, and we will soon set our sights on new and much harder problems. The pinnacle of creative achievement in the universe is probably not 2010s B2B SaaS. It is entirely possible, however, that human beings will not be the primary drivers of progress on those problems.

Finally, a perspective that looks beyond the buggy whips! As for your last comment, it depends on what you mean by the primary drivers. Figurative crank turners, maybe not. Creativity and insight, don’t count us out just yet.

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

#572

Post by sneak »

Gigachad wrote: post #207
robmccoll wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As described, this would not be the same thing. If the AI is looking at the source and effectively porting it, that is likely infringement. The idea instead should be "implement Minecraft from scratch" but with behavior, graphics, etc. identical. Note that you'll need to have an AI generate assets or something since you can't just reuse textures and models.

AI models have already looked at the source of GPL software and contain it in their dataset. Adding the minecraft source to the mix wouldn't seem much different. Of course art assets and trade marks would have to be replaced. But an AI "clean room" implementation has yet to be legally tested.

You are confusing training data with context (prompts).

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

#573

Post by matheusmoreira »

Eridrus wrote: post #535
matheusmoreira wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of IP is to encourage the creation of new things. Then why are corporations allowed to milk successful works for all eternity? Why do we have Disney monopolizing films made half a century ago? Why do we have Nintendo selling people the exact same Mario ROMs from the 80s every single console generation? They should have like 10 years of copyright so they can turn a profit. Once it expires it's over and the…

There is always drift between intent and implementation, but to be generous here, Disney is generally making new works with their IP and so is Nintendo. I am somewhat curious what you think shortening the copyright window would do that's so great for the culture though. We already have more than enough IP slop that's just licensed.

> Disney is generally making new works with their IP and so is Nintendo

Let them profit from those new works then. All the works from the last century belong in the public domain.

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

#574

Post by taint69 »

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…

[dead]

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

#575

Post by davidw »

stalfie wrote: post #504
davidw wrote: post #79

Earlier 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.

I don't begrudge the companies charging use their machine, but writing all the code and prose and everything else that the machine ingested was hard too.

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

#576

Post by davidw »

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #195
davidw wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM as the main weapon LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS. I don't think that's an exciting idea for the Free Software Foundation. Perhaps with time we…

> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS. When the FSF and GPL were created, I don't think this was really a consideration. They were perfectly happy with re…

Free software didn't really take off until a couple of things happened 1) personal computers got good enough to run Linux and BSD and 2) more people get connected to the internet.

The 'good enough' part is the important one here, I think.

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

#577

Post by Marsymars »

cubefox wrote: post #442
Marsymars wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the general guideline is that copyright covers the *expression of an idea*, not the idea itself. Translations are pretty much the textbook example of a derivative work in copyright. Your jurisdiction may vary, of course, but it's pretty well established in mine (Canada) that "plot" is an idea, and can't be copyrighted, only the expression of the idea (e.g. the written novel) falls under copyright.

If I translate Harry Potter to another language and change all the names, the resulting book clearly expresses the same ideas as the original.

Yes, I agree.

But "expresses the same idea" isn't the benchmark, "ideas expressed in the same way" is the benchmark.

A translated work is "ideas expressed in the same way", a translation doesn't change that.

See e.g. this question/top answer on stackexchange, it details pretty well how plot can't be copyrighted using Harry Potter as an example: https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/3928/on-copyrigh...

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

#578

Post by timeinput »

foresto wrote: post #165
timeinput wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blanchard fed the spec to the tool, and Anthropic fed the code to the tool, so Blanchard didn't do anything wrong, and Anthropic didn't do anything wrong. Nothing to see here.

> Blanchard fed the spec to the tool, Yes... > and Anthropic fed the code to the tool, Presumably, as part of the massive amount of open-source code that must have been fed in to train their model. > so Blanchard didn't do anything wrong, and Anthropic didn't do anything wrong. Nothing to see here. This is meant as irony, right?

Yes. Specifically: The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning, and not some knifey spoony confusion.

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

#579

Post by smsm42 »

metalcrow wrote: post #363
smsm42 wrote: post #354

> 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. I don't see how it matters what he looked at. If I took a copyrighted code and run it through a script that replaces all variable names, and then claimed copyright on the result because it's an entirely new work and I did not look on…

> AI is a more complex machine, but still a machine. If you feed somebody'd work into a machine, what comes out is a derivative work. I'm not sure that's true, legally speaking. If you fed it into a PRNG, the output seems to me like it would not be an obviously derivative work (i doubt you could copyright it but that's a separate question). So we have 1 machine that can transform something into non-derivative work, a…

PRNG is not intended to use information sent into it in a substantive way (in other words, for PRNG does not matter if what you feed into is is Shakespeare's sonnets or white noise). Sure, if your machine is an electronic analogue of a shredder, then yes, the result is not a derivative work in any sensible meaning. But LLMs are not that kind of a machine.

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

#580

Post by alterom »

stagger87 wrote: post #295

I'm probably spitting in the wind, but stuff like this is why I removed all my hosted open source projects. I manage several niche projects that I have now converted to binary only releases (to almost no push back). It's niche enough that it's not very hard to get LLMs to output chunks of code that it managed to scrape before I took it offline. I don't see many people talking about this angle, but LLMs ripping off my…

>I don't see many people talking about this angle, but LLMs ripping off my work killed my open source efforts.

This is exactly what the article is talking about.

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