Someone 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.
I meant it as a joke, given that oracle is famously litigious. It would solve the legal questions
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
591–600 of 623 posts
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#592Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes the leak illegal other than copyright? The occasional piece of software might be a trade secret, but a person downloading a preexisting leak isn't affected by those laws.
> What makes the leak illegal other than copyright? The occasional piece of software might be a trade secret, but a person downloading a preexisting leak isn't affected by those laws. I think 18 U.S.C. § 1832 (a) (3) might answer your question? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1832
To qualify as a trade secret, you have to actually register it as a trade secret.
Closed-source code is not automatically a trade secret.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
That code isn't going to be open source. And if you use someone else's closed source code you are violating laws that have nothing to do with copyright.
I'm not sure I understand. I'm not talking about stolen/leaked code here. I'm saying: imagine you claim you're the author of some piece of code. You may or may not have written it with an LLM, but even if so, assume you have the full rights to all the inputs. You post it publicly on GitHub. You don't attach a license, or perhaps you attach a restrictive license that doesn't permit much beyond viewing. Someone comes a…
Good questions.
My take on the answers (I am not a lawyer):
1. You copy their code. They bring a copyright claim (let's assume this isn't a DMCA thing and they're actually bringing a claim to court). Your defence is "the LLM wrote it so no copyright attaches". Since they're asserting their copyright claim, they would have to provide evidence for that claim (same as in any other copyright case), including providing evidence that a human wrote it (which is new, and required to defeat your defence).
2. They copy your code. You bring a copyright case. Their defence is "I used an LLM to wash the code without copying". Since they're not disputing your copyright claim to the original code, you don't have to defend or prove your copyright. But you do have to prove that their code infringes on your copyright, which would mean proving that the LLM copied your code when creating the new code. This has been done before by demonstrating similarity.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good news! LLM output cannot be copyrighted. Everything that an LLM produces is automatically, irrevocably, in the public domain.
If the LLM output is already someone else's copyrighted work, the LLM doesn't change that?
The LLM cannot produce copyrighted work.
If the LLM reproduces a human's copyrighted work, then that copyright still stands. This is, in effect, the same as photocopying someone else's writing. The LLM was trained on the copyrighted work, is incapable of producing new copyrightable work, so if it duplicates the original work then the original author's copyright still stands.
I am not a lawyer
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might wish that were true, but there are very strong arguments it's not. Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is. In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies. It's fair use. But agreed that we're waiting for a court case to confirm that. Although really, the main questions for any court cases are not going…
> Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is. Some might hold that we've granted persons certain exemptions, on account of them being persons. We do not have to grant machines the same. > In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies. Has the model really performed an extreme transformation if it is able to produce…
"Has the model really performed an extreme transformation if it is able to produce the training data near-verbatim?...."
So do 10 000 chimpanzees on typewriters.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#596Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there have been lawsuits over just these behaviors in the past How did they turn out?
It depends if you count the ones that were settled behind NDAs with large companies with unknown amounts being paid out that are ticking time bombs waiting to go off in the future.
let's just count the ones we know about? you sound evasive;)
Remember the original poster said that any time my browser downloads a picture on any website (which is a technical requirement to show it) I am infringing on those rights. If that is US court opinioon that would be absolutely stupid.
Of course if you reshare some work that actually is somebody's property you can be totally infringing. Which makes total sense. Except when big tech does the same to us (LLM and diffusion training) it's suddenly ok and that's insane
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#597One 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.
Perhaps you are right. I work for a company right now that has a smarter than average legal4IT department and they ask sensible questions about every piece of FLOSS code you want to bring in:
- what is the license?
- is it a program or a library?
- do you plan to use it as-is or modify it?
- do you plan to include it in our products or is it for internal use only?
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#598Earlier 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.
If certification is the actual cost, you don't need copyright, at all. SQLite is in the public domain. Your moat is the certification itself, not the code.
Certification isn't a moat; either the software is certified as safe/bug-free or it isn't. If it's safe, that just makes it more valuable to pirates.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#599Earlier quoted context omitted.
If certification is the actual cost, you don't need copyright, at all. SQLite is in the public domain. Your moat is the certification itself, not the code.
Certification isn't a moat; either the software is certified as safe/bug-free or it isn't. If it's safe, that just makes it more valuable to pirates.
That's absurd.
I can't use SQLite for aviation even though it was certified.
I can't even claim FIPS compliance for my software without going through an expensive process, even though I only use FIPS approved primitives.
Building on certified/compliant libraries helps, but their vendors can certainly contractually make me pay for it.
All OSS libraries have a warranty disclaimer; using them according to even those licenses automatically excludes "fitness for a particular purpose."
Why would public domain software be any different?
The moat is the certification process, not the code itself. "I copied this from somewhere after it was already certified" might fast track something, but it's not gonna fly with "certification was good, done."
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#600Earlier quoted context omitted.
It surely doesn't matter how leading or contorted the prompt has to be if it shows that the model is encoding the copyrighted work verbatimly or nearly so.
It definitely does, which is why I put substantial amount of verbatim material. If someone can recite the first paragraph of Harry Potter and the sorcerers stone from memory, it surely doesn't mean they have memorized the entire book.
Of course not. But if the passage they can recite is long enough that it is copyrightable, then surely distributing a thing that (contortedly or not) can do said recitation is a form of redistribution of the work itself?