Intellectual property laundering is the core and primary value of LLMs. Everything else is "bonus".
Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
61–70 of 408 posts
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#62> If “AI-rewriting” is accepted as a valid way to change licenses, it represents the end of Copyleft. Any developer could take a GPL-licensed project, feed it into an LLM with the prompt “Rewrite this in a different style,” and release it under MIT. The legal and ethical lines are still being drawn, and the chardet v7.0.0 case is one of the first real-world tests.
This isn't even limited to "the end of copyleft"; it's the end of all copyright! At least copyright protecting the little guy. If you have deep enough pockets to create LLMs, you can in this potential future use them to wash away anyone's copyright for any work. Why would the GPL be the only target? If it works for the GPL, it surely also works for your photographs, poetry – or hell even proprietary software?
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#63> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. Im struggling to see where this conclusion came from. To me it sounds like the AI-written work can not be coppywritten, and so its kind of like a copy pasting the original code. Copy pasting the original code doesnt make it public domain.…
The point is that even a work written by an AI trained exclusively on liberally licensed or public domain material cannot have copyright (isn’t a "work" in the legal sense) and thus nobody has standing to put it under a license or claim any rights to it.
If I train a limerick generator on the contents of Project Gutenberg, no matter how creative its outputs, they’re not copyrightable under this interpretation. And it’s by far the most reasonable interpretation of the law as both intended and written. Entities that are not legal persons cannot have copyright, but legal persons also cannot claim copyright of something made by a nonperson, unless they are the "creative force" behind the work.
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#64Can we do the same with universal music? Because that's easy and already possible. Or Microsoft Windows? Because we all know the answer: if it works, essentially any government will immediately call it illegal. Because if this isn't allowed, that makes all of the AI models themselves illegal. They are very much the product of using others' copyrighted stuff and rewriting it. But of course this will be allowed because…
The dark future possibility here is that the big guy is allowed to launder the intellectual property of the little guy, but not vice versa.
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#65Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#66If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in all clean room rewrites) t…
The new agent who writes code has probably at least parts of the original code as training data. We can't speak about clean room implementation from LLM since they are technically capable only of spitting their training data in different ways, not of any original creation.
The conclusion of this would be that you can never license AI generated code since you can't get a release from the original authors.
Of course in practice it would work exactly in the opposite fashion and AI generated code would be immune even if it copied code verbatim.
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#67This seems relevant: "No right to relicense this project (github.com/chardet)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LLM ingestion comes under fair use I don't think so. It is no where "limited use". Entirety of the source code is ingested for training the model. In other words, it meets the bar of "heart of the work" being used for training. There are other factors as well, such as not harming owner's ability to profit from original work.
https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/07/fair-u... Both Meta and Anthropic were vindicated for their use. Only for Anthropic was their fine for not buying upfront.
Alsup absolutely did not vindicate Anthropic as "fair use".
> Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies. [0]
It was only fair use, where they already had a license to the information at hand.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#69By design you can't know if the LLM doing the rewrite was exposed to the original code base. Unless the AI company is disclosing their training material, which they won't because they don't want to admit breaking the law.
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
The new agent who writes code has probably at least parts of the original code as training data. We can't speak about clean room implementation from LLM since they are technically capable only of spitting their training data in different ways, not of any original creation.
The conclusion of this would be that you can never license AI generated code since you can't get a release from the original authors. Of course in practice it would work exactly in the opposite fashion and AI generated code would be immune even if it copied code verbatim.
I don't see what's wrong with that personally. If I pirated someone's software, and then sold it as my own and got caught, just because I sold a bunch of it doesn't mean those people who bought it now are in the clear. They are still using bootleg software in their business.