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No right to relicense this project

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Re: No right to relicense this project

#61

Post by fzeroracer »

charcircuit wrote: post #43
fzeroracer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's up to them to prove that a) the original implementation was not part of whatever data set said AI used and b) that the engineers in question did not use the original as a basis.

It's up to the accuser to prove that they copied it and did not actually write it from scratch as they claimed.

No, that's not how copyright laws work. Especially in a world where the starting point is the accused making something and marketing it as someone else's IP with a license change.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#62

Post by senko »

Roritharr wrote: post #13

As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context. A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern. One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical. Took him a week after work. I…

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"

DMCA. The EULA likely prohibits reverse engineering. If a competitor does that, hit'em with lawyers.

Or, if you want to be able to sleep at night, recognize this as an opportunity instead of a threat.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#63

Post by NitpickLawyer »

bandrami wrote: post #35
littlecranky67 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting case, IANAL but sounds legal and legit. The AI did not have expose to the backend it re-implemented. The API itself is public and not protectable.

OTOH as of yesterday the output of the LLM isn't copyrightable, which makes licensing it difficult

I wrote this comment on another thread earlier, but it seems relevant here, so I'll just c/p:

I think we didn't even began to consider all the implications of this, and while people ran with that one case where someone couldn't copyright a generated image, it's not that easy for code. I think there needs to be way more litigation before we can confidently say it's settled.

If "generated" code is not copyrightable, where do draw the line on what generated means? Do macros count? Does code that generates other code count? Protobuf?

If it's the tool that generates the code, again where do we draw the line? Is it just using 3rd party tools? Would training your own count? Would a "random" code gen and pick the winners (by whatever means) count? Bruteforce all the space (silly example but hey we're in silly space here) counts?

Is it just "AI" adjacent that isn't copyrightable? If so how do you define AI? Does autocomplete count? Intellisense? Smarter intellisense?

Are we gonna have to have a trial where there's at least one lawyer making silly comparisons between LLMs and power plugs? Or maybe counting abacuses (abaci?)... "But your honour, it's just random numbers / matrix multiplications...

Re: No right to relicense this project

#64

Post by scosman »

swiftcoder wrote: post #20
scosman wrote: post #14

Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code. Question: if they had built one using AI teams in both “rooms”, one writing a spec the other implementing, would that be fine? You’d need to verify spec doesn’t include source code, but that’s easy enough. It seems to mostly follow the IBM-era precedent. However, since the model probably had the original c…

> Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code. It doesn't matter how they structure the agents. Since chardet is in the LLM training set, you can't claim any AI implementation thereof is clean room.

Yeah I mention that in the question.

Might still be valid for closed source projects (probably is).

I think courts would need to weigh in on the open source side. There’s legal precedent is that you can use a derived work to generate a new unique work (the spec derived for the copyrighted code is very much a derived work). There are rulings that LLMs are transformative works, not just copies of training data.

LLMs can’t reproduce their entire training set. But this thinking is also ripe for misuse. I could always train or fine-tune a model on the original work so that it can reproduce the original. We quickly get into statistical arguments here.

It’s a really interesting question.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#65

Post by nothrabannosir »

spoiler wrote: post #38
imcritic wrote: post #32

Licenses are cancer and the enemy of opensource.

I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.

The GPL exists for the benefit of end users, not developers. It being a chore for developers who want to deny their users the software freedoms is a feature, not a bug.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#66

Post by myrmidon »

I think Mark Pilgrim misrepresents the legal situation somewhat: The AI rewrite does not legally need to be a clean room implementation (whatever exactly that would even mean here).

That is just the easiest way to disambiguate the legal situation (i.e. the most reliable approach to prevent it from being considered a derivative work by a court).

I'm curious how this is gonna go.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#67

Post by user34283 »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #15
spoiler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole clean room argument makes no sense. Project changed governance and was significantly refactored or reimplemented... I think the maintainers deserve to call it their own. Original-pre MIT release can stay LGPL. I don't think this is a precedent either, plenty of projects changed licenses lol. I keep kind mixing them up but the GPL licenses keep popping up as occasionally horror stories. Maybe the license is…

No. Because they couldnt have done any of that refactoring without a licence to do so, and that licence forbids them from relicencing it.

Afaik you can do whatever you like to GPL licensed code, you do not need a license to refactor it.

I understand you need to publish the source code of your modifications, if you distribute them outside of your company.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#68

Post by oytis »

I wonder if LLMs will push the industry towards protecting their IP with patents like the other branches of engineering rather than copyright. If you patent a general idea of how your software works then no rewrite will be able to lift this protection.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#70

Post by orphea »

spoiler wrote: post #38
imcritic wrote: post #32

Licenses are cancer and the enemy of opensource.

I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.

If you have ill intentions or maybe you're a corporation that wants to use someone else's work for free without contributing anything back, then yes, I can see how GPL licenses "tend to cause problems".
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