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

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

#71

Post by nicole_express »

sigseg1v wrote: post #60
spullara wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the actual text of the code isn't the same or obviously derivative, copyright doesn't apply at all.

What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM and it was trained on the existing work, that's a derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.

Of course, the problem with this interpretation is that all modern LLMs are derivatives from huge amounts of text under completely different licenses, including "All rights reserved", and therefore can not be used for any purpose.

I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code, unless the code is a rewrite of an open source project to change its license".

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

#72

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

amarant wrote: post #64
re-thc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and > He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it Difference being Claude looked; so not blind. The equivalent is more like I blindly took a photo of it and then used that to... Technically did look.

The article is poorly written. Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at it's code! What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code, only the API and the test suite. The new implementation is all Claude. And the implementation is different enough to be considered original, completely different structure, design, and hey, a 48x improvement in performanc…

did he claim that Claude wasn't trained on the original? Or just that he didn't personally provide Claude with a copy?

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

#73

Post by amarant »

esafak wrote: post #30
sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

> 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 This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Mi…

If you only stick to the API and ignore the implementation, it is not Mickey Mouse any more but a rodent. If it was just a clone it wouldn't be 50x as fast. Nevertheless, APIs apparently can be copyrightable. I generally disagree with this; it's how PC compatibles took off, giving consumers better options.

Wait what, didn't oracle lose the case against Google? Have I been living in an alternate reality where API compatibility is fair use?

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

#74

Post by wizzwizz4 »

sigseg1v wrote: post #60
spullara wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the actual text of the code isn't the same or obviously derivative, copyright doesn't apply at all.

What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM and it was trained on the existing work, that's a derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.

See also: https://monolith.sourceforge.net/, which seeks to ask the question:

> But how far away from direct and explicit representations do we have to go before copyright no longer applies?

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

#75

Post by re-thc »

ordu wrote: post #3

I believe it is a narrow view of the situation. If we take a look into the history, into the reasons for inventing GPL, we'll see that it was an attempt to fight copyrights with copyrights. The very name 'copyleft' is trying to convey the idea. What AI are eroding is copyright. You can re-implement not just a GPL program, but to reverse engineer and re-implement a closed source program too, people have demonstrated i…

> What AI are eroding is copyright.

At the moment it's people that are eroding copyright. E.g. in this case someone did something.

"AI" didn't have a brain, woke up and suddenly decided to do it.

Realistically nothing to do with AI. Having a gun doesn't mean you randomly shoot.

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

#76

Post by casey2 »

largbae wrote: post #38

This is only worth arguing about because software has value. Putting this in context of a world where the cost of writing code is trending to 0, there are two obvious futures: 1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world, proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not…

The value of software has never been tied to the cost of writing it, even if you don't distribute it your still breaking the law.

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

#77

Post by amiga386 »

dathinab wrote: post #29
ordu wrote: post #3

I believe it is a narrow view of the situation. If we take a look into the history, into the reasons for inventing GPL, we'll see that it was an attempt to fight copyrights with copyrights. The very name 'copyleft' is trying to convey the idea. What AI are eroding is copyright. You can re-implement not just a GPL program, but to reverse engineer and re-implement a closed source program too, people have demonstrated i…

> we'll see that it was an attempt to fight copyrights with copyrights it's not that simple yes, GPLs origins have the idea of "everyone should be able to use" but it also is about attribution the original author and making sure people can't just de-facto "size public goods" the kind of AI usage is removing attribution and is often sizing public goods in a way far worse then most companies which just ignored the lice…

You've said "size" twice in comments, did you mean "seize"?

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

#78

Post by strongpigeon »

I feel like the licenses that suffer the most isn't the GPL, but the ones like SSPL. If your code can be re-implemented easily and legally by AWS using an LLM, why risk publishing it?

It does feel like open source is about to change. My hunch is that commercial open source (beyond the consultation model) risks disappearing. Though I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

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

#79

Post by davidw »

jacquesm wrote: post #69
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…

> There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations. This was already the case and it just got worse, not better.

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 up enough to spit it out in a way that doesn't even require attribution, and you have to pay to use their machine.

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

#80

Post by ghostpepper »

sigseg1v wrote: post #60
spullara wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the actual text of the code isn't the same or obviously derivative, copyright doesn't apply at all.

What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM and it was trained on the existing work, that's a derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.

As a cynical person I assume all the frontier LLMs were trained on datasets that include every open source project, but as a thought experiment, if an LLM was trained on a dataset that included every open source project _execept_ chardet, do you think said LLM would still be able to easily implement something very similar?
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