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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

#81

Post by zozbot234 »

cubefox wrote: post #22
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…

That's naive. Copyright doesn't just apply to software. There already have been countless lawsuits about copying music long before the term "open source" was invented. No, changing the lyrics a bit doesn't circumvent copyright. Nor does translating a Stephen King novel to German and switching the names of the places and characters. A court ordered the first Nosferatu movie to be destroyed because it had too many simi…

Claude was asked to implement a public API, not an entire codebase. The definition of a public API is largely functional; even in an unusually complex case like the Java standard facilities (which are unusually creative even in the structure and organization of the API itself) the reimplementation by Google was found to be fair use.

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

#82

Post by re-thc »

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…

> What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code

Who opened the PR? Who co-authored the commits? It's clearly on Github.

> Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at its code!

So there you have it. If he looked, he co-authored then there's that.

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

#83

Post by dathinab »

anonymous_sorry wrote: post #44
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…

There was a recent ruling that LLM output is inherently public domain (presumably unless it infringes some existing copyright). In which case it's not possible to use them to "reimplement everything we can as copyleft".

it's more complicated, the ruling was that AI can't be an author and the thing in question is (de-facto) public domain because it has no author in context of the "dev" claim it was fully build by AI

but AI assisted code has an author and claiming it's AI assisted even if it is fully AI build is trivial (if you don't make it public that you didn't do anything)

also some countries have laws which treat it like a tool in the sense that the one who used it is the author by default AFIK

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

#84

Post by spullara »

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.

In order for it to be creatively derivative you would need to copy the structure, logic, organization, and sequence of operations not just reimplement the functionality. It is pretty clear in this case that wasn't done.

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

#85

Post by kccqzy »

> When GNU reimplemented the UNIX userspace, the vector ran from proprietary to free. Stallman was using the limits of copyright law to turn proprietary software into free software. […] The vector in the chardet case runs the other way.

That’s just your subjective opinion which many other people would disagree. I bet Armin Ronacher would agree that an MIT licensed library is even freer than an LGPL licensed library. To them, the vector is running from free to freer.

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

#86

Post by intrasight »

sarchertech wrote: post #37
logicprog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't see how it's relevant whether he did look or didn't. In my opinion, it's not just legally valid to make a re-implementation of something if you've seen the code as long as it doesn't copy expressive elements. I think it's also ethically fine as well to use source code as a reference for re-implementing something as long as it doesn't turn into an exact translation.

Ignoring the legal or ethical concerns. Let’s say we live in a world where the cost of copying code is so close to zero that it’s indistinguishable from a world without copyright. Anything you put out can and will be used by whatever giant company wants to use it with no attribution whatsoever. Doesn’t that massively reduce the incentive to release the source of anything ever?

Most commercial software that I've used has the model of a legal moat around a pretty crappy database schema.

The non IP protection has largely been in the effort involved in replicating an application's behavior and that effort is dropping precipitously.

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

#87

Post by bjt »

> If source code can now be generated from a specification, the specification is where the essential intellectual content of a GPL project resides. Blanchard's own claim—that he worked only from the test suite and API without reading the source—is, paradoxically, an argument for protecting that test suite and API specification under copyleft terms.

This is an interesting reversal in itself. If you make the specification protected under copyright, then the whole practice of clean room implementations is invalid.

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

#88

Post by casey2 »

observationist wrote: post #17
throwaway2027 wrote: post #5

I think we're going one step too far even, AI itself is a gray area and how can they guarantee it was trained legally or if it's even legal what they're doing and how can they assert that the input training data didn't contain any copyrighted data.

Google already spent billions of dollars and decades of lawyer hours proving it out as fair use. The legal challenges we see now are the dying convulsions of an already broken system of publishers and IP hoarders using every resource at their disposal to manipulate authors and creators and the public into thinking that there's any legitimacy or value underlying modern copyright law. AI will destroy the current paradi…

Google has cut out some very specific ruling that have nothing to do with modern AI. These systems are just a really slow/lossy git clone, current law has no trouble with it, it's broadly illegal.

If corporations are allowed to launder someone else work as their own people will simply stop working and just start endlessly remixing a la popular music.

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

#89

Post by jacquesm »

davidw wrote: post #79
jacquesm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 u…

AI essentially gatekeeps all of open source to companies to pluck from to their hearts content. And individual contributors using these tools and freely mixing it with their own - usual minor - contributions are another step of whitewashing because they're definitely not going to own up to writing only 5% of the stuff they got paid for.

Before we had RedHat and Ubuntu, who at least were contributing back, now we have Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI who are racing to lock the barn door around their new captive sheep. It's just a massive IP laundromat.

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

#90

Post by dleslie »

IMHO, the API and Test Suite, particularly the latter, define the contract of the functional definition of the software. It almost doesn't matter what that definition looks like so long as it conforms to the contract.

There was an issue where Google did something similar with the JVM, and ultimately it came down to whether or not Oracle owned the copyright to the header files containing the API. It went all the way to the US supreme court, and they ruled in Google's favour; finding that the API wasn't the implementation, and that the amount of shared code was so minimal as to be irrelevant.

They didn't anticipate that in less than half a decade we'd have technology that could _rapidly_ reimplement software given a strong functional definition and contract enforcing test suite.

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