Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

Interesting.

> the complaint is not about code generation, it's about ingesting someone else's code, frequently for profit.

Why do you think that is, and what complaint specifically? I was talking about this:

> The Copyright Office reviewed the decision in 2022 and determined that the image doesn't include “human authorship,” disqualifying it from copyright protection

There seems to be 0 mentioning of training there. In fact if you read the appeal's court case [1] they don't mention training either:

> We affirm the denial of Dr. Thaler’s copyright application. The Creativity Machine cannot be the recognized author of a copyrighted work because the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. Given that holding, we need not address the Copyright Office’s argument that the Constitution itself requires human authorship of all copyrighted material. Nor do we reach Dr. Thaler’s argument that he is the work’s author by virtue of making and using the Creativity Machine because that argument was waived before the agency.

I have no idea where you got the idea that this was about training data. Neither the copyright office nor the appeals court even mention this.

But anyway, since we're here, let's entertain this. So you're saying that training data is the differentiator. OK. So in that case, would training on "your own data" make this ok with you? Would training on "synthetic" data be ok? Would a model that sees no "proprietary" code be ok? Would a hypothetical model trained just on RL with nothing but a compiler and endless compute be ok?

The courts seem to hint that "human authorship" is still required. I see no end to the "... but what about x", as I stated in my first comment. I was honestly asking those questions, because the crux of the case here rests on "human authorship of the piece to be copyrighted", not on anything prior.

[1] - https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/egpblokwqpq/...

> Which is why I was proposing a middle-ground where an agreement is setup between the model training company and the collective of developers/artists et all and come up with a license agreement where they are rewarded for their original work for perpetuity. A tiny % of the profits can be shared, which would be a form of UBI. This is fair

That wouldn't be fair because these models are not only trained on code. A huge chunk of the training data are just "random" webpages scraped off the Internet. How do you propose those people are compensated in such a scheme? How do you even know who contributed, and how much, and to whom to even direct the money?

I think the only "fair" model would be to essentially require models trained on data that you didn't explicitly license to be released as open weights under a permissive license (possibly with a slight delay to allow you to recoup costs). That is: if you want to gobble up the whole Internet to train your model without asking for permission then you're free to do so, but you need to release the resulting model so that the whole humanity can benefit from it, instead of monopolizing it behind an API paywall like e.g. OpenAI or Anthropic does.

Those big LLM companies harvest everyone's data en-masse without permission, train their models on it, and then not only they don't release jack squat, but have the gall to put up malicious explicit roadblocks (hiding CoT traces, banning competitors, etc.) so that no one else can do it to them, and when people try they call it an "attack"[1]. This is what people should be angry about.

[1] -- https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

That's another project though, right? In this case I think it is different because that project just seems stolen. The courts can probably verify this too.

I think the main question is when a rewrite is a clean rewrite, via AI. If it is a clean rewrite they can choose any licence.

"We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not."

I think it will depend on the way HOW the AI arrived to the new code.

If it was using the original source code then it probably is guilty-by-association. But in theory an AI model could also generate a rewrite if being fed intermediary data not based on that project.

If anything, the SCOTUS decision would seem to imply that generative AI transformations produce no additional creative contribution and therefore the original copyright holder has all rights to any derived AI works.

(IANAL)