91–100 of 623 posts
Why does anyone need his new library? They can do what he did and make their own. I'm glad we can fork things at a point and thumb our noses at those who wish to cash in on other's work.
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
"Antirez closes his careful legal analysis as though it settles the matter. Ronacher acknowledges that “there is an obvious moral question here, but that isn't necessarily what I'm interested in.” Both pieces treat legal permissibility as a proxy for social legitimacy. " This whole article is just complaining that other people didn't have the discussion he wanted. Ronacher even acknowledged that it's a different disc…
Having this discussion involves blasting others for not considering it. Consider the rest of the paragraph you quoted: > But law only says what conduct it will not prevent—it does not certify that conduct as right. Aggressive tax minimization that never crosses into illegality may still be widely regarded as antisocial. A pharmaceutical company that legally acquires a patent on a long-generic drug and raises the pric…
It might even be morally abhorrent to have such a discussion in the first place!
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.
1. An LLM recreating a piece of software violates its copyright and is illegal, in which case LLM output can never be legally used because someone somewhere probably has a copyright on some portion of any software that an LLM could write.
2. You read my example as "copying a project without distributing it", vs. "having an LLM write the same functionality just for me"
The fundamental problem is that once you take something outside the realm of law and rule of law in its many facets as the legitimizing principal, you have to go a whole lot further to be coherent and consistent.
You can’t just leave things floating in a few ambiguous things you don’t like and feel “off” to you in some way- not if you’re trying to bring some clarity to your own thoughts, much less others. You don’t have to land on a conclusion either. By all means chew over things, but once you try to settle, things fall apart if you haven’t done the harder work of replacing the framework of law with that of another conceptual structure.
You need to at least be asking “to what ends? What purpose is served by the rule?” Otherwise you’re stuck in things where half the time you end up arguing backwards in ways that put purpose serving rules, the maintenance of the rule with justifications ever further afield pulled in when the rule is questioned and edge cases reached. If you’re asking, essentially, “is the spirit of the rule still there?” You’ve got to stop and fill in what that spirit is or you or people that want to control you or have an agenda will sweep in with their own language and fill the void to their own ends.
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.
Then onto prompting: 'He fed only the API and (his) test suite to Claude'
This is Google v Oracle all over again - are APIs copyrightable?
Why does anyone need his new library? They can do what he did and make their own. I'm glad we can fork things at a point and thumb our noses at those who wish to cash in on other's work.
Why would I make my own? The new library is released under MIT license and faster than the old one.