4 ms·

Algorithms aren't copyrightable as far as my understanding goes and this is where it gets murky. The expression is copyrightable, the algorithm isn't (except wh

Algorithms aren't copyrightable as far as my understanding goes and this is where it gets murky. The expression is copyrightable, the algorithm isn't (except when it is...) My personal feeling is that we've gone too far down the road of assigning IP to code and we should be rolling it back. I'd hate for the current AI boom to trigger an extension of current IP law.

skibidibipiti 4y ago
Every corporate code base is copyrighted. Engineers can’t write code similar to what they worked on, why should a corporate AI be able to violate copyleft?
wongarsu 4y ago
The abstract algorithm isn't covered by copyright, but can be patented (lots of asterisks here about software parents). But the exact lines of code you write are covered by copyright. If you tell Github Copilot to write a fast inverse square sum algorithm it's allowed to reproduce the idea of the famous quake3 algorithm, but if it produces the same lines and comments as those in the quake 3 source code then that's a pretty open and shut copyright violation
- andybak 4y ago
  > But the exact lines of code you write are covered by copyright. I believe it's "only if they are expressive" i.e. code that is pretty much what anyone would have written in that situation isn't copyrightable. I think this is the part where we should be much stricter in applying the principle. Similar to "novel and non-obvious" in patent law, it's become diluted in favour of IP overreach.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
Leaving aside what I think IP law ought to look like, LLMs literally train on (and reproduce!) the fixed, copyrighted expression. They aren't producing a new work based on abstract knowledge of algorithms that happens to share a particular expression. It's not at all obvious to me why the training set copyright wouldn't nominally flow through the model, even if that seems impossible to actually implement in practice.
- visarga 4y ago
  Why is everyone fixating on 1% of the outputs. 99% are sufficiently distinct. It replicates code as an unintended side effect, but there are mitigations.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    If you take all the words from Harry Potter and shuffle the words together in a random order, the output will be distinct but the work as a whole is probably still derivative. If you do that for 500 book series, you still haven't generated a new work, you've simply created a legal morass of derivative copyrights. ChatGPT is just a really impressive word-blender. All of those "sufficiently distinct" snippets are in a meaningful sense recombinations of other copyrighted snippets it was trained on. When you're in a very sparse part of the space or have a single work that's present many times in training like fast inverse square root, the model may even replicate recognizable chunks of the training set. It could be that this is sufficiently transformative that the output is not derivative, but as I said it's not obvious to me.
    - andybak 4y ago
      > If you take all the words from Harry Potter and shuffle the words together in a random order, the output will be distinct but the work as a whole is probably still derivative. If you do that for 500 book series, you still haven't generated a new work, you've simply created a legal morass of derivative copyrights. This might be the worst metaphor I've stumbled across in this whole debate. You're surely making an argument here for the opposite team.

skibidibipiti 4y ago

Every corporate code base is copyrighted. Engineers can’t write code similar to what they worked on, why should a corporate AI be able to violate copyleft?

wongarsu 4y ago

The abstract algorithm isn't covered by copyright, but can be patented (lots of asterisks here about software parents). But the exact lines of code you write are covered by copyright. If you tell Github Copilot to write a fast inverse square sum algorithm it's allowed to reproduce the idea of the famous quake3 algorithm, but if it produces the same lines and comments as those in the quake 3 source code then that's a pretty open and shut copyright violation

andybak 4y ago
> But the exact lines of code you write are covered by copyright. I believe it's "only if they are expressive" i.e. code that is pretty much what anyone would have written in that situation isn't copyrightable. I think this is the part where we should be much stricter in applying the principle. Similar to "novel and non-obvious" in patent law, it's become diluted in favour of IP overreach.

AlotOfReading 4y ago

Leaving aside what I think IP law ought to look like, LLMs literally train on (and reproduce!) the fixed, copyrighted expression. They aren't producing a new work based on abstract knowledge of algorithms that happens to share a particular expression. It's not at all obvious to me why the training set copyright wouldn't nominally flow through the model, even if that seems impossible to actually implement in practice.

visarga 4y ago
Why is everyone fixating on 1% of the outputs. 99% are sufficiently distinct. It replicates code as an unintended side effect, but there are mitigations.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  If you take all the words from Harry Potter and shuffle the words together in a random order, the output will be distinct but the work as a whole is probably still derivative. If you do that for 500 book series, you still haven't generated a new work, you've simply created a legal morass of derivative copyrights. ChatGPT is just a really impressive word-blender. All of those "sufficiently distinct" snippets are in a meaningful sense recombinations of other copyrighted snippets it was trained on. When you're in a very sparse part of the space or have a single work that's present many times in training like fast inverse square root, the model may even replicate recognizable chunks of the training set. It could be that this is sufficiently transformative that the output is not derivative, but as I said it's not obvious to me.
  - andybak 4y ago
    > If you take all the words from Harry Potter and shuffle the words together in a random order, the output will be distinct but the work as a whole is probably still derivative. If you do that for 500 book series, you still haven't generated a new work, you've simply created a legal morass of derivative copyrights. This might be the worst metaphor I've stumbled across in this whole debate. You're surely making an argument here for the opposite team.