5 ms·

I am skeptical of this research. But, it amazes me the degree to which GPL proponents are willing to threaten the livelihoods of what are _clearly_ people with

I am skeptical of this research. But, it amazes me the degree to which GPL proponents are willing to threaten the livelihoods of what are _clearly_ people with good intentions without even trying to understand the situation or inspect intentions. These are grad students and artists. It was probably a mistake - or they found it was covered under fair use. But, nope! Stallman wouldn’t approve! Canceled!

Kim_Bruning 4y ago
They claimed they had made a tool to prevent plagiarism. On closer inspection, it turns out the tool itself was plagiarized. That was certainly a mistake.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  That seems like intentionally broadening the scope of their claims in order to fit a pre-defined narrative that falls apart upon closer inspection.
- kazinator 4y ago
  You're just playing word games. Whether a tool prevents plagiarism has nothing to do with whether it is itself plagiarized. Plagiarism is a misconduct whereby someone else's work is presented as one's own. Falling afoul of the GNU Public License in some way isn't ipso facto plagiarism.
  - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    I'm actually just summarizing what the sources say here. "Plagiarism is the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work." [1] Tool claims to prevent plagiarism, paper uses "plagiarism" language throughout. [2] Writers of tool used substantial portions of a different tool without acknowledgement. Source explicitly calls this out as plagiarism in first paragraph [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.04222.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.04222.pdf [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11sqkh9/glaze_is_violating_gpl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11sqkh9/gl... (edit) To be sure: somewhat later, authors do seem to be correcting their behavior, but only after having been called out. ( https://mobile.twitter.com/ravenben/status/1636439335569375238 https://mobile.twitter.com/ravenben/status/16364393355693752... )
    - kazinator 4y ago
      Plagiarism and copyright/licensing violations are only tangentially related. If you have the license to use some source code (e.g. it's public domain, or you purchased a license which allows royalty-free redistribution) then you have no copyright issue. If you submit that code to your school as your assignment, or part of your assignment without attribution, then that is plagiarism nonetheless. It's a problem between you and the school (and the world at large), not between you and the author of the code, who allowed your use. The GNU license is not concerned with academic misconduct. Users are encouraged to use the code as the basis for making something that works for them. It has to be redistributed according to certain rules so that the freedoms originally granted to the users are preserved. The concern isn't that the correct author has been identified to the users, but that they can get the source code and build that same thing, and also redistribute it with their modifications, if they wish. If you tell the users that this is based on GPLed code from such and such, but don't give them the code, then you are innocent of plagiarism, but still in violation of the license. Most programs use code that their author didn't write---often, a lot of code; that is understood. When I see an announcement like "Glaze: Protecting artists from style mimicry" and read its synopsis, I'm assuming that 90% of it is cobbed from libraries and adapations of other people's code. We don't think of it as plagiarism unless the central, distinguishing idea of the work is something that was consciously taken from someone else and presented by the purported authors as their own. And even then, if that plagiarized idea is effective in implementing something which prevents plagiarism, that just amounts to irony. Irony is a real philosophical construct, but not a software defect.
      - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
        AFAIK Attribution is the minimal requirement for all the free/libre/open source licenses, as well as (almost?[1]) all of the open content licenses. If you plagiarize, you will also tend to automatically violate both copyright law and most licenses, including BSD, MIT, and GPL. The GPLv3 is a bit more complicated than the other two, but section 4 and 5 state that you must include "appropriate copyright notices", which means full attribution. Here's a more in depth discussion specific to the GPLv3: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4577/does-gplv3-require-attribution https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4577/does-gpl... [1] (edit) I was thinking that CC-0 (being close to PD) would not require attribution. But on looking it up, it's a bit more complicated. (edit 2) In general I don't think "that is understood" holds. If you plagiarize copyrighted content, you might be breaking one or more laws. Depending on what you did exactly, how much you did, and how nasty the other party is feeling: you may be forced to take "your" work down, delete it outright, hand it over to the other party, pay damages, pay a large fine, or even go to jail. (edit 3) I agree that plagiarism by itself need not be illegal in some contexts. But if you then distribute your plagiarized work (which is very easy to end up doing these days), you do end up infringing copyright law.
bawolff 4y ago
So their entire usecase is around the idea that people shouldn't use other's work without permission. Clearly they have some familiarity with this issue. What possible good itentions could their possibly be here? Were they unaware of the idea that you shouldn't wholesale copy other people's work? That seems impossible by their own admission. Were they unaware that they were using the software? That seemes implausible. Did they believe that rules only apply to other people and not themselves? If so that is my definition of a bad person. Quite frankly i don't see any possible way this could be dismissed as an innocent mistake. Arguably the hypocrisy makes it much worse than your average gpl violation. Artists and grad students are people too. Being an artist doesn't alleviate moral culpability. Edit: however to clarify, since you said people wanted to "ruin their livlihoods". I want to be clear that i don't support anything like that. Negative consequences should fit the "crime", and ruined livlihood would be way out of porportion.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

They claimed they had made a tool to prevent plagiarism. On closer inspection, it turns out the tool itself was plagiarized. That was certainly a mistake.

ShamelessC 4y ago
That seems like intentionally broadening the scope of their claims in order to fit a pre-defined narrative that falls apart upon closer inspection.
kazinator 4y ago
You're just playing word games. Whether a tool prevents plagiarism has nothing to do with whether it is itself plagiarized. Plagiarism is a misconduct whereby someone else's work is presented as one's own. Falling afoul of the GNU Public License in some way isn't ipso facto plagiarism.
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  I'm actually just summarizing what the sources say here. "Plagiarism is the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work." [1] Tool claims to prevent plagiarism, paper uses "plagiarism" language throughout. [2] Writers of tool used substantial portions of a different tool without acknowledgement. Source explicitly calls this out as plagiarism in first paragraph [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.04222.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.04222.pdf [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11sqkh9/glaze_is_violating_gpl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11sqkh9/gl... (edit) To be sure: somewhat later, authors do seem to be correcting their behavior, but only after having been called out. ( https://mobile.twitter.com/ravenben/status/1636439335569375238 https://mobile.twitter.com/ravenben/status/16364393355693752... )
  - kazinator 4y ago
    Plagiarism and copyright/licensing violations are only tangentially related. If you have the license to use some source code (e.g. it's public domain, or you purchased a license which allows royalty-free redistribution) then you have no copyright issue. If you submit that code to your school as your assignment, or part of your assignment without attribution, then that is plagiarism nonetheless. It's a problem between you and the school (and the world at large), not between you and the author of the code, who allowed your use. The GNU license is not concerned with academic misconduct. Users are encouraged to use the code as the basis for making something that works for them. It has to be redistributed according to certain rules so that the freedoms originally granted to the users are preserved. The concern isn't that the correct author has been identified to the users, but that they can get the source code and build that same thing, and also redistribute it with their modifications, if they wish. If you tell the users that this is based on GPLed code from such and such, but don't give them the code, then you are innocent of plagiarism, but still in violation of the license. Most programs use code that their author didn't write---often, a lot of code; that is understood. When I see an announcement like "Glaze: Protecting artists from style mimicry" and read its synopsis, I'm assuming that 90% of it is cobbed from libraries and adapations of other people's code. We don't think of it as plagiarism unless the central, distinguishing idea of the work is something that was consciously taken from someone else and presented by the purported authors as their own. And even then, if that plagiarized idea is effective in implementing something which prevents plagiarism, that just amounts to irony. Irony is a real philosophical construct, but not a software defect.
    - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
      AFAIK Attribution is the minimal requirement for all the free/libre/open source licenses, as well as (almost?[1]) all of the open content licenses. If you plagiarize, you will also tend to automatically violate both copyright law and most licenses, including BSD, MIT, and GPL. The GPLv3 is a bit more complicated than the other two, but section 4 and 5 state that you must include "appropriate copyright notices", which means full attribution. Here's a more in depth discussion specific to the GPLv3: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4577/does-gplv3-require-attribution https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4577/does-gpl... [1] (edit) I was thinking that CC-0 (being close to PD) would not require attribution. But on looking it up, it's a bit more complicated. (edit 2) In general I don't think "that is understood" holds. If you plagiarize copyrighted content, you might be breaking one or more laws. Depending on what you did exactly, how much you did, and how nasty the other party is feeling: you may be forced to take "your" work down, delete it outright, hand it over to the other party, pay damages, pay a large fine, or even go to jail. (edit 3) I agree that plagiarism by itself need not be illegal in some contexts. But if you then distribute your plagiarized work (which is very easy to end up doing these days), you do end up infringing copyright law.

bawolff 4y ago

So their entire usecase is around the idea that people shouldn't use other's work without permission. Clearly they have some familiarity with this issue. What possible good itentions could their possibly be here? Were they unaware of the idea that you shouldn't wholesale copy other people's work? That seems impossible by their own admission. Were they unaware that they were using the software? That seemes implausible. Did they believe that rules only apply to other people and not themselves? If so that is my definition of a bad person. Quite frankly i don't see any possible way this could be dismissed as an innocent mistake. Arguably the hypocrisy makes it much worse than your average gpl violation. Artists and grad students are people too. Being an artist doesn't alleviate moral culpability. Edit: however to clarify, since you said people wanted to "ruin their livlihoods". I want to be clear that i don't support anything like that. Negative consequences should fit the "crime", and ruined livlihood would be way out of porportion.