3 ms·

I personally hope that we bring a lawsuit against an LLM company for emitting GPL licensed code and lose. It sets great precedent for FOSS. Focusing on the GPL

I personally hope that we bring a lawsuit against an LLM company for emitting GPL licensed code and lose. It sets great precedent for FOSS. Focusing on the GPL license is probably the wrong move. We want to set precedent that _any_ licensed code that is emitted from an LLM is fair game. If an LLM to emits non-FOSS copyrighted code and it's fair game, I can blindly use that implementation in my code, including FOSS code, and everyone wins. GPL was a clever hack to use copyright against itself with an infectious license. LLMs might be a better hack. Wanting to block this seems short sighted for giving user's agency over machines. I'd also like to see more patent defenses of GPL licensed code. If you can release a GPL licensed implementation and block non-FOSS rewrites through patents, that's a huge win for software freedom.

woah 4y ago
This comment falls into the classic programmer fallacy of thinking you can hack the law with a technicality. If you are using an LLM designed to violate copyright with the intention of violating copyright, and you then violate copyright, a judge is going to find you in violation. I'm generally in support of LLMs though and I think that they will very quickly be trained to remove verbatim duplication of the kind that a human would consider copyright violation while still using verbatim duplication where it makes sense (for example, every function in python has the word "def" in front of it).
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  I don’t think it does. I’m not looking to explicitly launder copyright. I’d like to be blind to it. I don’t want to explicitly use an LLM to remove copyright. I want to use an LLM to build software systems without having to cross reference its output with every line of code ever produced under a license to see if it’s already copyrighted. Agree with your take that motivation matters.
judge2020 4y ago
> Focusing on the GPL license is probably the wrong move. We want to set precedent that _any_ licensed code that is emitted from an LLM is fair game. If anything goes to court, that's what would happen. It's not "this is GPL code and they did not attribute", it's "they violated my copyright. As a side note, we license this code as GPL and they did not attribute in accordance with this license, so that's irrelevant". It would only be an actual license issue if they tried something like "license (C) at codium.com/all_licenses_dataset0423".
Eduard 4y ago
> GPL was a clever hack to use copyright against itself with an infectious license. This is a naive understanding and interpretation of GPL, in all its flavors. Or maybe I misunderstand you argument. The copyright owner of some work is free to offer that work under multiple, different licenses in parallel, to their liking. They can leverage GPL strategically for e.g. providing a free, easy-to-evaluate library with the "if you use it under GPL terms, you have to GPL your work as well" condition/caveat. For any library user / customer that does not want to be bound to the GPL terms (e.g. a closed-source software which a company does not want to share for free with their own paying customers and competitors), the copyright owner is free to offer an alternative proprietary commercial license. This is only one way how GPL can actually leverage copyright and use it financially beneficially to the owner, rather than use "copyright against copyright".

woah 4y ago

This comment falls into the classic programmer fallacy of thinking you can hack the law with a technicality. If you are using an LLM designed to violate copyright with the intention of violating copyright, and you then violate copyright, a judge is going to find you in violation. I'm generally in support of LLMs though and I think that they will very quickly be trained to remove verbatim duplication of the kind that a human would consider copyright violation while still using verbatim duplication where it makes sense (for example, every function in python has the word "def" in front of it).

r3trohack3r 4y ago
I don’t think it does. I’m not looking to explicitly launder copyright. I’d like to be blind to it. I don’t want to explicitly use an LLM to remove copyright. I want to use an LLM to build software systems without having to cross reference its output with every line of code ever produced under a license to see if it’s already copyrighted. Agree with your take that motivation matters.

judge2020 4y ago

> Focusing on the GPL license is probably the wrong move. We want to set precedent that _any_ licensed code that is emitted from an LLM is fair game. If anything goes to court, that's what would happen. It's not "this is GPL code and they did not attribute", it's "they violated my copyright. As a side note, we license this code as GPL and they did not attribute in accordance with this license, so that's irrelevant". It would only be an actual license issue if they tried something like "license (C) at codium.com/all_licenses_dataset0423".

Eduard 4y ago

> GPL was a clever hack to use copyright against itself with an infectious license. This is a naive understanding and interpretation of GPL, in all its flavors. Or maybe I misunderstand you argument. The copyright owner of some work is free to offer that work under multiple, different licenses in parallel, to their liking. They can leverage GPL strategically for e.g. providing a free, easy-to-evaluate library with the "if you use it under GPL terms, you have to GPL your work as well" condition/caveat. For any library user / customer that does not want to be bound to the GPL terms (e.g. a closed-source software which a company does not want to share for free with their own paying customers and competitors), the copyright owner is free to offer an alternative proprietary commercial license. This is only one way how GPL can actually leverage copyright and use it financially beneficially to the owner, rather than use "copyright against copyright".