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Although I agree with your general message here, to be fair: GP has a very clear specification, namely an exact duplicate of an existing product. That means tha

Although I agree with your general message here, to be fair: GP has a very clear specification, namely an exact duplicate of an existing product. That means that as long as the end product functions identically to the original, it is completely successful. This does require facilitating the implementer to have full access to use the original product.

ElevenLathe 1y ago
If you use software (i.e. an LLM or spiritual successor) to produce a "clone" of another piece of software, is that not a pretty cut and dry case of it being a derivative work? No creativity was exercised by human beings in that scenario, so it would seem to be akin to something like converting a photo between image formats. People get around this via "clean room" reverse engineering where one engineer tears down the thing to be cloned and writes a detailed spec, and then a different engineer (who has never seen the internals of the thing in question, and so isn't "tainted" by that knowledge) implements it from that spec. You could do this with AI, but then all that spec writing/reading is done by a machine too, so you haven't really bought yourself anything legally. To be clear, I'm not a lawyer. I'm just musing aloud.
- moi2388 1y ago
  Aren’t organisations like Microsoft continually saying already like 30-50% of their code is now written by AI? This means they no longer hold copyright on their code.
  - ElevenLathe 1y ago
    That's true if you assume that any LLM-written code is not copyrightable by the entity using the LLM. Everything about reality currently suggests that this is a false assumption, and AFAIK no court has made a ruling saying that LLM-generated code isn't copyrightable. Also, there are patent and trademark considerations that are entirely separate from copyright. My point above is just that this ("ChatGPT, make me a clone of Paint Shop Pro 4 but for modern Linux and in Rust. Here's a copy of the executable to get you started.") is a much more straightforward, old-fashioned kind of copyright infringement. I don't see why a court would treat it as different from "Let me decompile paintshoppro.exe to an IR and then recompile the IR for a Linux."
    - moi2388 1y ago
      There have already been rulings on this. AI generated content is not copyrightable.

ElevenLathe 1y ago

If you use software (i.e. an LLM or spiritual successor) to produce a "clone" of another piece of software, is that not a pretty cut and dry case of it being a derivative work? No creativity was exercised by human beings in that scenario, so it would seem to be akin to something like converting a photo between image formats. People get around this via "clean room" reverse engineering where one engineer tears down the thing to be cloned and writes a detailed spec, and then a different engineer (who has never seen the internals of the thing in question, and so isn't "tainted" by that knowledge) implements it from that spec. You could do this with AI, but then all that spec writing/reading is done by a machine too, so you haven't really bought yourself anything legally. To be clear, I'm not a lawyer. I'm just musing aloud.

moi2388 1y ago
Aren’t organisations like Microsoft continually saying already like 30-50% of their code is now written by AI? This means they no longer hold copyright on their code.
- ElevenLathe 1y ago
  That's true if you assume that any LLM-written code is not copyrightable by the entity using the LLM. Everything about reality currently suggests that this is a false assumption, and AFAIK no court has made a ruling saying that LLM-generated code isn't copyrightable. Also, there are patent and trademark considerations that are entirely separate from copyright. My point above is just that this ("ChatGPT, make me a clone of Paint Shop Pro 4 but for modern Linux and in Rust. Here's a copy of the executable to get you started.") is a much more straightforward, old-fashioned kind of copyright infringement. I don't see why a court would treat it as different from "Let me decompile paintshoppro.exe to an IR and then recompile the IR for a Linux."
  - moi2388 1y ago
    There have already been rulings on this. AI generated content is not copyrightable.