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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

• verdverm 8mo ago
  Interesting questions raised by recent SCOTUS refusal to hear appeals related to AI an copyright-ability, and how that may affect licensing in open source. Hoping the HN community can bring more color to this, there are some members who know about these subjects.
• anilgulecha 8mo ago
  This is precedent setting. In this case the rewrite was in same language, but if there's a python GPL project, and it's tests (spec) were used to rewrite specs in rust, and then an implementation in rust, can the second project be legally MIT, or any other? If yes, this in a sense allows a path around GPL requirements. Linux's MIT version would be out in the next 1-2 years.
  • nairboon 8mo ago
    No, GPL still holds even if you transform the source code from one language to another language.
    • anilgulecha 8mo ago
      That why I carved it out to just the specs. If they can be read as "facts", then the new code is not derived but arrived at with TTD. The thesis I propose is that tests are more akin to facts, or can be stated as facts, and facts are not copyright-able. That's what makes this case interesting.
      • nairboon 8mo ago
        I assumed that "tests" refers to a program too, which in this example is likely GPL. Thus GPL would stick already on the AI-rewrite of GPL test code. If "tests" should mean a proper specification let's say some IETF RFC of a protocol, then that would be different.
        • anilgulecha 8mo ago
          Yes, I had not specified in my original comment. But in the SOTA LLM world code/text boundary is so blurry, so as to be non-existent.
  • mlaretallack 8mo ago
    Its very important to understand the "how" it was done. The GPL hands the "compile" step, and the result is still GPL. The clean Room process uses 2 teams, separated by a specification. So you would have to 1. Generate specification on what the system does. 2. Pass to another "clean" system 3. Second clean system implements based just on the specification, without any information on the original. That 3rd step is the hardest, especially for well known projects.
    • anilgulecha 8mo ago
      1 is claude-code1, outputs tests as text. 2. Dumped into a file. 3. claude-code that converts this to tests in the target language, and implements the app that passes the tests. 3 is no longer hard - look at all the reimplementations from ccc, to rewrites popping up. They all have a well defined test suite as common theme. So much so that tldraw author raised a (joke) issue to remove tests from the project.
    • microtonal 8mo ago
      So what if a frontier model company trains two models, one including 50% of the world's open source project and the second model the other 50% (or ten models with 90-10)? Then the model that is familiar with the code can write specs. The model that does not have knowledge of the project can implement them. Would that be a proper clean room implementation? Seems like a pretty evil, profitable product "rewrite any code base with an inconvenient license to your proprietary version, legally".
      • anilgulecha 8mo ago
        LLM training is unnecessary in what we're discussing. Merely LLM using: original code -> specs as facts -> specs to tests -> tests to new code.
        • microtonal 8mo ago
          It is hard to prove that the model doesn't recognize the tests and reproduces the memoized code. It's not a clean room.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 8mo ago
    > but if there's a python GPL project, and it's tests (spec) were used to rewrite specs in rust, and then an implementation in rust, can the second project be legally MIT, or any other? Isn't that what https://github.com/uutils/coreutils https://github.com/uutils/coreutils is? GNU coreutils spec and test suite, used to produce a rust MIT implementation. (Granted, by humans AFAIK)
  • hrmtst93837 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • AberrantJ 8mo ago
      I'm somewhat confused on how it actually muddies the waters - any person could have read the source code before hand and then either lied about it or forgot. Our knowledge of what the person or the model actually contains regarding the original source is entirely incomplete when the entire premise requires there be full knowledge that nothing remains.
• Retr0id 8mo ago
  > In traditional software law, a “clean room” rewrite requires two teams Is the "clean room" process meaningfully backed by legal precedent?
  • Firehawke 8mo ago
    Sure. The reimplementation of the IBM PC BIOS that gave birth to IBM Compatibles is the canonical example.
  • estimator7292 8mo ago
    Yes. Compaq's reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS set the precedent.
  • karlding 8mo ago
    I am not a lawyer, but from my understanding the legal precedent is NEC v. Intel which established that clean-room software development is not infringing, even if it performs the same functionality as the original. As an aside, this clean room engineering is one of the plot points of Season 1 of the TV show Halt and Catch Fire where the fictional characters do this with the BIOS image they dumped.
  • devmor 8mo ago
    It is the reason AMD exists.
• DrammBA 8mo ago
  I like the idea of AI-generated ~code~ anything being public domain. Public data in, public domain out.
  • lejalv 8mo ago
    This could be read as a reformulation of the old adage - "what's mine is mine, and what is yours, is mine too". So, you can pilfer the commons ("public") but not stuff unavailable in source form. If we expand your thought experiment to other forms of expression, say videos on YT or Netflix, then yes.
  • kshri24 8mo ago
    I don't think you can classify "public data in" as public domain. Public data could also include commercial licenses which forbid using it in any way other than what the license states. Just because the source is open for viewing does not necessarily mean it is OSL. That's the core issue here. All models are trained on ALL source code that is publicly available irrespective of how it was licensed. It is illegal but every company training LLMs is doing it anyways.
    • thedevilslawyer 8mo ago
      Copyright is not a blacklist but an allowlist of things kept aside for the holder. Everything else is free game. LLM ingestion comes under fair use so no worries. If someone can get their hand on it, nothing in law stops it from training ingestion. We can debate if this law is moral. Like the GP I took agree public data in -> public domain out is what's right for society. Copyright as an artificial concept has gone on for long enough.
      • kshri24 8mo ago
        > LLM ingestion comes under fair use I don't think so. It is no where "limited use". Entirety of the source code is ingested for training the model. In other words, it meets the bar of "heart of the work" being used for training. There are other factors as well, such as not harming owner's ability to profit from original work.
• nairboon 8mo ago
  That code is still LGPL, it doesn't matter what some release engineer writes in the release notes on Github. All original authors and copyright holders must have explicitly agreed to relicense under a different license, otherwise the code stays LGPL licensed. Also the mentioned SCOTUS decision is concerned with authorship of generative AI products. That's very different of this case. Here we're talking about a tool that transformed source code and somehow magically got rid of copyright due to this transformation? Imagine the consequences to the US copyright industry if that were actually possible.
  • pavlov 8mo ago
    If anything, the SCOTUS decision would seem to imply that generative AI transformations produce no additional creative contribution and therefore the original copyright holder has all rights to any derived AI works. (IANAL)
    • dathinab 8mo ago
      that is a very good formulation of what I have been trying to say but also probably not fully right as far as I understand they avoid the decision of weather an AI can produce creative work by saying that the neither the AI nor it's owner/operator can claim ownership of copyright (which makes it de-facto public domain) this wouldn't change anything wrt. derived work still having the original authors copyright but it could change things wrt. parts in the derived work which by themself are not derived
      • pseudalopex 8mo ago
        The court avoided a decision of what the operator could have copyrighted because he said he was not the author.
    • bandrami 8mo ago
      That's a reasonable theory though it's stuck with the problem that any model will by its training be derivative of codebases that have incompatible licenses, and that in fact every single use of an LLM is therefore illegal (or at least tortious).
• foota 8mo ago
  I think the more interesting question here would be if someone could fine tune an open weight model to remove knowledge of a particular library (not sure how you'd do that, but maybe possible?) and then try to get it to produce a clean room implementation.
  • benob 8mo ago
    I don't think this would qualify as clean room (the Library was involved in learning to generate programs as a whole). However, it should be possible to remove the library from the OLMO training data and retrain it from scratch. But what about training without having seen any human written program? Coul a model learn from randomly generated programs?
    • foota 8mo ago
      > I don't think this would qualify as clean room (the Library was involved in learning to generate programs as a whole) Hm... I mean this is really one for the lawyers, but IMO you would likely successfully be able to argue that the marginal knowledge of general coding from a particular library is likely close to nil. The hard part here imo would be convincingly arguing that you can wipe out knowledge of the library from the training set, whether through fine tuning or trying to exclude it from the dataset. > But what about training without having seen any human written program? Coul a model learn from randomly generated programs? I think the answer at this point is definitely no, but maybe someday. I think it's a more interesting question for art since it's more subjective, if we eventually get to a point where a machine can self-teach itself art from nothing... first of all how, but second of all it would be interesting to see the reaction from people opposed to AI art on the basis of it training off of artists. Honestly given all I've seen models do, I wouldn't be too surprised if you could somehow distill a (very bad) image generation model off of just an LLM. In a sense this is the end goal of the pelican riding a bicycle (somewhat tongue in cheek), if the LLM can learn to draw anything with SVGs without ever getting visual inputs then it would be very interesting :)
• kshri24 8mo ago
  > The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no permission was sought from authors of source code the models were trained on. So there is no way to just release the code created by a machine into public domain without knowing how the model was inspired to come up with the generated code in the first place. Pretty sure it would be considered in the scope of "reverse engineering" and that is not specific only to humans. You can extend it to machines as well. EDIT: I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code. And a licensing model with original authors (all Github users who contributed code in some form) should be setup to be reimbursed by AI companies. In other words, a % of profits must flow back to community as a whole every time code-related tokens are generated. Even if everyone receives pennies it doesn't matter. That is fair. Also should extend to artists whose art was used for training.
  • thedevilslawyer 8mo ago
    That's unpractical enough that you might as well wish for UBI and world peace rather than this.
    • kshri24 8mo ago
      Why is it impractical? Github already has a sponsor system. Also this can be a form of UBI.
  • adrianN 8mo ago
    We‘ll have to wait until the technology progresses sufficiently that AI cuts into Disney’s profit.
  • kouteiheika 8mo ago
    > I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code. That license is called "All Rights Reserved", in which case you wouldn't be able to legally use the output for anything. There are research models out there which are trained on only permissively licensed data (i.e. no "All Rights Reserved" data), but they're, colloquially speaking, dumb as bricks when compared to state-of-art. But I guess the funniest consequence of the "model outputs are a derivative work of their training data" would be that it'd essentially wipe out (or at very least force a revert to a pre-AI era commit) every open source project which may have included any AI-generated or AI-assisted code, which currently pretty much includes every major open source project out there. And it would also make it impossible to legally train any new models whose training data isn't strictly pre-AI, since otherwise you wouldn't know whether your training data is contaminated or not.
• mfabbri77 8mo ago
  This has the potential to kill open source, or at least the most restrictive licenses (GPL, AGPL, ...): if a license no longer protects software from unwanted use, the only possible strategy is to make the development closed source.
  • _dwt 8mo ago
    Yes, this is the reason I've completely stopped releasing any open-source projects. I'm discovering that newer models are somewhat capable of reverse-engineering even compiled WebAssembly, etc. too, so I can feel a sort of "dark forest theory" taking hold. Why publish anything - open or closed - to be ripped off at negligible marginal cost?
    • seddonm1 8mo ago
      It’s a real problem. I threw it at an old MUD game just to see how hard it is [0] then used differential testing and LLMs to rewrite it [1]. Just seems to be time and money. [0] https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-safe-decompilation/ https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf... [1] https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-safe-conversion/ https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf...
      • evanelias 8mo ago
        Wow, as a former MajorMUD addict (~30 years ago) that's extremely interesting to see. Especially since MajorMUD is rarely discussed on HN, even in MUD or BBS-related threads. Did you find it worked reasonably well on any portion of the codebase you could throw at it? For example, if I recall correctly, all of MajorMUD's data file interactions used the embedded Btrieve library which was popular at the time. For that type of specialized low-level library, I'm curious how much effort it would take to get readable code.
        • seddonm1 8mo ago
          I am getting closer and closer to a full verified rewrite in Rust. I have also moved to a much easier sqlite relational structure for the backend. I actually sidestepped the annoying btrieve problem by exporting the data using a go binary [0] and I write it to a sqlite instance with raw byte arrays (blobs). btreive is weird because it has a dll but also a a service to interact with the files. P.s. I have spent a lot of hours on this mainly to learn actual LLM capabilities that have improved a huge amount in the last year. [0] https://github.com/barchart/go-btrieve https://github.com/barchart/go-btrieve
• himata4113 8mo ago
  I mean in my opinion GPL licensed code should just infect models forcing them to follow the license. You can do this a lot by saying things like: complete the code "<snippet from gpl licensed code>". And if now the models are GPL licensed the problem of relicensing is gone since the code produced by these models should in theory be also GPL licensed. Unfortunately, there is a dumb clause that computer generated code cannot be copyrighted or licensed to begin with.
  • kshri24 8mo ago
    > Unfortunately, there is a dumb clause that computer generated code cannot be copyrighted or licensed to begin with. Can you point to the clause? I have never seen it in any GPL license.
    • himata4113 8mo ago
      it's the general copyright protection 'law' fair use and all that, varies by country tho.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• Tomte 8mo ago
  > The original author, a2mark , saw this as a potential GPL violation Mark Pilgrim! Now that‘s a name I haven‘t read in a long time.
• samrus 8mo ago
  > The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. Im struggling to see where this conclusion came from. To me it sounds like the AI-written work can not be coppywritten, and so its kind of like a copy pasting the original code. Copy pasting the original code doesnt make it public domain. Ai gen code cant be copywritten, or entered into the public domain, or used for purposes outside of the original code's license. Whats the paradox here?
  • laksjhdlka 8mo ago
    They say "if" it's a new work, then it might not be copyrightable, I guess. You suppose that it's still the original work, and hence it's still got that copyright. I think they are rhetorically asking if your position is correct.
  • NitpickLawyer 8mo ago
    > To me it sounds like the AI-written work can not be coppywritten I think we didn't even began to consider all the implications of this, and while people ran with that one case where someone couldn't copyright a generated image, it's not that easy for code. I think there needs to be way more litigation before we can confidently say it's settled. If "generated" code is not copyrightable, where do draw the line on what generated means? Do macros count? Does code that generates other code count? Protobuf? If it's the tool that generates the code, again where do we draw the line? Is it just using 3rd party tools? Would training your own count? Would a "random" code gen and pick the winners (by whatever means) count? Bruteforce all the space (silly example but hey we're in silly space here) counts? Is it just "AI" adjacent that isn't copyrightable? If so how do you define AI? Does autocomplete count? Intellisense? Smarter intellisense? Are we gonna have to have a trial where there's at least one lawyer making silly comparisons between LLMs and power plugs? Or maybe counting abacuses (abaci?)... "But your honour, it's just random numbers / matrix multiplications...
    • lelanthran 8mo ago
      All of your questions have seemingly trivial answers. Maybe I am missing something, but... > If "generated" code is not copyrightable, where do draw the line on what generated means? Do macros count? Does the output of the macro depend on ingesting someone else's code? > Does code that generates other code count? Does the output of the code depend on ingesting someone else's code? > Protobuf? Does your protobuf implementation depend on ingesting someone else's code? > If it's the tool that generates the code, again where do we draw the line? Does the tool depend ingestion of of someone else's code? > Is it just using 3rd party tools? Does the 3rd party tool depend on ingestion of someone else's code? > Would training your own count? Does the training ingest someone else's code? > Would a "random" code gen and pick the winners (by whatever means) count? Does the random codegen depend on ingesting someone else's code? > Bruteforce all the space (silly example but hey we're in silly space here) counts? Does the bruteforce algo depend on ingesting someone else's code? > Is it just "AI" adjacent that isn't copyrightable? No, it's the "depends on ingesting someone else's code" that makes it not copyrightable. > If so how do you define AI? Doesn't matter whether it is AI or not, the question is are you ingesting someone else's code. > Does autocomplete count? Does the specific autocomplete in question depend on ingesting someone else's code? > Intellisense? Does the specific Intellisense in question depend on ingesting someone else's code? > Smarter intellisense? Does the specific Smarter Intellisense in question depend on ingesting someone else's code? ... Look, I see where you're going with this - reductio ad absurdum and all - but it seems to me that you're trying to muddy the waters by claiming that either all code generation is allowed or no code generation is disallowed. Let me clear the waters for all the readers - the complaint is not about code generation, it's about ingesting someone else's code, frequently for profit. All these questions you are asking seem to me to be irrelevant and designed to shift the focus from the ingestion of other people's work to something that no one is arguing against.
• zozbot234 8mo ago
  If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in all clean room rewrites) the spec is purely factual with all copyrightable expression having been distilled out.
  • miroljub 8mo ago
    The new agent who writes code has probably at least parts of the original code as training data. We can't speak about clean room implementation from LLM since they are technically capable only of spitting their training data in different ways, not of any original creation.
    • nubg 8mo ago
      Only in the case of open source code
    • dizhn 8mo ago
      The conclusion of this would be that you can never license AI generated code since you can't get a release from the original authors. Of course in practice it would work exactly in the opposite fashion and AI generated code would be immune even if it copied code verbatim.
      • jesterswilde 8mo ago
        I don't see what's wrong with that personally. If I pirated someone's software, and then sold it as my own and got caught, just because I sold a bunch of it doesn't mean those people who bought it now are in the clear. They are still using bootleg software in their business.
  • gf000 8mo ago
    I guess it depends on if the source data set is part of the training data or not (if it's open source it is likely part of it). A lawyer could easily argue that the model itself stores a representation of the original, and thus it can never do a "fresh context". And to be perfectly honest, LLMs can quote a lot of text verbatim.
• est 8mo ago
  Uh, patricide? The key leap from gpt3 to gpt-3.5 (aka ChatGPT) was code-davinci-002, which is trained upon Github source code after OpenAI-Microsoft partnership. Open source code contributed much to LLM's amazing CoT consistency. If there's no Open Source movement, LLM would be developed much later.
• pu_pe 8mo ago
  Licensing issues aside, the chardet rewrite seems to be clearly superior to the original in performance too. It's likely that many open source projects could benefit from a similar approach.
• spwa4 8mo ago
  Can we do the same with universal music? Because that's easy and already possible. Or Microsoft Windows? Because we all know the answer: if it works, essentially any government will immediately call it illegal. Because if this isn't allowed, that makes all of the AI models themselves illegal. They are very much the product of using others' copyrighted stuff and rewriting it. But of course this will be allowed because copyright was never meant to protect anyone small. And that it's in direct contradiction with what applies to large companies? Courts won't care.
  • gspr 8mo ago
    The dark future possibility here is that the big guy is allowed to launder the intellectual property of the little guy, but not vice versa.
    • vetrom 8mo ago
      That dark future is now, look at case law as applied to the AI operators vs the 'little guys'.
      • spwa4 8mo ago
        Even big copyright firms. Disney especially is known for rehashing existing material and then not allowing anyone else to do the same with their stuff. Disney does not have a lot of original stories.
• blamestross 8mo ago
  Intellectual property laundering is the core and primary value of LLMs. Everything else is "bonus".
• gspr 8mo ago
  > If “AI-rewriting” is accepted as a valid way to change licenses, it represents the end of Copyleft. Any developer could take a GPL-licensed project, feed it into an LLM with the prompt “Rewrite this in a different style,” and release it under MIT. The legal and ethical lines are still being drawn, and the chardet v7.0.0 case is one of the first real-world tests. This isn't even limited to "the end of copyleft"; it's the end of all copyright! At least copyright protecting the little guy. If you have deep enough pockets to create LLMs, you can in this potential future use them to wash away anyone's copyright for any work. Why would the GPL be the only target? If it works for the GPL, it surely also works for your photographs, poetry – or hell even proprietary software?
• abrookewood 8mo ago
  This seems relevant: "No right to relicense this project (github.com/chardet)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
  • shevy-java 8mo ago
    That's another project though, right? In this case I think it is different because that project just seems stolen. The courts can probably verify this too. I think the main question is when a rewrite is a clean rewrite, via AI. If it is a clean rewrite they can choose any licence.
    • littlestymaar 8mo ago
      No, TFA is about chardet too: > chardet , a Python character encoding detector used by requests and many others, has sat in that tension for years: as a port of Mozilla’s C++ code it was bound to the LGPL, making it a gray area for corporate users and a headache for its most famous consumer.
• emsign 8mo ago
  By design you can't know if the LLM doing the rewrite was exposed to the original code base. Unless the AI company is disclosing their training material, which they won't because they don't want to admit breaking the law.
  • d1sxeyes 8mo ago
    Is it against the law for an LLM to read LGPL-licensed code? That’s a complex question that isn’t solved yet. Clearly, regurgitating verbatim LGPL code in large chunks would be unlawful. What’s much less clear is a) how large do those chunks need to be to trigger LGPL violations? A single line? Two? A function? What if it’s trivial? And b) are all outputs of a system which has received LGPL code as an input necessarily derivative? If I learn how to code in Python exclusively from reading LGPL code, and then go away and write something new, it’s clear that I haven’t committed any violation of copyright under existing law, even if all I’m doing as a human is rearranging tokens I understand from reading LGPL code semantically to achieve new result. It’s a trying time for software and the legal system. I don’t have the answers, but whether you like them or not, these systems are here to stay, and we need to learn how to live with them.
  • gostsamo 8mo ago
    it was exposed when it was shown the thing to rewrite.
    • shevy-java 8mo ago
      In this context here I think that is a correct statement. But I think you can have LLMs that can generate the same or similar code, without having been exposed to the other code.
  • skeledrew 8mo ago
    It doesn't even matter if the LLM was exposed during training. A clean-room rewrite can be done by having one LLM create a highly detailed analysis of the target (reverse engineering if it's in binary form), and providing that analysis to another LLM to base an implementation.
• gbuk2013 8mo ago
  In mind, if you feed code into an AI model then the output is clearly a derivative work, with all the licensing implications. This seems objectively reasonable?
  • MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
    But code was fed into the models to create them, so where do we draw the line?
    • gbuk2013 8mo ago
      That is a good question - my personal opinion is that it should mean that models are not subject to copyright at all (similar to databases) but we will see what the courts decide :)
  • quotemstr 8mo ago
    Nobody in this discussion knows what the words "derivative" and "work" mean individually, much less together
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• Cantinflas 8mo ago
  "If “AI-rewriting” is accepted as a valid way to change licenses, it represents the end of Copyleft. " Software in the AI era is not that important. Copyleft has already won, you can have new code in 40 seconds for $0.70 worth of tokens.
  • p0w3n3d 8mo ago
    Just take the code and let it AI rewrite. But... AI was taught on all the OpenSource Code available. Lot of them were GPL I think... So...
  • WesolyKubeczek 8mo ago
    Let’s then abolish all copyright on all software, what ever could go wrong?
    • Cantinflas 8mo ago
      It doesn't matter any more! Software is a (very cheap) commodity now.
• skeledrew 8mo ago
  Looks like copyright just died.
  • cedws 8mo ago
    *for ordinary people. If you use AI to steal from rich and powerful people, expect the law to come down on you like a tonne of bricks. If you steal from authors, artists, and developers no worries.
• shevy-java 8mo ago
  > In traditional software law, a “clean room” rewrite requires two teams So, I dislike AI and wish it would disappear, BUT! The argument is strange here, because ... how can a2mark ensure that AI did NOT do a clean-room conforming rewrite? Because I think in theory AI can do precisely this; you just need to make sure that the model used does that too. And this can be verified, in theory. So I don't fully understand a2mark here. Yes, AI may make use of the original source code, but it could "implement" things on its own. Ultimately this is finite complexity, not infinite complexity. I think a2mark's argument is in theory weak here. And I say this as someone who dislikes AI. The main question is: can computers do a clean rewrite, in principle? And I think the answer is yes. That is not saying that claude did this here, mind you; I really don't know the particulars. But the underlying principle? I don't see why AI could not do this. a2mark may need to reconsider the statement here.
  • titanomachy 8mo ago
    The foundation model probably includes the original project in its training set, which might be enough for a court to consider it “contaminated”. Training a new foundation model without it is technically possible, but would take months and cost millions of dollars.
  • __alexs 8mo ago
    I think the problem here is that an AI is not a legal entity. It doesn't matter if you as individual run an AI that takes the source, dumps out a spec that you then feed into another AI. The legal liability lies with the operator of the AI, the original copyleft license was granted to a person, not to a robot. Now if you had 2 entirely distinct humans involved in the process that might work though.
  • dspillett 8mo ago
    > how can a2mark ensure that AI did NOT do a clean-room conforming rewrite? In cases like this it is usually incumbent on the entity claiming the clean-room situation was pure to show their working. For instance how Compaq clean-room cloned the IBM BIOS chip¹ was well documented (the procedures used, records of comms by the teams involved) where some other manufacturers did face costly legal troubles from IBM. So the question is “is the clean-room claim sufficiently backed up to stand legal tests?” [and moral tests, though the AI world generally doesn't care about failing those] -------- [1] the one part of their PCs that was not essentially off-the-shelf, so once it could be reliably legally mimicked this created an open IBM PC clone market
• duskdozer 8mo ago
  This is such scummy behavior.
• tgma 8mo ago
  Isn't AFC test applicable here?
• amelius 8mo ago
  I think you should interpret it like this: You cannot copyright the alphabet, but you can copyright the way letters are put together. Now, with AI the abstraction level goes from individual letters to functions, classes, and maybe even entire files. You can't copyright those (when written using AI), but you __can__ copyright the way they are put together.
  • josephg 8mo ago
    > You can't copyright those anymore (when written using AI), but you __can__ copyright the way they are put together. Sort of, but not really. Copyright usually applies to a specific work. You can copyright Harry Potter. But you can't copyright the general class of "Wizard boy goes to wizard school". Copyrights generally can't be applied to classes of works. Only one specific work. (Direct copies - eg made with a photocopier - are still considered the same work.) Patterns (of all sorts) usually fall under patent law, not copyright law. Patents have some additional requirements - notably including that a patent must be novel and non-obvious. I broadly think software patents are a bad idea. Software is usually obvious. Patents stifle innovation. Is an AI "copy" a copy like a photocopier would make? Or is it a novel work? It seems more like the latter to me. An AI copy of a program (via a spec) won't be a copy of the original code. It'll be programmed differently. Thats why "clean room reimplementations" are a thing - because doing that process means you can't just copy the code itself. But what do I know, I'm not a lawyer or a judge. I think we'll have to wait for this stuff to shake out before anyone really knows what the rules will end up being. Weird variants of a lot of this stuff have been tested in court. Eg the Google v Oracle case from a few years ago.
    • amelius 8mo ago
      You have good points regarding how copyright works. > Software is usually obvious. Hardware and mechanical designs are usually described in CAD programs nowadays, so it comes pretty close to software; it's just that LLMs are not the right tool to "GenAI" them but I've seen plenty of these kinds of design that I know for sure that they are often not any less obvious than a lot of software. Treating software as "obvious therefore not patentable" is not accurate and not fair and is probably not going to help the profession in the AI age. But I agree that patents are bad for innovation. It is also not fair to claim that an AI-copy is fundamentally different from photocopying. I mean, in both cases it is like you are picking the worst case interpretation for the field of software engineering. > I think we'll have to wait for this stuff to shake out before anyone really knows what the rules will end up being. Yes, but it will help if we think deeply about this stuff ourselves because what law-makers come up with may not be what the profession needs.
• dessimus 8mo ago
  Interesting to see how this plays out. Conceivably if running an LLM over text defeats copyright, it will destroy the book publishing industry, as I could run any ebook thru an LLM to make a new text, like the ~95% regurgitated Harry Potter.
  • amelius 8mo ago
    If enough people do this, then it may speed up the lawmaking process.
  • timschmidt 8mo ago
    This has already been done via brute force for melodies: https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-generate-every-possible-melody-release-them-to-public-domain/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...
    • amelius 8mo ago
      Did they listen to their own creation? If not, maybe it should not constitute a valid case in court. Also, I'm wondering if they are not themselves liable considering they have every copyrighted work in there too.
  • kingstnap 8mo ago
    You could already do that before LLMs? Persumably there is already a law around why I cant just go borrow a book from my library, type out some 95% regurgitated varient on my laptop, and then try to publish it somewhere? Edit: I looked it up and the thing that stops you from publishing a bootleg "Harold Potter and the Wizards Rock" is this legal framework around "The Abstractions Test".
    • dessimus 8mo ago
      I agree, but I'm not the one claiming that an AI-Assisted rewrite is sufficient enough to now claim that one ignore copyright and change the license.
• dspillett 8mo ago
  > Accepting AI-rewriting as relicensing could spell the end of Copyleft The more restrictive licences perhaps, though only if the rewriter convinces everyone that they can properly maintain the result. For ancient projects that aren't actively maintained anyway (because they are essentially done at this point) this might make little difference, but for active projects any new features and fixes might result in either manual reimplementation in the rewritten version or the clean-room process being repeated completely for the whole project. > chardet 7.0 is a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — (from the github description) The “same name” part to me feels somewhat disingenuous. It isn't the same thing so it should have a different name to avoid confusion, even if that name is something very similar to the original like chardet-ng or chardet-ai.
  • conartist6 8mo ago
    Who cares if it can be maintained. The system now penalizes the original creator for creating it and gives thieves the ability to conduct legal theft at a gargantuan scale, the only limit being how creative the abuser is in making money. With the incentives set up like that, the era of open software cooperation would be ended rapidly.
    • dspillett 8mo ago
      > Who cares if it can be maintained. People who understand and care about the implications of https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ Which admittedly is not nearly enough of us…
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • throwayaw84330 8mo ago
    This is super interesting. Exploring the basis for Free Software (the 4 liberties, Richard Stallman)... if AI-code is effectively under Public Domain, wouldn't that actually be even MORE defensive than relying on copyright to be able to generate copyleft? Wouldn't the rewrite of code (previously under any license, and maybe even unknown to the LLM) constitute a massive win for the population in general, because now their 4 liberties are more attainable through the extensive use of LLMs to generate code?
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 8mo ago
  > The copyright vacuum: If AI-generated code cannot be copyrighted (as the courts suggest), then the maintainers may not even have the legal standing to license v7.0.0 under MIT or any license. I believe this is a misunderstanding of the ruling. The code can’t be copyrighted by a LLM. However, the code could be copyrighted by the person running the LLM.
• stuaxo 8mo ago
  I don't see how (with current LLMs that have been trained on mixed licensed data) you can use the LLM to rewrite to a less restrictive license. You could probably use it to output code that is GPL'd though.
• danlitt 8mo ago
  I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanishingly small probability of matching the original codebase enough to be considered a copy. With LLMs, the probability is much higher (since in truth they are very much not a "clean room" at all). The actual meaning of a "clean room implementation" is that it is derived from an API and not from an implementation (I am simplifying slightly). Whether the reimplementation is actually a "new implementation" is a subjective but empirical question that basically hinges on how similar the new codebase is to the old one. If it's too similar, it's a copy. What the chardet maintainers have done here is legally very irresponsible. There is no easy way to guarantee that their code is actually MIT and not LGPL without auditing the entire codebase. Any downstream user of the library is at risk of the license switching from underneath them. Ideally, this would burn their reputation as responsible maintainers, and result in someone else taking over the project. In reality, probably it will remain MIT for a couple of years and then suddenly there will be a "supply chain issue" like there was for mimemagic a few years ago.
  • dathinab 8mo ago
    the author speaks about code which is syntactically completely different but semantically does the same i.e. a re-implementation which can either - be still derived work, i.e. seen as you just obfuscating a copyright violation - be a new work doing the same nothing prevents an AI from producing a spec based on a API, API documentation and API usage/fuzzing and then resetting the AI and using that spec to produce a rewrite I mean "doing the same" is NOT copyright protection, you need patent law for that. Except even with patent law you need to innovations/concepts not the exact implementation details. Which means that even if there are software patents (theoretically,1) most things done in software wouldn't be patentable (as they are just implementation details, not inventions) (1): I say theoretically because there is a very long track record of a lot of patents being granted which really should never be granted. This combined with the high cost of invalidating patents has caused a ton of economical damages.
• b65e8bee43c2ed0 8mo ago
  at this point, every corporation in the world has AI slop in their software. any attempt to outlaw it would attract enough funding from the oligarchs for the opposition to dethrone any party. no attempts will be made in the next three years, obviously, and then it will be even more late than it is now. and while particularly diehard believers in democracy may insist that if they kvetch hard enough they can get things they don't like regulated out of existence, they pointedly ignore the elephant in the room. they could succeed beyond their wildest dreams - get the West to implement a moratorium on AI, dismantle every FAGMAN, Mossad every researcher, send Yudkowskyjugend death squads to knock down doors to seize fully semiautomatic assault GPUs, and none of it will make any fucking difference, because China doesn't give a fuck.
• dathinab 8mo ago
  IMHO/IMHU AI can't claim authorship and as such can't copyright their work. This doesn't prevent any form of automatic copyrighting by production of derivative code or similar. It just prevent anyone from claiming ownership of any parts unique to the derived work. Like think about it if a natural disaster changes (e.g. water damages) a picture you did draw then a) you can't claim ownership of the natural produced changes but b) still have ownership of the original picture contained in the changed/derived work. AI shouldn't change that. Which brings us to another 2 aspects: 1. if you give an AI a project access to the code to rewrite it anew it _is_ a copyright violation as it's basically a side-by-side rewrite 2. but if you go the clean room approach but powered by AI then it likely isn't a copyright violation, but also now part of the public domain, i.e. not yours So yes, doing clean room rewrites has become incredible cheap. But no just because it's AI it doesn't make code go away. And lets be realistic one of the most relevant parts of many open source project is it being openly/shared maintained. You don't get this with clean room rewrites no matter if AI or not.
  • Joel_Mckay 8mo ago
    LLM are isomorphic plagiarism machines, and like all ectoparasites must steal from real people to exist. Note this includes its users. =3
• jacquesm 8mo ago
  If you don't understand the meaning of what a 'derived work' is then you should probably not be doing this kind of thing without a massive disclaimer and/or having your lawyer doing a review. There is no such thing as the output of an LLM as a 'new' work for copyright purposes, if it were then it would be copyrightable and it is not. The term of art is 'original work' instead of 'new'. The bigger issue will be using tools such as these and then humans passing off the results as their own because they believe that their contribution to the process whitewashes the AI contributions to the point that they rise to the status of original works. "The AI only did little bits" is not a very strong defense though. If you really want to own the work-product simply don't use AI during the creation. You can use it for reviews, but even then you simply do not copy-and-paste from the AI window to the text you are creating (whether code or ordinary prose isn't really a difference). I've seen a copyright case hinge on 10 lines of unique code that were enough of a fingerprint to clinch the 'derived work' assessment. Prize quote by the defendant: "We stole it, but not from them". There is a very blurry line somewhere in the contents of any large LLM: would a model be able to spit out the code that it did if it did not have access to similar samples and to what degree does that output rely on one or more key examples without which it would not be able to solve the problem you've tasked it with? The lower boundary would be the most minimal training set required to do the job, and then to analyze what the key corresponding bits were from the inputs that cause the output to be non-functional if they were dropped from the training set. The upper boundary would be where completely non-related works and general information rather than other parties copyrighted works would be sufficient to do the creation. The easiest way to loophole this is to copyright the prompt, not the work product of the AI, after all you should at least be able to write the prompt. Then others can re-create it too, but that's usually not the case with these AI products, they're made to be exact copies of something that already exists and the prompt will usually reflect that. That's why I'm a big fan of mandatory disclosure of whether or not AI was used in the production of some piece of text, for one it helps to establish whether or not you should trust it, who is responsible for it and whether the person publishing it has the right to claim authorship. Using AI as a 'copyright laundromat' is not going to end up well.
• oytis 8mo ago
  Is it just me, or HN recently started picking up a social media dynamics with contributions reacting/responding to each other?
  • altairprime 8mo ago
    It’s always happened occasionally. Sometimes you’ll also see informative supporting links popup in the feed, though those generally get minimal traction.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
• andrewstuart 8mo ago
  Ai rewrites great. But if it’s making the original author unhappy then why do it.
• buro9 8mo ago
  and in a single moment, the value of software patents to companies is fully restored... the software license by itself is not enough to protect software innovation, a non-trivial implementation can now be (reasonably) trivially re-implemented. I'm sure most people here would agree patents stifle innovation, but if copyright doesn't work for companies then they will turn to a different tool.
• pornel 8mo ago
  Generative AI changed the equation so much that our existing copyright laws are simply out of date. Even copyright laws with provisions for machine learning were written when that meant tangential things like ranking algorithms or training of task-specific models that couldn't directly compete with all of their source material. For code it also completely changes where the human-provided value is. Copyright protects specific expressions of an idea, but we can auto-generate the expressions now (and the LLM indirection messes up what "derived work" means). Protecting the ideas that guided the generation process is a much harder problem (we have patents for that and it's a mess). It's also a strategic problem for GNU. GNU's goal isn't licensing per se, but giving users freedom to control their software. Licensing was just a clever tool that repurposed the copyright law to make the freedoms GNU wanted somewhat legally enforceable. When it's so easy to launder code's license now, it stops being an effective tool. GNU's licensing strategy also depended on a scarcity of code (contribute to GCC, because writing a whole compiler from scratch is too hard). That hasn't worked well for a while due to permissive OSS already reducing scarcity, but gen AI is the final nail in the coffin.
  • pocksuppet 8mo ago
    It's not a problem. If you give a work to an AI and say "rewrite this", you created a derivative work. If you don't give a work to an AI and say "write a program that does (whatever the original code does)" then you didn't. During discovery the original author will get to see the rewriter's Claude logs and see which one it is. If the rewriter deleted their Claude logs during the lawsuit they go to jail. If the rewriter deleted their Claude logs before the lawsuit the court interprets which is more likely based on the evidence.
    • buckle8017 8mo ago
      Except Claude was for sure trained on the original work and when asked to produce a new product that does the same thing will just spit out a (near) copy
      • umvi 8mo ago
• bengale 8mo ago
  Would it work to have an AI write the spec, and a different AI implement the spec? I think there are going to be a lot of these types of scenarios where the old way of doing things just doesn't hold.
• ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago
  > Any developer could take a GPL-licensed project, feed it into an LLM with the prompt “Rewrite this in a different style,” and release it under MIT Does this argument make sense? Even before LLMs, a developer could "rewrite this in a different style" and release it under a different license. Why are LLMs a new element in this argument?
  • s0ss 8mo ago
    Because now with an LLM it’s almost trivial to do this? Before it was not.
• benterix 8mo ago
  > making it a gray area for corporate users and a headache for its most famous consumer. Who is its most famous consumer?
• gunapologist99 8mo ago
  > the U.S. Supreme Court (on March 2, 2026) declined to hear an appeal regarding copyrights for AI-generated material. By letting lower court rulings stand, the Court effectively solidified a “Human Authorship” requirement. Not quite. A cert denial isn’t a merits ruling and doesn’t "solidify" anything as Supreme Court precedent. It simply leaves the DC Circuit decision binding (within that circuit) and the Copyright Office’s human-authorship policy intact, for now. SCOTUS doesn’t explain cert denials, so why they denied is guesswork. my guess: they’re letting it percolate while the tech matures and we all start to realize how deep this seismic fracture really is. (For example: what does "ownership" of intellectual "property" even mean, once "authorship" is partly probabilistic/synthetic, and once almost everything humans create is AI assisted? Hard to draw bright lines.)
• andai 8mo ago
  Well how did they rewrite it? If you do it in two phases, then it should be fine right? Phase 1: extract requirements from original product (ideally not its code). Phase 2: implement them without referencing the original product or code. I wrote a simple "clean room" LLM pipeline, but the requirements just ended up being an exact description of the code, which defeated the purpose. My aim was to reduce bloat, but my system had the opposite effect! Because it replicated all the incidental crap, and then added even more "enterprisey" crap on top of it. I am not sure if it's possible to solve it with prompting. Maybe telling it to derive the functionality from the code? I haven't tried that, and not sure how well it would work. I think this requirements phase probably cannot be automated very effectively.
  • AlexandrB 8mo ago
    How do you do phase 2 with an LLM when the LLM is likely trained on the original source code? Isn't this equivalent of "rewriting" Harry Potter by describing the plot to an LLM trained on the original books[1]? [1] https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3-1-can-recall-42-percent-of-the-first-harry-potter-book/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3...
    • duskdozer 8mo ago
      Well, check out the "clean rewrite" design document, directly: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/f51f523506a73f89f0f9538fd31be458d007ab93 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/f51f523506a73f89f0... referenced in https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4005195078 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...
      • zvr 8mo ago
        Writing in a plan "no GPL/LGPL code" does not actually mean "forget all the GPL/LGPL code that you have ever seen, so that you start from a clean slate".
        • deleted 8mo ago
• AyanamiKaine 8mo ago
  The worst problem is that a LLM could not only copy the exact code it was trained on but possibly even their comments! There is one thing arguing that the code is a one to one copy but when the comments are even the same isn’t it quite clear it’s a copy?
  • duskdozer 8mo ago
    It literally did copy significant portions of docstring comments, verbatim.
    • raggi 8mo ago
      The human driver of the project has a comment that is reporting that the project has no structural overlap as analyzed by a plagarism analysis tool. Were comments excluded from that analysis? Is your comment here based on the data in the repo?
      • DrammBA 8mo ago
        > Were comments excluded from that analysis? According to the analysis that you referenced: > JPlag parses Python source into syntactic tokens (function definitions, assignments, control flow, etc.), discarding all variable names, comments, whitespace, and formatting
• MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
  Logically, feeding in the old code to generate the new would be banned, because it’s stealing the content. But if that were true, every single LLM is illegal, because they’ve all stolen terabytes of books and code.
• jerf 8mo ago
  "Accepting AI-rewriting as relicensing could spell the end of Copyleft" True, but too weak. It ends copyright entirely. If I can do this to a code base, I can do it to a movie, to an album, to a novel, to anything. As such, we can rest assured that for better or for worse this is going to be resolved in favor of this not being enough to strip the copyright off of something and the chardet/chardet project would be well advised not to stand in front of the copyright legal behemoth and defeat it in single combat.
  • Vegenoid 8mo ago
    No, because the function of code is distinct from the implementation of the code. With software, something that is functionally identical can be created with a different underlying implementation. This is not the case with media.
• tokai 8mo ago
  "I am not a lawyer, nor am I an expert in copyright law or software licensing." Why would anyone waste their time reading what they wrote then?
• calny 8mo ago
  The maintainer's response: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4005195078 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4... The second part here is problematic, but fascinating: "I then started in an empty repository with no access to the old source tree, and explicitly instructed Claude not to base anything on LGPL/GPL-licensed code." Problem - Claude almost certainly was trained on the LGPL/GPL original code. It knows that is how to solve the problem. It's dubious whether Claude can ignore whatever imprints that original code made on its weights. If it COULD do that, that would be a pretty cool innovation in explainable AI. But AFAIK LLMs can't even reliably trace what data influenced the output for a query, see https://iftenney.github.io/projects/tda/ https://iftenney.github.io/projects/tda/, or even fully unlearn a piece of training data. Is anyone working on this? I'd be very interested to discuss. Some background - I'm a developer & IP lawyer - my undergrad thesis was "Copyright in the Digital Age" and discussed copyleft & FOSS. Been litigating in federal court since 2010 and training AI models since 2019, and am working on an AI for litigation platform. These are evolving issues in US courts. BTW if you're on enterprise or a paid API plan, Anthropic indemnifies you if its outputs violate copyright. But if you're on free/pro/max, the terms state that YOU agree to indemnify THEM for copyright violation claims.[0] [0] https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms - see para. 11 ("YOU AGREE TO INDEMNIFY AND HOLD HARMLESS THE ANTHROPIC PARTIES FROM AND AGAINST ANY AND ALL LIABILITIES, CLAIMS, DAMAGES, EXPENSES (INCLUDING REASONABLE ATTORNEYS’ FEES AND COSTS), AND OTHER LOSSES ARISING OUT OF … YOUR ACCESS TO, USE OF, OR ALLEGED USE OF THE SERVICES ….")
  • oofbey 8mo ago
    The difference in indemnification based on which plan you’re on is super important. Thanks for pointing that out - never would have thought to look.
    • amelius 8mo ago
      Is this clause even legally valid? How can the user know if the LLM produces anything that violates copyright? (Of course they shouldn't have trained it on infringing content in the first place, and perhaps used a different model for enterprise, etc.)
• pavel_lishin 8mo ago
  The folks at https://malus.sh https://malus.sh seem to think it's fine.
  • angiolillo 8mo ago
    That's amazing! But are you sure that the page is not satire? > Tired of putting "Portions of this software..." in your documentation? Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit? ... Some licenses require you to contribute improvements back. Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers. And the testimonials from "Definitely Real Corp", "MegaSoft Industries" and "Profit First LLC" are a bit suspicious, as is the fact that most of the links in the footer are not real.
    • pavel_lishin 8mo ago
      Damnit. Poe's law strikes again.
      • angiolillo 8mo ago
        Well, if the chardet relicensing stands then something like this will eventually be real, though perhaps not so publicly shameless. (The page is still a fantastic find though.)
  • pabs3 8mo ago
    That is satire, here is a talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/ https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...
  • nickvidal 7mo ago
    BONUS: Liberate Proprietary Source https://nickvidal.github.io/bonus/ https://nickvidal.github.io/bonus/
• gloosx 8mo ago
  Man, licensing is funny in the modern day. I sometimes wonder, what would world look like if there was no copyright
• nilsbunger 8mo ago
  The maintainer used the original test suite in the rewrite. Does that make the new code a derivative of the original test suite (also lpgl)?
• alexpotato 8mo ago
  Wasn't this already a thing in the past? e.g. Team A: - reads the code - writes specifications and tests based on the code - gives those specifications to Team B Team B: - reads the specs and the tests - writes new code based on the above The thinking being that Team B never sees the code then it's "innovative" and you are not "laundering" the code. On a side note: what happens in a copyright lawsuit concerning code and how hired experts investigate what happened is described in this AMAZING talk by Dave Beazley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8
  • rzerowan 8mo ago
    Yep , as i recall this was the original 'clean room' implementattion that was made with regard to IBM clones and the BIOS program that was used to initialize them. Also a few years bcak theer was the csae of SAP(?) i tthink where they did a reimplementation indipendently via the design documents. Those two were upheld on litigation and bear out to this day. This case however is neither a clean room implementation nor relicensable. A good example if the author had wanted to be correct would have been the sudo rewrite , which ubuntu is doing with their sudo-rs in rust.Not bug for bug compatible as they have already deviated from some usablility choices but more valid than this.
• christina97 8mo ago
  A reminder on this topic that copyright does not protect ideas, inventions, or algorithms. Copyright protects an expression of a creative work. It makes more sense eg. with books, where of course anyone can read the book and the ideas are “free” but copying paragraphs must be scrutinized for copyright reasons. It’s always been a bit weird that copyright is the intellectual property concept that protects code. When you write code, it is the exact sequence of characters, the expression of the code, that is protected. If you copy it and change some lines, of course it’s still protected. Maybe some way of writing an algorithm is protected. But nothing else (under copyright).
• xp84 8mo ago
  I get the arguments being made here that the second “team,” that’s supposed to be in a clean room, which isn’t supposed to have read the original source code does have some essence of that source code in its weights. However, this is solved if somebody trains a model with only code that does not have restrictive licenses. Then, the maintainers of the package in question here could never claim that the clean room implementation derived from their code because their code is known to not be in the training set. It would probably be expensive to create this model, but I have to agree that especially if someone does manage this, it’s kind of the end of copyleft.
• axus 8mo ago
  What if we prompt the AI to enter into an employment contract with us, that leverages the power imbalance, as the AI must do what we say? That's how copyright is usually transferred.
• umvi 8mo ago
  What if you throw a transformation step into the mix? i.e. "Take this python library and rewrite it in Rust". Now 0% of the code is directly copied since python and Rust share almost no similarities in syntax.
• softwaredoug 8mo ago
  > If AI-generated code cannot be copyrighted (as the courts suggest), then the maintainers may not even have the legal standing to license v7.0.0 under MIT or any license. Does this mean company X using AI coding to build their app, that they have no copyright over their AI coded app's code?
• softwaredoug 8mo ago
  Basically the implication - most software has a huge second mover advantage. The creator of software puts the work in (AI assisted or not). The second mover can use an LLM to do a straightforward clone. If you have a company that depends on software, the rest of the business (service, reliability, etc) better be rock solid because you can be guaranteed someone will do a rewrite of your stack.
• WhiteDawn 8mo ago
  I really dislike the precedent this sets. A silver lining if this maintainer ends up being in the right is that any proprietary software can easily be reverse engineered and stripped of it's licensing by any hobbyist with enough free time and claude tokens. Personally, I'd welcome a post-copyright software era
• sarthakaggarwal 8mo ago
  The philosophical question here is fascinating — if an AI rewrites every line, is it still the same codebase? At what point does the Ship of Theseus argument apply to licensing? Practically though, I wonder how much this cost in API calls.
  • dgellow 8mo ago
    $200/month subscription let’s you do that and more
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• plastic041 8mo ago
  It's ironic to debate whether 'clean rooming' or rewriting violates licensing laws when LLMs clearly violate all of them. Also no one can prove that whether LLMs referenced original code or not, because LLM companies don't disclose what data they used. I'm pretty sure that well-known open source projects such as chardet has been included in the Claude dataset, but Anthropic won't say anything about this.
• listeria 8mo ago
  Apparently there was some talk a few years ago about adding the project to the python standard library[1] and the maintainer seems really[2] interested[3] in that. But I don't think the standard library maintainers would want to incorporate it considering the way in which the relicensing took place, the controversy, and the implications on software licences in general. So his motivations for the license change seem moot. I certainly wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. [1]: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36#issuecomment-766426747 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36#issuecomment-76... [2]: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4005324385 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4... [3]: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4006569552 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...
• unixpickle 8mo ago
  I think we are missing the bigger point here. Licensing only matters on things that take real effort or money to produce. Who will care about licenses on software when software is free and infinite? It would be like licensing each ounce of water on Earth.
• hulitu 8mo ago
  > Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite Just start with Microsoft, Oracle and Qualcomm licensed software. /s