3 ms·

A translation of a book to a different language is a derivative work. So a translation of a computer program to a different programming language is also. But

by jbotz 4mo ago

A translation of a book to a different language is a derivative work. So a translation of a computer program to a different programming language is also. But if in the translation of the book you start altering the plot and the personalities of that characters, does it at some point become not a derivative work? What point? IANAL, and I have no real idea, but I imagine that point has been probed significantly in case-law with respect to creative works. Given the current climate of ever-expanding scope of "intellectual property", if they admit that the LLM had access to git source code then I would say their case is weak at best.

anilgulecha 4mo ago
> translation. It's not technically a translation, it's a re-implementation, with test suites acting as the destination. If it was a file by file translation your argument would have been valid.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- 20k 4mo ago
  Git is part of the LLM's training set though, so simply asking it to recreate git in another language is pretty equivalent. Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications)
  - rcxdude 4mo ago
    > Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications) Are you sure? LLMs are in some way a compressed version of their input but it's a pretty lossy compression (arguably this makes them more like a compression algorithm than a compressed version of the data). I'm not sure you can prompt a full, accurate, copy of a nontrivial codebase out of them. Even with zero temperature their accuracy is just not that high.
    - philipportner 4mo ago
      > I'm not sure you can prompt a full, accurate, copy of a nontrivial codebase out of them. Even with zero temperature their accuracy is just not that high. Granted, these are some of the most widely spread texts, and not codebases, but just fyi: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671 > For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984 (Section 4).
      - rcxdude 4mo ago
        That paper is basically using the LLM as a compression algorithm: it's prompting with some section of the book and it's reprompting if it doesn't give the right output. Notably this only works if you already have a copy of the book in question!
        20k 4mo ago
        Distributed a compressed copy of something is still copyright infringement
        rcxdude 4mo ago
        You misunderstand my point: the LLM is not a losslessly compressed version of the text: you need to supply additional information from the original in order to 'extract' it from the LLM (and from that point of view, the extra information would be the compressed form).
  - spacechild1 4mo ago
    That's something I have been wondering. If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to LLMs as well. If an LLM might have been trained on the original source code, it should be considered "tainted".
    - 20k 4mo ago
      Yes, and realistically any code that LLMs produce is a derivative work of its training data. There's going to be a huge disaster licensing wise I have absolutely no idea how LLMs got through anyone's legal departments, I guess the hope is that if everyone breaks the law enough, it'll just be fine
      - bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
        Problem is there's a lot more than a single repo in training data, the corpus is massive... Should the author of a blog post on cats also be compensated for simply being in the same training data as the git repo?
        20k 4mo ago
        Honestly? Yes. This is why its such a problem that most of the training data was not used with permission, and without the correct copyright status or license associated with it There's a lot of arguments about humans doing the same thing, but the reality is that humans and robots don't enjoy the same legal protection. Its clearly a derivative work of all of its training data
        bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
        > Honestly? Yes. Then it works both ways. Say I manage to generate essentially a ripoff of your copyrighted song, release it and make a ton of money, you now have to split that royalty with keyboard cat. And Joe bloggs. You'd end up fractions of pennies
      - 4mo ago
  - yusefnapora 4mo ago
    As mentioned in another comment, it's even more clear cut in this case. They actually put the original git sources in their project repo and instructed the agent to use it as the "source of truth". Simple thought experiment. If you handed this same agents.md file (https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#source-of-truth https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...) to a human software developer and let them work on exactly the same goal, would their output be considered a derivative work?
- alienbaby 4mo ago
  Wouldn't a re-implementation be akin to 'heres how it works, write the code' rather than 'heres the code, redo it in rust'?
spwa4 4mo ago
Yes, but as soon as copyright became a problem for very rich people parts of it were cancelled. 1) re-implementation for compatibility (which was quickly "reestablished" through use of copyright-protecting encryption. In other words: do you get to write software that connects to MS/Apple/Google/Facebook servers without authorization from those companies? Yes. Do you get to copy an encryption key from their software to make it possible? No) and, more recently, 2) violating copyright for LLM training and, currently mostly attempted: 3) "uncopyrighting" run software through an LLM, and some people "believe" it comes out with your copyright on it! Because very rich people want to sell uncopyrighting. Ie. the jury's still out what will happen when it's billionnaire vs billionnaire. Of course, the question is what happens the second someone does this with a disney movie, or a big microsoft application ...
- bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
  > Yes, but as soon as copyright became a problem for very rich people parts of it were cancelled. When copyright law was established, not many poor people owned printing presses. That is to say, copyright law is a PROTECTION to the very rich, not an inconvenience
  - spwa4 4mo ago
    true but as the exception for model training (which can only be done by very, very rich people and organizations) shows, there's some new rich and they want new rules. Against the will of the people, as evidenced by the court cases and protests online ...
miohtama 4mo ago
Related, software API compability is not a derivate work, or eligible to protection, as ruled in the US and in the EU. Google, SAP R/3, etc. cases. Or SCO Vs IBM. If everything would be a derivate work we would not Linux.
WD-42 4mo ago
The agents.md says “here’s the git source code” https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#source-of-truth https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou... This isn’t even a question of training data, thy fed the full git source code directly to the llm.
- throw-the-towel 4mo ago
  I wonder if imitating clean room reverse engineering with two LLMs would be enough for licence compliance.
  - cyphar 4mo ago
    That already exists[1]. It looks like a joke but apparently they will accept your money to do it, which seems to cross the line of a joke. [1]: https://malus.sh/ https://malus.sh/
- To1ne 4mo ago
  I would say it's worse, the whole C Git source code is checked in https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/tree/main/git https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/tree/main/git
kisper 3mo ago
Mathematically, does similarity/intelligibility of one equation to another have any bearing on whether the one was derived from the other? Philosophically? Legally? I'm not a copyright lawyer, but that's the crux of the matter to me: did you start with something, and iterate from it (even if it was so many times as to be transformed beyond recognition), or is it something more akin to clean-room reverse engineering?

by jbotz 4mo ago

anilgulecha 4mo ago

> translation. It's not technically a translation, it's a re-implementation, with test suites acting as the destination. If it was a file by file translation your argument would have been valid.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
20k 4mo ago
Git is part of the LLM's training set though, so simply asking it to recreate git in another language is pretty equivalent. Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications)
- rcxdude 4mo ago
  > Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications) Are you sure? LLMs are in some way a compressed version of their input but it's a pretty lossy compression (arguably this makes them more like a compression algorithm than a compressed version of the data). I'm not sure you can prompt a full, accurate, copy of a nontrivial codebase out of them. Even with zero temperature their accuracy is just not that high.
  - philipportner 4mo ago
    > I'm not sure you can prompt a full, accurate, copy of a nontrivial codebase out of them. Even with zero temperature their accuracy is just not that high. Granted, these are some of the most widely spread texts, and not codebases, but just fyi: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671 > For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984 (Section 4).
    - rcxdude 4mo ago
      That paper is basically using the LLM as a compression algorithm: it's prompting with some section of the book and it's reprompting if it doesn't give the right output. Notably this only works if you already have a copy of the book in question!
      - 20k 4mo ago
        Distributed a compressed copy of something is still copyright infringement
        rcxdude 4mo ago
        You misunderstand my point: the LLM is not a losslessly compressed version of the text: you need to supply additional information from the original in order to 'extract' it from the LLM (and from that point of view, the extra information would be the compressed form).
- spacechild1 4mo ago
  That's something I have been wondering. If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to LLMs as well. If an LLM might have been trained on the original source code, it should be considered "tainted".
  - 20k 4mo ago
    Yes, and realistically any code that LLMs produce is a derivative work of its training data. There's going to be a huge disaster licensing wise I have absolutely no idea how LLMs got through anyone's legal departments, I guess the hope is that if everyone breaks the law enough, it'll just be fine
    - bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
      Problem is there's a lot more than a single repo in training data, the corpus is massive... Should the author of a blog post on cats also be compensated for simply being in the same training data as the git repo?
      - 20k 4mo ago
        Honestly? Yes. This is why its such a problem that most of the training data was not used with permission, and without the correct copyright status or license associated with it There's a lot of arguments about humans doing the same thing, but the reality is that humans and robots don't enjoy the same legal protection. Its clearly a derivative work of all of its training data
        bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
        > Honestly? Yes. Then it works both ways. Say I manage to generate essentially a ripoff of your copyrighted song, release it and make a ton of money, you now have to split that royalty with keyboard cat. And Joe bloggs. You'd end up fractions of pennies
    - 4mo ago
- yusefnapora 4mo ago
  As mentioned in another comment, it's even more clear cut in this case. They actually put the original git sources in their project repo and instructed the agent to use it as the "source of truth". Simple thought experiment. If you handed this same agents.md file (https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#source-of-truth https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...) to a human software developer and let them work on exactly the same goal, would their output be considered a derivative work?
alienbaby 4mo ago
Wouldn't a re-implementation be akin to 'heres how it works, write the code' rather than 'heres the code, redo it in rust'?

spwa4 4mo ago

Yes, but as soon as copyright became a problem for very rich people parts of it were cancelled. 1) re-implementation for compatibility (which was quickly "reestablished" through use of copyright-protecting encryption. In other words: do you get to write software that connects to MS/Apple/Google/Facebook servers without authorization from those companies? Yes. Do you get to copy an encryption key from their software to make it possible? No) and, more recently, 2) violating copyright for LLM training and, currently mostly attempted: 3) "uncopyrighting" run software through an LLM, and some people "believe" it comes out with your copyright on it! Because very rich people want to sell uncopyrighting. Ie. the jury's still out what will happen when it's billionnaire vs billionnaire. Of course, the question is what happens the second someone does this with a disney movie, or a big microsoft application ...

bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
> Yes, but as soon as copyright became a problem for very rich people parts of it were cancelled. When copyright law was established, not many poor people owned printing presses. That is to say, copyright law is a PROTECTION to the very rich, not an inconvenience
- spwa4 4mo ago
  true but as the exception for model training (which can only be done by very, very rich people and organizations) shows, there's some new rich and they want new rules. Against the will of the people, as evidenced by the court cases and protests online ...

miohtama 4mo ago

Related, software API compability is not a derivate work, or eligible to protection, as ruled in the US and in the EU. Google, SAP R/3, etc. cases. Or SCO Vs IBM. If everything would be a derivate work we would not Linux.

WD-42 4mo ago

The agents.md says “here’s the git source code” https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#source-of-truth https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou... This isn’t even a question of training data, thy fed the full git source code directly to the llm.

throw-the-towel 4mo ago
I wonder if imitating clean room reverse engineering with two LLMs would be enough for licence compliance.
- cyphar 4mo ago
  That already exists[1]. It looks like a joke but apparently they will accept your money to do it, which seems to cross the line of a joke. [1]: https://malus.sh/ https://malus.sh/
To1ne 4mo ago
I would say it's worse, the whole C Git source code is checked in https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/tree/main/git https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/tree/main/git

kisper 3mo ago

Mathematically, does similarity/intelligibility of one equation to another have any bearing on whether the one was derived from the other? Philosophically? Legally? I'm not a copyright lawyer, but that's the crux of the matter to me: did you start with something, and iterate from it (even if it was so many times as to be transformed beyond recognition), or is it something more akin to clean-room reverse engineering?