4 ms·

Isn't there also a concern that an LLM may reproduce copyrighted code verbatim (or close enough), and the original author asserts their copyright?

by Retr0id 3mo ago

worthless-trash 3mo ago
I had early chatGPT spit my own erlang code back at me WITH my comments.
justthehuman 3mo ago
+1, I also thought this was the actual concern.
olalonde 3mo ago
This doesn't really happen by accident, especially where it's significant enough to constitute copyright infringement. And to my knowledge, there hasn't been a single lawsuit over this in the entire history of LLM-assisted coding.
- dijksterhuis 3mo ago
  > there hasn't been a single lawsuit over this in the entire history of LLM-assisted coding. the "entire history of" is circa 3-4 years, which is very much a tiny period of time compared to normal legal system / copyright law stuff (IANAL).
  - olalonde 3mo ago
    It's enough to tell you that, if it does happen, it must be quite rare and not a widespread systemic issue. It's also worth noting that Anthropic and co are so confident that it's a non-issue that they offer full copyright indemnification to their commercial users.
    - dijksterhuis 3mo ago
      > It's enough to tell you that, if it does happen, it must be quite rare and not a systematic issue. alternative perspective: it's just taking time for the lawyers to figure out what they can sue them for.
      - olalonde 3mo ago
        Not sure I understand. If some company or open source project is violating your copyright, you sue them for copyright infringement, no?
bluGill 3mo ago
There is concern, but the more I think about it, the less convinced I am. LLMs might produce a snippet, but copyright requires more than that. Last I checked (I'm not a lawyer, this was far enough back that the law has had major changes, and different countries have different laws! - read this with plenty of salt) if you start with copyright work and replace all but 10% that final amount just disappears since there isn't enough original to claim copyright anymore. You can never claim copyright over 'printf("Hello World");' - it is too generic. Most of what I've seen an LLM produce is likewise generic enough that even if it is a copy, it wouldn't be a copyrightable snippet.
- dijksterhuis 3mo ago
  reminded me of: > The complaint argued that "the basis of the Gaye defendants' claims is that "Blurred Lines" and "Got To Give It Up" "feel" or "sound" the same. Being reminiscent of a "sound" is not copyright infringement. The intent in producing "Blurred Lines" was to evoke an era. In reality, the Gaye defendants are claiming ownership of an entire genre, as opposed to a specific work" they lost (eventually) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharrell_Williams_v._Bridgeport_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharrell_Williams_v._Bridgepor... wider point -- whether or not a copy is a copy and whether it is is infringing on copyright or not ultimately has to be decided by a court case when it's not an obvious and clear cut violation. especially in the USA with the utterly mental fair use law.
user43928 3mo ago
To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened. News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material. The parent comment still stands in my opinion: When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest?
- jryan49 3mo ago
  I mean ai has generated copyright headers verbatim in code I asked it to make. I had a tutorial open from the web and asked the AI to generate an example for me and it was the example from the tutorial verbatim as well...
  - user43928 3mo ago
    This never happened to me and there is not a single such occurrence in my main project, across 150k LOC. I would be surprised if a frontier model generated unexpected copyright headers during typical usage.
    - nemomarx 3mo ago
      the people blindly submitting prs are not going to be using expensive frontier models, though.
    - jryan49 3mo ago
      It was a frontier model from a few months ago. It hasn't done it recently. But it has happened. I imagine if there isn't a lot of training data for an idea it probably has a higher change of generating verbatim, so as time goes on, it should become less of a problem (at least with high quality models).
- dijksterhuis 3mo ago
  > To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened. > News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material. First, there are other cases if you take the time to dig. This is quite an old example (GPT-2) as i haven't kept up to date on this field recently, but it does show that this problem has been known about since before these systems were widely adopted: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 [0] Second, GP said nothing about the type of effort required to make it happen, just that it can be done and that the copyright owner could come along and cause legal problems later. It's absolutely possible to have a fly-by contributor who purposefully asks for code that reproduces X/Y/Z without a maintainer knowing about it. But then the maintainer is the one in legal trouble. > When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest? Legal / copyright / etc. cases often take a lot longer than a couple of years to come to fruition. --- [0]: edit -- to clarify this is an example of the reproduction problem, not an example copyright infringement case.
agentultra 3mo ago
That would be an example of, “overfitting.” It is something the AI labs are concerned about. They tweak parameters to try and avoid it. It’s a hard balancing act to do. Give in too much randomness and you get non-sensical outputs that are difficult to align. Fit too closely to the training data and the model regurgitates the training data. And oh, what’s that copyrighted material we never made any agreement to use doing in there?
jmull 3mo ago
Not to mention the moral concern. IP law (like a lot of other things) has been skewed toward the interests of business, even when that conflicts with fairness or societal good. For all its flaws (IMO), the free software movement tends to be principled. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s right.
panzi 3mo ago
Not just when it reproduces code. Since fair use doesn't exist like that in a lot of countries the question is if the training itself is a violation. Are there e.g. EU or Japanese rulings on that?

Isn't there also a concern that an LLM may reproduce copyrighted code verbatim (or close enough), and the original author asserts their copyright?

by Retr0id 3mo ago

Isn't there also a concern that an LLM may reproduce copyrighted code verbatim (or close enough), and the original author asserts their copyright?

worthless-trash 3mo ago

I had early chatGPT spit my own erlang code back at me WITH my comments.

justthehuman 3mo ago

+1, I also thought this was the actual concern.

olalonde 3mo ago

This doesn't really happen by accident, especially where it's significant enough to constitute copyright infringement. And to my knowledge, there hasn't been a single lawsuit over this in the entire history of LLM-assisted coding.

dijksterhuis 3mo ago
> there hasn't been a single lawsuit over this in the entire history of LLM-assisted coding. the "entire history of" is circa 3-4 years, which is very much a tiny period of time compared to normal legal system / copyright law stuff (IANAL).
- olalonde 3mo ago
  It's enough to tell you that, if it does happen, it must be quite rare and not a widespread systemic issue. It's also worth noting that Anthropic and co are so confident that it's a non-issue that they offer full copyright indemnification to their commercial users.
  - dijksterhuis 3mo ago
    > It's enough to tell you that, if it does happen, it must be quite rare and not a systematic issue. alternative perspective: it's just taking time for the lawyers to figure out what they can sue them for.
    - olalonde 3mo ago
      Not sure I understand. If some company or open source project is violating your copyright, you sue them for copyright infringement, no?

bluGill 3mo ago

There is concern, but the more I think about it, the less convinced I am. LLMs might produce a snippet, but copyright requires more than that. Last I checked (I'm not a lawyer, this was far enough back that the law has had major changes, and different countries have different laws! - read this with plenty of salt) if you start with copyright work and replace all but 10% that final amount just disappears since there isn't enough original to claim copyright anymore. You can never claim copyright over 'printf("Hello World");' - it is too generic. Most of what I've seen an LLM produce is likewise generic enough that even if it is a copy, it wouldn't be a copyrightable snippet.

dijksterhuis 3mo ago
reminded me of: > The complaint argued that "the basis of the Gaye defendants' claims is that "Blurred Lines" and "Got To Give It Up" "feel" or "sound" the same. Being reminiscent of a "sound" is not copyright infringement. The intent in producing "Blurred Lines" was to evoke an era. In reality, the Gaye defendants are claiming ownership of an entire genre, as opposed to a specific work" they lost (eventually) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharrell_Williams_v._Bridgeport_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharrell_Williams_v._Bridgepor... wider point -- whether or not a copy is a copy and whether it is is infringing on copyright or not ultimately has to be decided by a court case when it's not an obvious and clear cut violation. especially in the USA with the utterly mental fair use law.

user43928 3mo ago

To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened. News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material. The parent comment still stands in my opinion: When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest?

jryan49 3mo ago
I mean ai has generated copyright headers verbatim in code I asked it to make. I had a tutorial open from the web and asked the AI to generate an example for me and it was the example from the tutorial verbatim as well...
- user43928 3mo ago
  This never happened to me and there is not a single such occurrence in my main project, across 150k LOC. I would be surprised if a frontier model generated unexpected copyright headers during typical usage.
  - nemomarx 3mo ago
    the people blindly submitting prs are not going to be using expensive frontier models, though.
  - jryan49 3mo ago
    It was a frontier model from a few months ago. It hasn't done it recently. But it has happened. I imagine if there isn't a lot of training data for an idea it probably has a higher change of generating verbatim, so as time goes on, it should become less of a problem (at least with high quality models).
dijksterhuis 3mo ago
> To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened. > News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material. First, there are other cases if you take the time to dig. This is quite an old example (GPT-2) as i haven't kept up to date on this field recently, but it does show that this problem has been known about since before these systems were widely adopted: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 [0] Second, GP said nothing about the type of effort required to make it happen, just that it can be done and that the copyright owner could come along and cause legal problems later. It's absolutely possible to have a fly-by contributor who purposefully asks for code that reproduces X/Y/Z without a maintainer knowing about it. But then the maintainer is the one in legal trouble. > When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest? Legal / copyright / etc. cases often take a lot longer than a couple of years to come to fruition. --- [0]: edit -- to clarify this is an example of the reproduction problem, not an example copyright infringement case.

agentultra 3mo ago

That would be an example of, “overfitting.” It is something the AI labs are concerned about. They tweak parameters to try and avoid it. It’s a hard balancing act to do. Give in too much randomness and you get non-sensical outputs that are difficult to align. Fit too closely to the training data and the model regurgitates the training data. And oh, what’s that copyrighted material we never made any agreement to use doing in there?

jmull 3mo ago

Not to mention the moral concern. IP law (like a lot of other things) has been skewed toward the interests of business, even when that conflicts with fairness or societal good. For all its flaws (IMO), the free software movement tends to be principled. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s right.

panzi 3mo ago

Not just when it reproduces code. Since fair use doesn't exist like that in a lot of countries the question is if the training itself is a violation. Are there e.g. EU or Japanese rulings on that?