4 ms·

I find it extremely ironic that big corp openly steals IP en masse to build their models but hackers are still concerned about using same models for their rever

by cromka 19d ago

I find it extremely ironic that big corp openly steals IP en masse to build their models but hackers are still concerned about using same models for their reverse engineering work. I think at this point the hacking community needs to grow some balls.

doot 19d ago
Excited to see what you contribute to open source against one of the richest and most litigious companies in the world.
- cromka 19d ago
  Cool. Excited to see you on the pitch next time you comment on a football game.
- bigyabai 19d ago
  Nothing. I hope those companies go bankrupt, I'm not underwriting their failure to support their customers with my time and effort.
cogman10 19d ago
It's because it doesn't matter how copyrighted material ends up in a project. If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects. The fact is, open source has much more liability than closed source software does. If copyrighted material ends up inside a private code base it'll be nearly impossible for the owner to discover that and sue.
- 1dom 18d ago
  > If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects. Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share? I really don't see how this issue is going to be feasible for courtrooms to deal with in a world where big tech are bragging about large percentages of all their code being produced by LLMs.
  - Gud 18d ago
    Why wouldn't it be feasible for Apple, with an unlimited war chest, to go after Asahi? I am not saying they will, but it is certainly possible for them.
    - 1dom 18d ago
      Because if it's feasible for any company with a war chest to start a court case about a competitor maybe having a matching line of code to theirs via an LLM, then basically every single company with a warchest would be at war with eachother, because they're all using LLMs. Business and code production would grind to a halt whilst basically every big tech company shares it's entire codebase with every other tech company for discovery. It's basically MAD. And if it was feasible, given we've had a couple of years of all the big tech companies heavily using LLMs, there should be some notable court cases by now, surely?
      - justinclift 18d ago
        Heh, sounds like it'd be along the same lines as the SCO Unix kerfuffle back in the day.
      - mschuster91 18d ago
        Mutually assured destruction is what keeps everyone quiet at the moment.
        cromka 18d ago
        These are very good observations indeed.
  - VBprogrammer 18d ago
    In the 90s aircraft manufacturers basically stopped whole segments of the market (anything smaller than a piston twin) due to litigation. I wouldn't be horribly surprised to find we spend the next 10 years fighting about this stuff in court.
jandrese 19d ago
The tiniest bit of contamination can get a whole project shut down and the creators heavily fined if the lawyers are aggressive enough. It's not worth the risk to a project like Asahi. Generally the law is going to side with whomever has the most lawyers.
- xp84 19d ago
  none of this is incorrect, however, how freaking sad is it that in order to get any OS that's not locked down and owned by Apple on the hardware we buy and supposedly own, someone (together with whole open source organizations) has to risk utter financial ruin. I hate the new system of no ownership and closed everything.
asveikau 19d ago
It may not just be about IP but also code quality. As an example, TFA calls the user mode portion "slop" in need of cleanup.
rossy 19d ago
It's not ironic, it's the flipside of exactly the same reason. Bigcorps can steal with impunity because they have unlimited money to pay expensive lawyers. FOSS projects do not, so they cannot.
- otterley 19d ago
  No judge I’ve ever met gave a damn how much a party spent on legal resources. With rare exceptions, they care a great deal about achieving justice, and often bend over backwards to help indigent parties avoid prejudicing themselves. Keep in mind that there are no indigent parties in this debate; both major IP rights holders and the frontier AI companies are well capitalized. (I worked in a federal district court for a while.)
  - voakbasda 19d ago
    The problem is that money buys lawyers, and you need those to get justice. If the other side spends more, you are likely to lose.
    - otterley 19d ago
      Which of these parties doesn’t have lawyers? (I’m talking about bigcorps stealing from bigcorps here.) In a case where both parties have lawyers, having more and more expensive lawyers is not necessarily predictive of a case’s outcome. There are diminishing returns. What having more resources tends to do is force the poorer party to settle quicker. But that’s not necessarily a loss. Judges still have to approve settlements in the interest of justice.
      - voakbasda 18d ago
        Settlements are not justice.
    - cromka 18d ago
      Not everywhere is the US.
littlecranky67 18d ago
Agree. Especially since even a tainted GPU driver (tainted as in, used former Apple Engineer knowledge) is usefull as we just throw another LLM onto it and tell it "rewrite in rust" and get an untainted version of it (at least that is the current judicial state, and the bigtech argues in this direction).
- mitxela 18d ago
  An AI doesn't magically add copyright but it also doesn't magically remove copyright except via diffusion of training data. It does not remove copyright from its input. Malus was a parody. If you machine-translate something from one language to another, copyright is retained no matter how sophisticated the translator is.
  - xyzsparetimexyz 18d ago
    How is that any different from a clean room?
    - preisschild 18d ago
      With clean room you just have access to the api specifications, not the internals.
      - simoncion 18d ago
        Yep. An entity in the "dirty room" reads the thing to be reimplemented and produces a document that thoroughly describes its behavior. That document is passed to the entity in the "clean room" whose only knowledge of that system is through that document. Reverse engineering is legal, plagiarism is not. Despite the fact that the raw output of the system is incomprehensible to humans, scanning a photograph of Mickey Mouse and running it through a lossy compression system like JPEG doesn't suddenly make it not a picture of Mickey Mouse. Similarly, running the code for a system through the lossy compression system that is LLM "training" doesn't suddenly obliterate that data and make that LLM a "clean room". If one has any doubt of that, remember that they are known to reproduce their inputs, even after all these years of work to make them not do that. [0] [0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727685>
mitxela 18d ago
Both people with balls and people without balls belong in the community. Diversity is a strength in a decentralised system. In emulators, there is Azahar which is an emulator without the ability to decrypt games, and there is Azahar Plus, by different people, which is downstream of Azahar and adds piracy-specific features. The Azahar developers, who do the majority of the work, do not need balls. Only the people making the piracy fork need balls.

by cromka 19d ago

doot 19d ago

Excited to see what you contribute to open source against one of the richest and most litigious companies in the world.

cromka 19d ago
Cool. Excited to see you on the pitch next time you comment on a football game.
bigyabai 19d ago
Nothing. I hope those companies go bankrupt, I'm not underwriting their failure to support their customers with my time and effort.

cogman10 19d ago

It's because it doesn't matter how copyrighted material ends up in a project. If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects. The fact is, open source has much more liability than closed source software does. If copyrighted material ends up inside a private code base it'll be nearly impossible for the owner to discover that and sue.

1dom 18d ago
> If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects. Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share? I really don't see how this issue is going to be feasible for courtrooms to deal with in a world where big tech are bragging about large percentages of all their code being produced by LLMs.
- Gud 18d ago
  Why wouldn't it be feasible for Apple, with an unlimited war chest, to go after Asahi? I am not saying they will, but it is certainly possible for them.
  - 1dom 18d ago
    Because if it's feasible for any company with a war chest to start a court case about a competitor maybe having a matching line of code to theirs via an LLM, then basically every single company with a warchest would be at war with eachother, because they're all using LLMs. Business and code production would grind to a halt whilst basically every big tech company shares it's entire codebase with every other tech company for discovery. It's basically MAD. And if it was feasible, given we've had a couple of years of all the big tech companies heavily using LLMs, there should be some notable court cases by now, surely?
    - justinclift 18d ago
      Heh, sounds like it'd be along the same lines as the SCO Unix kerfuffle back in the day.
    - mschuster91 18d ago
      Mutually assured destruction is what keeps everyone quiet at the moment.
      - cromka 18d ago
        These are very good observations indeed.
- VBprogrammer 18d ago
  In the 90s aircraft manufacturers basically stopped whole segments of the market (anything smaller than a piston twin) due to litigation. I wouldn't be horribly surprised to find we spend the next 10 years fighting about this stuff in court.

jandrese 19d ago

The tiniest bit of contamination can get a whole project shut down and the creators heavily fined if the lawyers are aggressive enough. It's not worth the risk to a project like Asahi. Generally the law is going to side with whomever has the most lawyers.

xp84 19d ago
none of this is incorrect, however, how freaking sad is it that in order to get any OS that's not locked down and owned by Apple on the hardware we buy and supposedly own, someone (together with whole open source organizations) has to risk utter financial ruin. I hate the new system of no ownership and closed everything.

asveikau 19d ago

It may not just be about IP but also code quality. As an example, TFA calls the user mode portion "slop" in need of cleanup.

rossy 19d ago

It's not ironic, it's the flipside of exactly the same reason. Bigcorps can steal with impunity because they have unlimited money to pay expensive lawyers. FOSS projects do not, so they cannot.

otterley 19d ago
No judge I’ve ever met gave a damn how much a party spent on legal resources. With rare exceptions, they care a great deal about achieving justice, and often bend over backwards to help indigent parties avoid prejudicing themselves. Keep in mind that there are no indigent parties in this debate; both major IP rights holders and the frontier AI companies are well capitalized. (I worked in a federal district court for a while.)
- voakbasda 19d ago
  The problem is that money buys lawyers, and you need those to get justice. If the other side spends more, you are likely to lose.
  - otterley 19d ago
    Which of these parties doesn’t have lawyers? (I’m talking about bigcorps stealing from bigcorps here.) In a case where both parties have lawyers, having more and more expensive lawyers is not necessarily predictive of a case’s outcome. There are diminishing returns. What having more resources tends to do is force the poorer party to settle quicker. But that’s not necessarily a loss. Judges still have to approve settlements in the interest of justice.
    - voakbasda 18d ago
      Settlements are not justice.
  - cromka 18d ago
    Not everywhere is the US.

littlecranky67 18d ago

Agree. Especially since even a tainted GPU driver (tainted as in, used former Apple Engineer knowledge) is usefull as we just throw another LLM onto it and tell it "rewrite in rust" and get an untainted version of it (at least that is the current judicial state, and the bigtech argues in this direction).

mitxela 18d ago
An AI doesn't magically add copyright but it also doesn't magically remove copyright except via diffusion of training data. It does not remove copyright from its input. Malus was a parody. If you machine-translate something from one language to another, copyright is retained no matter how sophisticated the translator is.
- xyzsparetimexyz 18d ago
  How is that any different from a clean room?
  - preisschild 18d ago
    With clean room you just have access to the api specifications, not the internals.
    - simoncion 18d ago
      Yep. An entity in the "dirty room" reads the thing to be reimplemented and produces a document that thoroughly describes its behavior. That document is passed to the entity in the "clean room" whose only knowledge of that system is through that document. Reverse engineering is legal, plagiarism is not. Despite the fact that the raw output of the system is incomprehensible to humans, scanning a photograph of Mickey Mouse and running it through a lossy compression system like JPEG doesn't suddenly make it not a picture of Mickey Mouse. Similarly, running the code for a system through the lossy compression system that is LLM "training" doesn't suddenly obliterate that data and make that LLM a "clean room". If one has any doubt of that, remember that they are known to reproduce their inputs, even after all these years of work to make them not do that. [0] [0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727685>

mitxela 18d ago

Both people with balls and people without balls belong in the community. Diversity is a strength in a decentralised system. In emulators, there is Azahar which is an emulator without the ability to decrypt games, and there is Azahar Plus, by different people, which is downstream of Azahar and adds piracy-specific features. The Azahar developers, who do the majority of the work, do not need balls. Only the people making the piracy fork need balls.