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dathinabyesterday at 11:32 AM1 replyview on HN

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.


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jacquesmyesterday at 11:46 AM

No, that depends on whether or not the AI work product rests on key contributions to its training set without which it would not be able to the the work, see other comment. In that case it looks like 'a new work doing the same' but it still a derived work.

Ted Nelson was years ahead of the future where we really needed his Xanadu to keep track of fractional copyright. Likely if we had such a mechanism, and AI authors respected it then we would be able to say that your work is derived from 3000 other original works and that you added 6 lines of new code.

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