Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

1) Legality and morality are obviously different and unrelated concepts. More people should understand that.

2) Copyright was the wrong mechanism to use for code from the start, LLMs just exposed the issue. The thing to protect shouldn't be creativity, it should be human work - any kind of work.

The hard part of programming isn't creativity, it's making correct decisions. It's getting the information you need to make them. Figuring out and understanding the problem you're trying to solve, whether it's a complex mathematical problem or a customer's need. And then evaluating solutions until you find the right one. (One constrains being how much time you can spend on it.)

All that work is incredibly valuable but once the solution exists, it's each easier to copy without replicating or even understanding the thought process which led to it. But that thought process took time and effort.

The person who did the work deserved credit and compensation.

And he deserves it transitively, if his work is used to build other works - proportional to his contribution. The hard part is quantifying it, of course. But a lot of people these days benefit from throwing their hands up and saying we can't quantify it exactly so let's make it finders keepers. That's exploitation.

3) Both LLM training and inference are derivative works by any reasonable meaning of those words. If LLMs are not derivative works of the training data then why is so much training data needed? Why don't they just build AI from scratch? Because they can't. They just claim they found a legal loophole to exploit other people's work without consent.

I am still hoping the legal people take time to understand how LLMs work, how other algorithms, such as synonym replacement or c2rust work, decide that calling it "AI" doesn't magically remove copyright and the huge AI companies will be forced to destroy their existing models and train new ones which respect the licenses.

Imagine if the author has his way, and when we have AI write software, it becomes legally under the license of some other sufficiently similar piece of software. Which may or may not be proprietary. "I see you have generated a todo app very similar to Todoist. So they now own it." That does not seem like a good path either for open source software or for opening up the benefits of AI generated software.

Perhaps software patents may play an even bigger role in the future.

LPGL is dead, long live the AI rewrites of your barely open source code

Easy solution for now:

Add something like this to NEW gpl /bsd/mit licenses:

'you are forbidden from reimplementing it with AI'

or just:

'all clones, reimpletetions with ai etc must still be GPL'

What if someone doesn't declare that it has been reimplemented using an LLM? Isn't it enough to simply declare that you have reimplemented the software without using an LLM? Good luck proving that in court...

One thing is certain, however: copyleft licenses will disappear: If I can't control the redistribution of my code (through a GPL or similar license), I choose to develop it in closed source.

That's a non-sequitur. chardet v7 is GPL-derived work (currently in clear violation of the GPL). If xe wanted it to be a different thing xe should've published as such. Simple as.

If the model wasn't trained on copyleft, if he didn't use a copyleft test suite and if he wasn't the maintainer for years. Clearly the intent here is copyright infringement.

If you have software your testsuite should be your testsuite, you do dev with a testsuite and then mit without releasing one. Depending on the test-suite it may break clean room rules, especially for ttd codebases.

I think what is happening is the collapse of the “greater good”. Open source is dependent upon providing information for the greater good and general benefit of its readers. However now that no one is reading anything, its purpose is for the great good of the most clever or most convincing or richest harvester.

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shall we now have to think about the tradeoffs in adopting

- proprietary

- free

- slop-licensed

software?

> Ronacher notes this as an irony and moves on. But the irony cuts deeper than he lets on. Next.js is MIT licensed. Cloudflare's vinext did not violate any license—it did exactly what Ronacher calls a contribution to the culture of openness, applied to a permissively licensed codebase. Vercel's reaction had nothing to do with license infringement; it was purely competitive and territorial. The implicit position is: reimplementing GPL software as MIT is a victory for sharing, but having our own MIT software reimplemented by a competitor is cause for outrage. This is what the claim that permissive licensing is “more share-friendly” than copyleft looks like in practice. The spirit of sharing, it turns out, runs in one direction only: outward from oneself.

This argument makes no sense. Are they arguing that because Vercel, specifically, had this attitude, this is an attitude necessitated by AI, reimplementation, and those who are in favor of it towards more permissive licenses? That certainly doesn't seem to be an accurate way to summarize what antirez or Ronacher believe. In fact, under the legal and ethical frameworks (respectively) that those two put forward, Vercel has no right to claim that position and no way to enforce it, so it seems very strange to me to even assert that this sort of thing would be the practical result of AI reimplementations. This seems to just be pointing towards the hypocrisy of one particular company, and assuming that this would be the inevitable universal, attitude, and result when there's no evidence to think so.

It's ironic, because antirez actually literally addresses this specific argument. They completely miss the fact that a lot of his blog post is not actually just about legal but also about ethical matters. Specifically, the idea he puts forward is that yes, corporations can do these kinds of rewrites now, but they always had the resources and manpower to do so anyway. What's different now is that individuals can do this kind of rewrites when they never have the ability to do so before, and the vector of such a rewrite can be from a permissive to copyleft or even from decompile the proprietary to permissive or copyleft. The fact that it hasn't been so far is a more a factor of the fact that most people really hate copyleft and find an annoying and it's been losing traction and developer mind share for decades, not that this tactic can't be used that way. I think that's actually one of the big points he's trying to make with his GNU comparison — not just that if it was legal for GNU to do it, then it's legal for you to do with AI, and not even just the fundamental libertarian ethical axiom (that I agree with for the most part) that it should remain legal to do such a rewrite in either direction because in terms of the fundamental axioms that we enforce with violence in our society, there should be a level playing field where we look at the action itself and not just whether we like or dislike the consequences, but specifically the fact that if GNU did it once with the ability to rewrite things, it can be done again, even in the same direction, it now even more easily using AI.

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Perhaps we should finally admit that copyright has always been nonsense, and abolish this ridiculous measure once and for all

I think we're going one step too far even, AI itself is a gray area and how can they guarantee it was trained legally or if it's even legal what they're doing and how can they assert that the input training data didn't contain any copyrighted data.