Interesting questions raised by recent SCOTUS refusal to hear appeals related to AI an copyright-ability, and how that may affect licensing in open source.
Hoping the HN community can bring more color to this, there are some members who know about these subjects.
This is precedent setting. In this case the rewrite was in same language, but if there's a python GPL project, and it's tests (spec) were used to rewrite specs in rust, and then an implementation in rust, can the second project be legally MIT, or any other?
If yes, this in a sense allows a path around GPL requirements. Linux's MIT version would be out in the next 1-2 years.
Lawyer here. Its not. This article is highly confused. The case was about whether an AI could be considered an author for copyright purposes. Mainly as a way of arguing for robot rights, not copyright. The person listed the AI as the sole author: On the application, Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author and himself as just the
work’s owner.
This is not the first time someone tried to say a machine is the author. The law is quite clear, the machine cant be an author for copyright purposes. Despite all the confused news articles, this does not mean if claude writes code for you it is copyright free. It just means you are the author. Machines being used as tools to generate works is quite common, even autonomously. ill steal from the opinion here:
In 1974, Congress created the National Commission on
New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (“CONTU”)
to study how copyright law should accommodate “the creation
of new works by the application or intervention of such
automatic systems or machine reproduction.”
...
This understanding of authorship and computer
technology is reflected in CONTU’s final report:
On the basis of its investigations and society’s experience
with the computer, the Commission believes that there is
no reasonable basis for considering that a computer in any
way contributes authorship to a work produced through its
use. The computer, like a camera or a typewriter, is an
inert instrument, capable of functioning only when
activated either directly or indirectly by a human. When
so activated it is capable of doing only what it is directed
to do in the way it is directed to perform.
...
IE When you use a computer or any tool you are still the author.
The court confirms this later:
Contrary to Dr. Thaler’s assumption, adhering to the
human-authorship requirement does not impede the protection
of works made with artificial intelligence. Thaler Opening Br.
38-39.
First, the human authorship requirement does not prohibit
copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of
artificial intelligence. The rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being—the person who created,
operated, or used artificial intelligence—and not the machine
itself. The Copyright Office, in fact, has allowed the
registration of works made by human authors who use artificial
intelligence.
There are cases where the use of AI made something uncopyrightable, even when a human was listed as the author, but all of the ones i know are image related.
That code is still LGPL, it doesn't matter what some release engineer writes in the release notes on Github. All original authors and copyright holders must have explicitly agreed to relicense under a different license, otherwise the code stays LGPL licensed.
Also the mentioned SCOTUS decision is concerned with authorship of generative AI products. That's very different of this case. Here we're talking about a tool that transformed source code and somehow magically got rid of copyright due to this transformation? Imagine the consequences to the US copyright industry if that were actually possible.
In the legal system there's no such thing as "code that is LGPL". It's not an xattr attached to the code.
There is an act of copying, and there is whether or not that copying was permitted under copyright law. If the author of the code said you can copy, then you can. If the original author didn't, but the author of a derivative work, who wasn't allowed to create a derivative work, told you you could copy it, then it's complicated.
And none of it's enforced except in lawsuits. If your work was copied without permission, you have to sue the person who did that, or else nothing happens to them.
I think the more interesting question here would be if someone could fine tune an open weight model to remove knowledge of a particular library (not sure how you'd do that, but maybe possible?) and then try to get it to produce a clean room implementation.
> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot.
How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no permission was sought from authors of source code the models were trained on. So there is no way to just release the code created by a machine into public domain without knowing how the model was inspired to come up with the generated code in the first place. Pretty sure it would be considered in the scope of "reverse engineering" and that is not specific only to humans. You can extend it to machines as well.
EDIT: I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code. And a licensing model with original authors (all Github users who contributed code in some form) should be setup to be reimbursed by AI companies. In other words, a % of profits must flow back to community as a whole every time code-related tokens are generated. Even if everyone receives pennies it doesn't matter. That is fair. Also should extend to artists whose art was used for training.
I would be totally fine with all code generated by LLMs being considered to be under GPL v3 unless the model authors can prove without any doubt it was not trained on any GPL v3 code - viral licensing to the max. ;-)
This has the potential to kill open source, or at least the most restrictive licenses (GPL, AGPL, ...): if a license no longer protects software from unwanted use, the only possible strategy is to make the development closed source.
If you'd be willing to close source your "libre" open source project because somebody might do something you don't like with it, you never wanted a "libre" project.
I mean in my opinion GPL licensed code should just infect models forcing them to follow the license.
You can do this a lot by saying things like: complete the code "<snippet from gpl licensed code>".
And if now the models are GPL licensed the problem of relicensing is gone since the code produced by these models should in theory be also GPL licensed.
Unfortunately, there is a dumb clause that computer generated code cannot be copyrighted or licensed to begin with.
> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot.
Im struggling to see where this conclusion came from. To me it sounds like the AI-written work can not be coppywritten, and so its kind of like a copy pasting the original code. Copy pasting the original code doesnt make it public domain. Ai gen code cant be copywritten, or entered into the public domain, or used for purposes outside of the original code's license. Whats the paradox here?
If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in all clean room rewrites) the spec is purely factual with all copyrightable expression having been distilled out.
Licensing issues aside, the chardet rewrite seems to be clearly superior to the original in performance too. It's likely that many open source projects could benefit from a similar approach.
Can we do the same with universal music? Because that's easy and already possible. Or Microsoft Windows? Because we all know the answer: if it works, essentially any government will immediately call it illegal.
Because if this isn't allowed, that makes all of the AI models themselves illegal. They are very much the product of using others' copyrighted stuff and rewriting it.
But of course this will be allowed because copyright was never meant to protect anyone small. And that it's in direct contradiction with what applies to large companies? Courts won't care.
> If “AI-rewriting” is accepted as a valid way to change licenses, it represents the end of Copyleft. Any developer could take a GPL-licensed project, feed it into an LLM with the prompt “Rewrite this in a different style,” and release it under MIT. The legal and ethical lines are still being drawn, and the chardet v7.0.0 case is one of the first real-world tests.
This isn't even limited to "the end of copyleft"; it's the end of all copyright! At least copyright protecting the little guy. If you have deep enough pockets to create LLMs, you can in this potential future use them to wash away anyone's copyright for any work. Why would the GPL be the only target? If it works for the GPL, it surely also works for your photographs, poetry – or hell even proprietary software?
By design you can't know if the LLM doing the rewrite was exposed to the original code base. Unless the AI company is disclosing their training material, which they won't because they don't want to admit breaking the law.
I don't see how this is different from current human poaching practices. i.e. It appears to be currently legal to hire an employee from company A who has been "tainted" by company A's [proprietary AI secrets/proprietary CPU architecture secrets/etc] in order to develop a competing offering for company B. i.e. It's not illegal for a human who worked at Intel for 20 years to go work for AMD even though they are certainly "tainted" with all sorts of copyrighted/proprietary knowledge that will surely leak through at AMD. Maybe patents are a first line of defense for company A, but that can't prevent adjacent solutions that aren't outright duplications and circumvent the patent.
In mind, if you feed code into an AI model then the output is clearly a derivative work, with all the licensing implications. This seems objectively reasonable?
> In traditional software law, a “clean room” rewrite requires two teams
So, I dislike AI and wish it would disappear, BUT!
The argument is strange here, because ... how can a2mark ensure that AI
did NOT do a clean-room conforming rewrite? Because I think in theory AI
can do precisely this; you just need to make sure that the model used
does that too. And this can be verified, in theory. So I don't fully
understand a2mark here. Yes, AI may make use of the original source code,
but it could "implement" things on its own. Ultimately this is finite
complexity, not infinite complexity. I think a2mark's argument is in
theory weak here. And I say this as someone who dislikes AI. The main
question is: can computers do a clean rewrite, in principle? And I think
the answer is yes. That is not saying that claude did this here, mind
you; I really don't know the particulars. But the underlying principle?
I don't see why AI could not do this. a2mark may need to reconsider the
statement here.
93 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 66.0 ms ] threadHoping the HN community can bring more color to this, there are some members who know about these subjects.
If yes, this in a sense allows a path around GPL requirements. Linux's MIT version would be out in the next 1-2 years.
Is the "clean room" process meaningfully backed by legal precedent?
This is not the first time someone tried to say a machine is the author. The law is quite clear, the machine cant be an author for copyright purposes. Despite all the confused news articles, this does not mean if claude writes code for you it is copyright free. It just means you are the author. Machines being used as tools to generate works is quite common, even autonomously. ill steal from the opinion here:
In 1974, Congress created the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (“CONTU”) to study how copyright law should accommodate “the creation of new works by the application or intervention of such automatic systems or machine reproduction.”
...
This understanding of authorship and computer technology is reflected in CONTU’s final report: On the basis of its investigations and society’s experience with the computer, the Commission believes that there is no reasonable basis for considering that a computer in any way contributes authorship to a work produced through its use. The computer, like a camera or a typewriter, is an inert instrument, capable of functioning only when activated either directly or indirectly by a human. When so activated it is capable of doing only what it is directed to do in the way it is directed to perform.
...
IE When you use a computer or any tool you are still the author.
The court confirms this later:
Contrary to Dr. Thaler’s assumption, adhering to the human-authorship requirement does not impede the protection of works made with artificial intelligence. Thaler Opening Br. 38-39. First, the human authorship requirement does not prohibit copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being—the person who created, operated, or used artificial intelligence—and not the machine itself. The Copyright Office, in fact, has allowed the registration of works made by human authors who use artificial intelligence.
There are cases where the use of AI made something uncopyrightable, even when a human was listed as the author, but all of the ones i know are image related.
Also the mentioned SCOTUS decision is concerned with authorship of generative AI products. That's very different of this case. Here we're talking about a tool that transformed source code and somehow magically got rid of copyright due to this transformation? Imagine the consequences to the US copyright industry if that were actually possible.
There is an act of copying, and there is whether or not that copying was permitted under copyright law. If the author of the code said you can copy, then you can. If the original author didn't, but the author of a derivative work, who wasn't allowed to create a derivative work, told you you could copy it, then it's complicated.
And none of it's enforced except in lawsuits. If your work was copied without permission, you have to sue the person who did that, or else nothing happens to them.
How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no permission was sought from authors of source code the models were trained on. So there is no way to just release the code created by a machine into public domain without knowing how the model was inspired to come up with the generated code in the first place. Pretty sure it would be considered in the scope of "reverse engineering" and that is not specific only to humans. You can extend it to machines as well.
EDIT: I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code. And a licensing model with original authors (all Github users who contributed code in some form) should be setup to be reimbursed by AI companies. In other words, a % of profits must flow back to community as a whole every time code-related tokens are generated. Even if everyone receives pennies it doesn't matter. That is fair. Also should extend to artists whose art was used for training.
You can do this a lot by saying things like: complete the code "<snippet from gpl licensed code>".
And if now the models are GPL licensed the problem of relicensing is gone since the code produced by these models should in theory be also GPL licensed.
Unfortunately, there is a dumb clause that computer generated code cannot be copyrighted or licensed to begin with.
Mark Pilgrim! Now that‘s a name I haven‘t read in a long time.
Im struggling to see where this conclusion came from. To me it sounds like the AI-written work can not be coppywritten, and so its kind of like a copy pasting the original code. Copy pasting the original code doesnt make it public domain. Ai gen code cant be copywritten, or entered into the public domain, or used for purposes outside of the original code's license. Whats the paradox here?
The key leap from gpt3 to gpt-3.5 (aka ChatGPT) was code-davinci-002, which is trained upon Github source code after OpenAI-Microsoft partnership.
Open source code contributed much to LLM's amazing CoT consistency. If there's no Open Source movement, LLM would be developed much later.
Because if this isn't allowed, that makes all of the AI models themselves illegal. They are very much the product of using others' copyrighted stuff and rewriting it.
But of course this will be allowed because copyright was never meant to protect anyone small. And that it's in direct contradiction with what applies to large companies? Courts won't care.
This isn't even limited to "the end of copyleft"; it's the end of all copyright! At least copyright protecting the little guy. If you have deep enough pockets to create LLMs, you can in this potential future use them to wash away anyone's copyright for any work. Why would the GPL be the only target? If it works for the GPL, it surely also works for your photographs, poetry – or hell even proprietary software?
Software in the AI era is not that important.
Copyleft has already won, you can have new code in 40 seconds for $0.70 worth of tokens.
So, I dislike AI and wish it would disappear, BUT!
The argument is strange here, because ... how can a2mark ensure that AI did NOT do a clean-room conforming rewrite? Because I think in theory AI can do precisely this; you just need to make sure that the model used does that too. And this can be verified, in theory. So I don't fully understand a2mark here. Yes, AI may make use of the original source code, but it could "implement" things on its own. Ultimately this is finite complexity, not infinite complexity. I think a2mark's argument is in theory weak here. And I say this as someone who dislikes AI. The main question is: can computers do a clean rewrite, in principle? And I think the answer is yes. That is not saying that claude did this here, mind you; I really don't know the particulars. But the underlying principle? I don't see why AI could not do this. a2mark may need to reconsider the statement here.
> *Context:* The registry maps every supported encoding to its metadata. Era assignments MUST match chardet 6.0.0's `chardet/metadata/charsets.py` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chardet/chardet/f0676c0d6a...
> Fetch that file and use it as the authoritative reference for which encodings belong to which era. Do not invent era assignments.
[0] https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...