Well yes, LLMs like Claude Code are merely a "copyright violation as a service". Everyone is so focused on the next new "AI" feature but we haven't actually resolved the issue of all model providers using stolen code to train their models and their lack of transparency on sourced training data.
The bigger issue (spiritually anyway) seems to be the need to develop free software LLM tools the same way FSF needed to develop free compilers. That's what's going to keep users from being able to adapt and control their machines. The issue is more ecological that programmers equipped with LLM are likely much more productive at creating and modifying code.
Some of the rest seems more like saying that anyone who studies GCC internals is forever tainted and must write copyleft code for life which seems laughable to me. Again this is more a topic of plagiarism than copyright which are fairly similar but actually different and not as clear cut.
You’re right, in the context of a technical legal interpretation they’re different. In the context of right or wrong, they amount to the same.
> anyone who studies GCC internals
LLMs are not a someone, they’re more like … the indigo printout of some text or design, you then use to make a scrapbook to be mass produced for profit. Very different situation.
When the AI bubble pops, I hope we will have some equalisation back to something more ethical.
But I also disagree in general about LLMs. LLMs are statistical text models but the general concept of what if there were an "AI" that wasn't a LLM and was trained on open source software is the same at the end of the day. I think whether or not LLM are intelligent or equivalent to humans is a red herring. There's no reason to not consider the implications of machines that are indistinguishable or even superior to human programmers. Particularly if we're discussing ethics getting lost in implementation details seems like a distraction and then all the derived ethics gets thrown out after the next innovation.
This is in line with my disagreement over the fair use rulings. Most people who published works that have been used to train AI systems, created those works and published them for other people to consume and benefit from, not for proprietary software systems to consume and benefit from. The existing licenses and laws did not account for this; nobody was anticipating it.
As a society, we don't benefit from copyright maximalism, despite how trendy it is around here all of a sudden. See also Oracle v. Google.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/oc9qj1/copilot...
Nobody benefits from a law that says that LLMs can't regurgitate the Quake sqrt() approximation. If that's what the law actually says, which it isn't.
most countries don't have a concept of fair use
but they nearly all have copyright law
That's all i've been saying from the start, and your pedantry isn't helpful. It doesn't make you look smart. You haven't added any value or illumination to the conversation.
if not there's plenty of competitors that will
don't worry, the orange one is fixing that problem too
Are there any rulings about use of code generated by model trained on copyrighted code?
I believe distinction is clear.
I just think it's especially asinine how corporations are perfectly willing to launder copyrighted works via LLMs when it's profitable to do so. We have to perpetually pay them for their works and if we break their little software locks it's felony contempt of business model, but they get to train their AIs on our works and reproduce them infinitely and with total impunity without paying us a cent.
It's that "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense that makes me reach such extreme logical conclusions that I feel empathy for terrorists.
>We have to perpetually pay them for their works and if we break their little software locks it's felony contempt of business model
You don't have to pay them, or break their restrictions.
>but they get to train their AIs on our works and reproduce them infinitely and with total impunity without paying us a cent.
You don't need to allow this either. Unfortunately open-source code is necessarily public.
>It's that "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense that makes me reach such extreme logical conclusions that I feel empathy for terrorists.
The way LLMs use code is fundamentally different from wholesale copying. If someone read your code and paraphrased it and tweaked it, it would be a completely new work not subject to the original copyright. At least it would be really hard to get a court to regard it as an infringement. This is like what LLMs do.
How is it contradictory? Tell it to the corporations who defend copyright for you and public domain fair use for themselves. If they were honest, they'd abolish copyright straight up instead of creating this idiotic caste system.
> Copyright shouldn't exist, but the businesses infringing on it are the bad ones?
Yes. Copyright shouldn't exist to begin with, but since it does, one would expect the corporations to work within the legal framework they themselves created and lobbied so heavily for. One would expect them to reap the consequences of their actions and be bound by the exact same limitations they seek to impose on us.
It is absolutely asinine to watch them make trillions of dollars by breaking their own rules while simultaneously pretendinf that nothing is happening and insisting that you mortal citizen must still abide by the same rules they are breaking.
The sheer dishonesty of it makes me sick to my core.
> If someone read your code and paraphrased it and tweaked it, it would be a completely new work not subject to the original copyright.
Derivative work.
I was once told that corporate programmers are warned by legal not to even read AGPLv3 source code, lest it subconsciously infect their thought processes and the final result. This is also the reason we have clean room reverse engineering where one team produces documentation and another uses it to reimplement the thing. Isolating minds from the copyrighted inputs is the whole point of it. All of this is risk management meant to disallow even the mere possibility that a derivative work was created in the process.
There is absolutely no reason to believe LLMs are any different. They are literally trained on copyrighted inputs. Either they're violating copyrights or we're being oppressed by these copyright monopolists who say we can't do stuff we should be able to do. Both cannot be true at the same time.
> At least it would be really hard to get a court to regard it as an infringement.
It's extremely hard to get a court to do anything. As in tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars difficult. Nothing is decided until actual judges start deciding things, and to get to that point you need to actually go through the legal system, and to do that you need to pay expensive lawyers lots of money. It's the reason people instantly fold the second legal action is threatened, doesn't matter if they're right. Corporations have money to burn, we don't.
And that's assuming that courts are presided by honest human beings who believe in law and reason instead of political activist judges or straight up corrupt judges who can be lobbied by industry.
There are different views out there about this. If you literally just copy a piece of code and make stupid changes, it might be a derivative work. But this is not guaranteed. There are times when there is one idiomatic way to do a thing, so your code will necessarily be similar to other code in the world. That type of code is not copyrightable, even if it appears in a larger work that is copyrightable. A small amount of bog standard code resembling something in another project is not in and of itself evidence of infringement.
Corporations would rather not have to deal with unnecessarily similar code or deliberate copyright or patent infringement. So they generally tell you not to look at anything else.
You should read over the criteria for something to be copyrightable: https://guides.lib.umich.edu/copyrightbasics/copyrightabilit...
The biggest issue is that any individual part of a copyrighted work may not be copyrightable. If you dissect a large copyrighted work, it probably contains many uncopyrightable structures. For example, in a book, most phrases and grammatical structures are not copyrightable. The style is not copyrightable. In code, common boilerplate is probably not copyrightable. Please don't make your stuff bizarre to add to its originality though. We need to be able to read and understand it lol.
>There is absolutely no reason to believe LLMs are any different. They are literally trained on copyrighted inputs. Either they're violating copyrights or we're being oppressed by these copyright monopolists who say we can't do stuff we should be able to do. Both cannot be true at the same time.
People who learn to program by reading open-source code are also trained on copyrighted inputs. Copyright may need some rethinking to cope with the reality of LLMs. Unless it is proven that AI is spitting out unique and copyrightable blocks of code from other projects, it really isn't infringing. People do this type of shit all the time. Have you ever looked at Stack Overflow and copied a couple of lines from it? You probably infringed on someone's copyright.
Ultimately, even if you prove copyright infringement happened, you have basically no recourse unless you also prove damages. Since open-source code is public and given away for free, the only possible damage is generally in being deprived of contributions that might have resulted from direct usage of your code. But direct integration of your entire project might have been highly unlikely anyway. Like it or not, people can be inspired by your work in a way that can't be proven without their direct confession.
> copyright shouldn't even exist to begin with.
Absolutely an improvement. Information wants to be free. Stop criminalizing it and people will find a way to free it. And once it's out there it's over, there is no containing it.
Even when the idea of a thing is "out there" there is a lot of grunt work and special stuff that needs to be implemented to get the best outcomes. Nobody owes you that work for free. Regardless of what GPL copers say, it is very hard to make money with software without enforcing some access restrictions and IP. Open source is great when it works, but it does not work for most things nor is it at the leading edge for most things.
Copyright is a functionally perpetual state granted monopoly on information, on numbers. A business model that depends on such a delusion should not even exist to begin with.
Saying that intellectual property is founded on a delusion because someone can infringe on it or it's mere numbers is like saying your physical property rights are a delusion because the stuff is mere matter and can be manipulated by anyone. While true, such statements add absolutely nothing to the conversation. If people are willing to copy from others rather than make their own creations, there is value in the original works that is a direct result of someone's labor, not some immutable law of the universe.
We're discussing this in a thread about AI laundering of copyrighted works, for god's sake. If you keep believing this delusion, you'll eventually watch it shatter right before your eyes.
Let's not waste time comparing bits of infomation to physical objects either. We can revisit this discussion when Star Trek replicators are invented.
Actually printing presses are alive and well.
>It's the 21st century, the age of information, the age of globally networked pocket supercomputers. Copying is so trivial that it's become normal. It happens every day at massive scales. People do not even realize they are doing it.
This is a bunch of hand-waving. Information is still bought and sold, and protected by law. Dissemination by the Internet is not all that different from dissemination on paper or via radio waves. People who make illegal copies of media know what they are doing.
>We're discussing this in a thread about AI laundering of copyrighted works, for god's sake. If you keep believing this delusion, you'll eventually watch it shatter right before your eyes.
Again, the AI is doing something not all that different from what an intelligent human would do. The fact it is done by a machine is only marginally relevant, because we are getting into philosophical questions about how it works and so on. Even if AGI is achieved, I think copyright will be extended to include the output of the machines. But what might change is that the value of information goes down as it gets easier to produce.
>Let's not waste time comparing bits of infomation to physical objects either. We can revisit this discussion when Star Trek replicators are invented.
It's not a waste. Even in the case where replicators existed, the output of a replicator would cost something because energy is not free. I don't think it is free in Star Trek if memory serves me right. The replicator and the holodeck, being finite resources, must be allocated intelligently and fairly among the crew. Same for the physical space aboard the ship. If anyone was to be a pack rat with unlimited replicator access, they might flood an entire deck with trinkets.
Likewise, even though copying is easy, it still represents a theft from the producer of the information. We are only debating details of the mechanics of how it works, to decide whether AI actually copies enough to be infringing and what the damages might actually be. That is one big question. That's one line of questioning. The other is, can the output of an AI be copyrighted? I think the answer to that question is definitely yes.
Exactly - that is what copyright was set up for (whereas before copyright, people could copy freely), and then copyleft comes and says that everyone can use and modify the code, and the only thing that the license prohibits is the ability of authors of derived works to apply their own copyright. In this way (known as being "viral"), copyleft uses the legal mechanism of copyright to essentially bring things to how they were before copyright.