> The author was banned from Asahi Linux for hiding his extensive use of LLMs from us in another attempted contribution, and (more importantly) for concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development. Make of this what you will.
This is false. I am a former Apple engineer. I did not conceal it (it's the top item of my resume and my LinkedIn and I made my PR from my public Github with my name attached, as opposed to a pseudonym which is expressly allowed by Asahi policy). I also had no exposure, at all, to any internal information or code about macOS, SPTM, or Apple Silicon during my time there.
I also don't have connections to people involved in Apple Silicon development (and I'd add that this does not mean someone cannot contribute, the question is were they exposed to tainted information, which is absolutely not true in my case). I have many friends who work for Apple (I'm a Stanford alum) but none in Apple Silicon directly.
I disagree with the phrasing of this entire thing, but this statement is demonstrably false.
No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law.
It's safest to err on the side of plausible deniability, any proximity to OEM software increases liability if things go wrong.
For the record Yuzu included code for circumventing Nintendo's DRM they had on game carts. It violated the DMCA.
It doesn't, this is what Nintendo claimed but it's false. The community learned their lessons from the Wii emulation era and you are supposed to bring your own keys, nothing is included in the emulator.
And yes, they also wrote this lie on their DMCA takedown against Suyu (which also doesn't have any keys), so they officially lied on a DMCA takedown.
Just because you have to bring your own keys that doesn't make it not a circumvention measure.
Here's the code that breaks the DRM.
https://github.com/Fabi/yuzu-mirror-mirror/blob/master/src/c...
Also I may mention that the support of external keys is there for you to get games for your own switch, pirates can just share decrypted games anyways.
Nintendo didn't want to get in court and also had to basically lie in a DMCA, I think that tells it all on their legal standpoint, they were afraid of creating a precedent.
Don't worry that if they were so sure to win, they would be in court already like they did with the R4 cartridge.
I seem to recall DeCSS being the 'hot button' as it was RE'd in a 'non clean' way, the code released, and then a 'clean room' RE could be made from the 'public' info ??
edit: actually, at the time I think there was German law allowing RE for 'interoperablity' or some such. But that was a long time ago so my memory might be off.
This "clean room RE" fabrication is also not something so obviously compelling that nobody would ever attempt to challenge it - it's just that nobody has cared to put dollars behind it. IP provenance cases are enormously difficult to prove and are almost always settled ahead of trial. This concept is software engineer folklore more than anything.
There's no law saying you have to do clean room RE. It's legal for me to look at a decompiled driver and write my own driver from scratch. It's not legal for me to just copy the decompilation, and a clean room environment is solid proof that it wasn't copied, but it's not the only way to not copy it, since I could also just not copy it.
Who has used it successfully in litigation?
I do agree with you that the term is misused (it’s almost completely irrelevant here, anyway) and over-applied, but “not having ever been in a position to see or access the source code” is proven, especially in SAS v World, to be a pretty strong defense that’s worth pursuing in some re-implementation scenarios.
You seem confused here? "Clean Room RE" is simply a descriptive result of copyright law in the US, and is well established. In the US there is no "sweat of the brow doctrine", pure facts simply cannot be copyrighted at all, nor underlying methods/ideas (that's patents). And as a direct result of the latter, again unlike patents, if two people truly independently write the same thing, both get separate copyright.
"Clean room reverse engineering" is just applying that to make any legal fight much cheaper or discourage it from every being bothered with in the first place. You have an RE "dirty" team that goes through copyrighted software and makes a specification that is purely factual, ie, "function 1 takes (int16)X input and does equation ABC on it, function 2 takes (long)X & (long)Y inputs and does LMN" etc. A factual/math spec like that cannot be copyrighted, so it breaks any derivation chain. They then give that, and only that with no other communications, to the clean team. If someone with no other exposure to the software being RE'd uses that spec to write a new piece of software themselves, then by definition the result cannot have any copyright of the original. It's a brand new work based off a list of uncopyrightable facts & math/ideas (though worth noting it could still get tripped up by abomination that is software patents).
There are other ways to argue against copyright infringement successfully, but they're much more subjective, which legally speaking reads "expensive, uncertain". CRRE simply trades that for two clear binary questions: was the spec copyrightable, and did the people writing a new piece of software from that spec have any previous exposure to the original? If the answers to that are no, then all arguments about function names being similar or whatever are no longer relevant.
On the subject of LLMs, one curious twist is that proprietary software might have less effective protection then open source depending on how it all goes. A coding LLM almost certain trained on all open source software available on the web. So there's at least some argument it's tainted. But proprietary software is proprietary. If the LLM has never had any of the source code in its training input, then isn't it clean in terms of producing anything derivative of that? That'll be kinda interesting, and might leave some companies with a bit of a conundrum (or I guess pushing the patent side even harder, but that has a much more sane 20 year expiration date vs copyright).
It doesn't really make sense for it to be in a statute or in case law.
When you are a copyright infringement defendant the plaintiff has the burden of proving two things: (1) that they have valid and enforceable copyright rights, and (2) that you infringed those rights.
Direct proof of the later is rare, so they usually prove infringement by showing you had access to the work and that your alleged infringing work is substantially similar.
There are some defenses in the statute, such as fair use. With these defenses you are basically saying "Even if they prove everything that normally would prove they case, there is this exception that says in these circumstances I'm allowed to do that". (That's called an affirmative defense).
There are also affirmative defenses that were developed in case law. First sale doctrine was originally a case law developed affirmative defense, but was later incorporated in the statute. Copyright misuse is another case law affirmative defense. That one has not been incorporated into statute.
There are also non-affirmative defenses, often called negative defenses or failure-of-proof defenses. With these your defense it "They can't prove I did this thing that is necessary for them to win".
Clean room implementations are not technically a defense. They are a development methodology designed to provide rebuttal evidence to support a future failure-of-proof defense if you are accused of infringement.
How would you even put that in a statute? As far as case law goes all the case law you'd expect to see is around the particular evidence offered to show the implementers really did not have access to copyrighted elements of plaintiff's work, like record keeping and proof of authenticity and things like that.
An analogy would be like not having alcohol at an event you are hosting that is open to families because you want to make sure you don't violate laws against serving alcohol to minors. You aren't going to find a statute that says "Not having served alcohol to children is a defense to a charge violating the not serving alcohol to children statute". It is implicit in the not serving alcohol to children statute.
Any case law you find on this will not be about whether not serving alcohol to children is a valid way to avoid violating the not serving alcohol to children law. It will be about whether or not some kid that had alcohol got it from you or snuck it in from outside or about whether you took care to make sure your caterer adhered to you no alcohol policy or things like that.
On mobile I didn't see the full URL, and zoomed before I saw the calendar. My bad.
The author’s blogpost is sloppy and has some signs of being AI written. This kind of bleeds into the main point I’m going to make.
Asahi Linux folks are clearly more conservative and erring on the side of caution, so, this means that the glibness with which the author is treating any of this is probably sufficient cause to refuse his entries. It is unclear if LLMs should be considered a toxic waste dump in terms of trying to maintain a clean room. We have not established a standard. It is clear the author doesn’t think this is a big deal, so that’s one conflict. The other conflict is that it is not clear what their exact interactions with Apple Silicon folks is and their glibness of it doesn’t clarify anything.
If you take a group that is trying to be very careful about the potential legal landmines a still nascent technology has and you get someone that espouses a general glibness about those concerns wanting to merge code…why on earth would you expect that group to accept them as a contributor?
This is not to say this isn’t really cool and a neat use of LLMs, but it is totally understandable why Asahi Linux won’t accept the fruits of this kind of development. If it turns out that Apple can identify its non-OSS code in this, it’ll be a mess.
I mean they are working around and on hardware controlled by a nearly 5 trillion market cap behemoth who has resources on the level of some nation states.
I'd be erring on the side of caution as well if they could hire that many lawyers.
And they say irony is dead.
I say this from an anonymous account but at least it isn't a throwaway. And at least I have the good taste to feel a little shame for my hypocrisy.
For the lazy.
The only way to get flawless Linux support is to buy hardware from an OEM that supports Linux well.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
Just call yourself "Idea Llmina" or whatever and let someone else commit it.
I think at this point the hacking community needs to grow some balls.
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.
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.
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?
LLMs have been firing out a lot of code for a year or 2 now at least, so I would have thought we'd start seeing some court cases by now?
The only real innovation for small planes is in the electric flight area - when you gotta do a full certification anyway as you're piloting an entirely new drivetrain, you can financially afford to be much more innovative on other parts of the design.
If by "this" you mean "an LLM [reproducing] copyrighted material", I have one here [0], with the challenge posed and plagiarized response at [1], found via [2].
One wonders how often the "Don't plagiarize, make no mistakes about this!" instruction fails and the LLMs include nontrivial chunks of other people's work into what they emit.
[0] <https://infosec.exchange/@zzt@mas.to/117134157775929932>
[1] <https://mas.to/@zzt/117122289150514171>
[2] <https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117134446424182178>
No. I have absolutely no doubt that happens, and I'm not defending it or encouraging it.
My point is whilst it technically might be illegal and happening all the time, if it's unenforceable or sets a precedence that would severely break the business world, there's every chance nobody would dare bring it to a court room.
I'm not aware of it happening yet (someone trying to enforce copyright on code that was put in production via an LLM) and I would have thought if it did, we would all know about the precedence now.
AIUI, in the US something that's entirely machine-generated is not eligible for copyright protection. If one could demonstrate that that machine-generated output is plagiarized human work and were rich enough to bring it to court, and able to wait five to ten years for the outcome, I have to believe that the usual copyvio rules would apply because that's not machine-generated output, it's straight-up unauthorized copying performed by a machine.
> My point is whilst it technically might be illegal and happening all the time...
If it's illegal, it's illegal. Refusal to enforce the law doesn't make the action any less illegal. Criminals who get away with their crimes are still criminals. [0]
> ... if it's unenforceable or sets a precedence that would severely break the business world, there's every chance nobody would dare bring it to a court room.
Or the highest court of the land would find a way to misinterpret "related" historical decisions to make the crime retroactively legal, yeah.
> ...I would have thought if it did, we would all know about the precedence now.
I'm not so sure. For one thing, the courts move really slowly when they're not very motivated to address something. For another, news that paints the twin VC darlings and their "industry" as villainous has a tendency to get buried by any one of a billion hype pieces or minor scandals that they have waiting in the wings.
[0] To bystanders who might wish to retort: Yes, I'm very aware that some things that are illegal should not be. I'm also aware that some things that are not illegal very much should be.
Can you state what actual point you're trying to make, rather than just picking each of my sentences and saying you're not so sure or you disagree? I could do the same to you, but it's just a waste of time if we're not trying to actually come to a conclusion together.
My hypothesis is that I suspect there's a MAD type situation where technically - by the letter of the law - all the big tech companies bragging about x% of their code being LLM generated are basically admitting to breaching copyright laws. But if one well funded tech company successfully prosecutes that and sets a precedence, then all big tech is going to have to wind back all the LLM code its put in production in the past few years to prevent litigation, which is probably unworkable, hence MAD.
I was looking to disprove my own hypothesis by asking for court cases prosecuting this. I'm not interested in arguing semantics with you.
(FWIW, I was repeatedly taught by various legal scholars at various levels of education that a criminal is someone who has been found by a court to be guilty of committing an act that violates criminal law. Up until that point, they're usually just a suspect or similar. Not debating, just highlighting that your definition of criminal doesn't negate or disprove any point I'm making. Same for your definition of illegal.)
If you're looking for a single point, that's going cause you trouble. Maybe go back and read what I wrote more carefully? I believe that I took care to make sure that my rebuttals to your claims both dovetailed in nicely with the part of the claim they were rebutting and -as a backup- contained the context needed to understand exactly what I was rebutting.
> I was looking to disprove my own hypothesis by asking for court cases prosecuting this.
_Prosecuting_? If you know enough to ask for that, then you have the knowledge needed to discover that those court cases don't really exist yet. The courts move slowly, especially when wealthy and/or powerful entities are supremely disinterested in attracting their attention.
> I'm not interested in arguing semantics with you.
For anything that's not incredibly clear-cut, that's like the entirety of the practice of law... at least in the US. At its heart, it's an adversarial storytelling exercise that has hundreds to thousands of years of tradition to pull from. I know this in part because I strongly considered becoming a lawyer before I became a programmer.
> ...a criminal is someone who has been found by a court to be guilty...
That's very good practice to engage in when talking about ordinary people. When talking about very powerful people or entities (such as large, influential companies), it's not so great. Very powerful entities tend to be permitted to get away with antisocial conduct that the rest of us get metaphorically nailed to the wall for. "Rules for thee but not for me" is trite, but very, very frequently how things end up working.
EDIT: There's also the example that I had in mind yesterday of US-based marijuana growers, commercial purchasers, individual purchasers, and consumers. All of these people are knowingly illegally producing, trafficking, and/or consuming a Schedule I substance. Folks often do this in the open, making no secret of it. The DoJ and DEA might choose not to haul these people into court, but most -if not all- of them are still very plainly criminals... just not convicted ones.
> My hypothesis is that I suspect there's a MAD type situation...
No. In regards to this whole LLM craze, there's no MAD-type situation between well-funded tech companies. There are a handful of players who have absolutely no interest in stopping the money-making party. No one involved in the money-making party that resulted in the 2008 crash who could make a credible report to the relevant authorities had any interest in calling those authorities in to stop it... why on earth would they when there's so much money being made? And since approximately none of the folks responsible for that huge pile of fraud saw any meaningful punishment, why wouldn't businesses with the means to engage in activity that's no less illegal but is very profitable for a large number of powerful people be discouraged from doing it again?
I hate the new system of no ownership and closed everything.
(I worked in a federal district court for a while.)
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.
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]
I'd also rephrase your first sentence as "Plagiarism isn't illegal, actually.". Unless you're rich and/or very influential, plagiarism is a seriously bad thing to do.
Decided by the courts in for American Megatrends and Phoenix Technologies for their IBM BIOS reimplementation that lead to the PC revolution in the 1990s.
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.
Weird how justified reasonable policies get the "crazy" label.
Imagine what happen if OP submit patches upstream skipping Asahi and they gonna be accepted.
I have many frustrations with LLMs, mainly around the type of user whos brain shuts down, but Apple would be walking a very fine line if they offer a service that they also will sue you for using.
Perhaps they should have used the Foundation Models to build their code. Really put Apple in a difficult position.
It won’t be clean room like the stuff Alyssa did.
Judges, as far as I know, do not generally take kindly to such arguments.
That's what's referred to as a "clean room implementation" further up the thread.
However, this specific thread is about the scenario where an employee has inside knowledge and is passing that knowledge on to the implementer.
Legally speaking, a clean room implementation has much better defenses from claims of copyright violation.
Any other interpretation would mean trade secrets have essentially infinite protection/NDAs apply to all of humanity.
The NDA doesn't apply to people who haven't signed it, but copyright law does. If you know the material you're receiving is under copyright (eg proprietary source code), and you publish work based on that copyright material, the fact that it's now widely available is not an effective defense against claims of copyright violation.
Person B in this scenario hasn't violated the NDA, but they could be sued for copyright infringement.
Which I think you know, so I don't understand your argument.
You said in another comment "However, this specific thread is about the scenario where an employee has inside knowledge and is passing that knowledge on to the implementer."
It being proprietary and/or secret information doesn't affect the copyright of the clean-room output. If there's trade secret implications those are worth discussing, but as a separate issue.
A clean room implementation by people who haven’t seen the original work means there can be no discussion of copying, which makes it much cheaper and more reliable to fight an infringement claim.
Your last comment said person B could be sued for copyright infringement. But the essence of clean-room is that person B "hasn't seen the original work which means there can be no discussion of copying".
Person A is not giving the original documents to person B, they only give functional details.
One of your earlier comments had a vague description of clean-room that wasn't clear on this aspect. But you were responding to someone that gave a clear and correct definition, so I assumed you were also using the actual definition.
If you've actually been talking about fake not-really-clean-room then sure someone could get sued. But that's obvious. The suggestion by alightsoul was actual clean-room.
Once it's established that person A has given _any_ details to person B, the upper bound on "expected cost of an effective defense" is dramatically higher.
Yeah but that's what clean room is.
You said "A clean room implementation by people who haven’t seen the original work means there can be no discussion of copying, which makes it much cheaper and more reliable to fight an infringement claim."
Something doesn't add up.
If you were thinking about a situation where the developers don't get the original work, and nobody feeds them info based on the original work either, that's not clean room, that's something much harder.
This sort of thing has always been a concern for projects that re-implement some existing piece of software, e.g. there were concerns early on during development of the GNU project about people contributing after having been exposed to Unix source code. Similarly, it is an ongoing concern for the Wine project[1], as well as ReactOS. The later even had a code freeze and internal audit in 2006, after allegations came forward that code had been derived from disassembled Windows binaries[2].
[1] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...
Isn’t that just saying “he uses modern tools and has subject matter expertise”?
See DCO. You cant sign off on you having permission to license the code when you stole it.
Many open source contributors like copyleft, but with illegal LLM copyright-washing many people disrespect the terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Certificate_of_Origi...
General thought here is the entire economy is all in on a bet that that would never be enforced and I am willing to bet we would rather change the law than destroy the economy…