Yesterday, I boosted something that maybe I shouldn't have, which made at least one OSS maintainer feel personally attacked.
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@miss_rodent I tend to think that the copyright concerns are both
A) real, and
B) overblown.There's a fair amount of case law at this point that indicates that you can mix in a small amount of human creativity to create something copyrightable. In the context of coding, particularly of open source, the "raw" LLM outputs are generally not even accessible, given that a bunch of human creative choices go into what to submit, and the project as a whole has an umbrella of human creativity generally
@miss_rodent But, to take the recent example of chardet:
While I do not like Bruce Perens's opinion on the copyright status of v7, I think he is *probably* correct on the merits under current jurisprudence. The "clean room" implementation is *probably* going to be ruled either uncopyrightable (public domain) or copyrighted (MIT license) by the "new author" by dint of a few minor choices around its submission and structure.
HOWEVER…
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@miss_rodent I tend to think that the copyright concerns are both
A) real, and
B) overblown.There's a fair amount of case law at this point that indicates that you can mix in a small amount of human creativity to create something copyrightable. In the context of coding, particularly of open source, the "raw" LLM outputs are generally not even accessible, given that a bunch of human creative choices go into what to submit, and the project as a whole has an umbrella of human creativity generally
@glyph I think the more pressing concern is their tendancy to produce exact or near-exact copies of training code (I linked a study a few days ago about it ... here https://girlcock.club/@miss_rodent/116190673809741664 ) which ... it's kind of an open question still, how much of a legal liability it is, but, there is enough uncertainty about it that if I were running a donation-funded project, I wouldn't want to risk the legal fees over it until someone with money sets stronger precedents about it.
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@miss_rodent But, to take the recent example of chardet:
While I do not like Bruce Perens's opinion on the copyright status of v7, I think he is *probably* correct on the merits under current jurisprudence. The "clean room" implementation is *probably* going to be ruled either uncopyrightable (public domain) or copyrighted (MIT license) by the "new author" by dint of a few minor choices around its submission and structure.
HOWEVER…
1. That's only in the US, nad
2. In this case, we already have a motivated and highly pissed-off litigant in the form of Mark Pilgrim who broke a *decade-long silence* to tell people that if they FA they might FO. A years-long lawsuit where you *win* is still a pretty catastrophic form of "finding out" in this case. There's still a pretty good chance, even if <50%, that he wins if he decides to sue, and even if he doesn't, you don't want to be standing in the blast radius
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1. That's only in the US, nad
2. In this case, we already have a motivated and highly pissed-off litigant in the form of Mark Pilgrim who broke a *decade-long silence* to tell people that if they FA they might FO. A years-long lawsuit where you *win* is still a pretty catastrophic form of "finding out" in this case. There's still a pretty good chance, even if <50%, that he wins if he decides to sue, and even if he doesn't, you don't want to be standing in the blast radius
@miss_rodent I am a graduate of the University of Debian-Legal myself (go fightin' sea-lions!), so I realize it is from my tenuous perch on the parapet of a glass house that I am hurling this particular stone, but what a lot of open source programmer / amateur legal analysts get wrong is that the MAIN risk of any copyright issue is the presence of a MOTIVATED COUNTERPARTY WITH A CAUSE OF ACTION, way more than any specific legal risk that you might be able to anticipate
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@miss_rodent I am a graduate of the University of Debian-Legal myself (go fightin' sea-lions!), so I realize it is from my tenuous perch on the parapet of a glass house that I am hurling this particular stone, but what a lot of open source programmer / amateur legal analysts get wrong is that the MAIN risk of any copyright issue is the presence of a MOTIVATED COUNTERPARTY WITH A CAUSE OF ACTION, way more than any specific legal risk that you might be able to anticipate
@miss_rodent maybe Pilgrim sues in the Chardet case and absolutely eats dirt on the copyright claims, but it turns out he has some kind of uno-reverse trademark thing that makes them liable for that. Or a patent. There are a zillion ways that such fight could go sideways for unpredictable reasons.
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@glyph I think the more pressing concern is their tendancy to produce exact or near-exact copies of training code (I linked a study a few days ago about it ... here https://girlcock.club/@miss_rodent/116190673809741664 ) which ... it's kind of an open question still, how much of a legal liability it is, but, there is enough uncertainty about it that if I were running a donation-funded project, I wouldn't want to risk the legal fees over it until someone with money sets stronger precedents about it.
@glyph mitigatable by going over it, making changes by hand, involving a human? Sure, probably.
... How many LLM slop code submissions are actually doing that sufficiently to legally qualify or copyright & as distinct from the original? ... where is the bar for that even going to land? ... per country?
Seem to be up in the air still. -
@glyph mitigatable by going over it, making changes by hand, involving a human? Sure, probably.
... How many LLM slop code submissions are actually doing that sufficiently to legally qualify or copyright & as distinct from the original? ... where is the bar for that even going to land? ... per country?
Seem to be up in the air still.@glyph And even if you can win the legal claim... how expensive is it going to be to win it, compared to the cost of just doing the code by hand in the already-established methodology in the first place?
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@glyph And even if you can win the legal claim... how expensive is it going to be to win it, compared to the cost of just doing the code by hand in the already-established methodology in the first place?
@glyph Like, even if it doesn't win, if the FSF decides to open GPL cases against LLM-generated code (hypothetically), how many will just settle, or remove the code from a cease-and-desist or something like that, vs actually deal with the legal battle over it to find out?
I haven't seen any indication the FSF would do this, exactly, but, they're an activist group holding rights on a lot of GPL software, it's not entirely out of the question that they might try it. -
@glyph Like, even if it doesn't win, if the FSF decides to open GPL cases against LLM-generated code (hypothetically), how many will just settle, or remove the code from a cease-and-desist or something like that, vs actually deal with the legal battle over it to find out?
I haven't seen any indication the FSF would do this, exactly, but, they're an activist group holding rights on a lot of GPL software, it's not entirely out of the question that they might try it.@glyph (I somewhat doubt they will, but, who knows. If they think they can put a strong case together I could see them at least going after non-free projects over it.)
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@glyph Honestly, I'm surprised more projects haven't banned it over just the licensing concerns at this point.
No copyright -> LLM generated code not eligible for licensing, unless your project is public domain/public domain-equivalent licensed, then LLM code creates a looming legal clusterfuck. And LLMs trained on GPL code might be *generating* license violations (and legal liability) any time you run them.@miss_rodent @glyph
The long-term implications of outsourcing software development to a proprietary-ass database (roleplaying as a bullshitting chatbot) are honestly dire enough to overshadow the ethical concerns of how said database was compiled.
(I don't give a crap about machinelearning or it's uses (beyond OCR maybe), but feel free to bring up the more open models) -
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