Apparently chardet got Claude to rewrite the entire codebase from LGPL to MIT?

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@scy @Foxboron ... naming and goes back to a time where making copies and distributing them was the hard part.

This is a non-problem in the digital age, which is why it's fine to create backup copies of copyrighted works, so long as the people accessing them are always the people having purchased/licensed an original copy.

So LLMs training on GPL is not itself a copyright violation, and them reproducing similar code isn't either, but then publishing such sufficiently similar code is.

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@scy @Foxboron TL;DR what others already wrote: if the result is similar enough to inputs, the copyright holder of the inputs could challenge it, yes.

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@scy @Foxboron If courts decide to throw this out, I would personally *love* for someone to use the exact same argument to produce a minimally altered copy of Avatar, and have Hollywood throw a fit.

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@scy @Foxboron Basically, let's not fight this, let the industry giants fight each other. Throw a few near-copies of Metallica songs in for good measure, so we get a v2 of that "Napster baaaad" animation with greedy gnome Lars Ulrich.

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@scy @Foxboron Either LLMs will die on the spot, or Copyright does.

[mutesplash@uncontrollablegas.com]

@Foxboron Fun, one of the fundamental problems I have with this technology!

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@xgranade
They have been the upstream maintainer for years, so I don't see any huge issue with that.

I would have done the same probably?

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@Foxboron Posted an unkind reply and deleted, sorry. I'm getting frustrated with the whole AI thing today, and I'm not being my best self. I should probably just step offline for a bit.

This is just so... frustrating.

[jti42@infosec.exchange]

@Foxboron @scy@chaos.social That'd be the US system. Then there's the various Euro systems that differ substantially. I'm certainly curious how this will turn out.

On the other hand: it'd require that those who can enforce their rights here actually do so.
Given that IP rights are normally enforced pretty harshly, even on consumers (anyone remember the days of the torrent c&d letters or the traditional find&ban the infringing exhibitor days on computex et al?) they're effectively completely ignored on FOSS.
There is virtually no education for biz, cs or law students on this topic, let alone mandatory ed.

Presenting the case of possibilities and rights to those who have them is often dismissed by those, especially developers on the younger side or those who are still in a "hobby" / "non commercial" stage. Only to shortly after complain about sustainability and demanding funding.

Instead we see demands to throw substantial amounts of tax money after random Foss projects on more or less random criteria and evaluators. Which will totally scale, right?

Virtually every company that was enforced against in terms of FOSS compliance ended up consciously allocating resources to FOSS in various ways. There are a lot of companies and they are a renewable resource in a functional economy.

But what do I know, rite? I just see the cases.
/rant

[jti42@infosec.exchange]

@Foxboron today's new term "code laundering" I'll keep that one

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@xgranade
Yes.

But lets not clutch pearls over how a understaffed FOSS project decides to merge their work.

[kekunplazas@mamot.fr]

@Foxboron @scy So it's not copyrightable, what are they using to apply the MIT license if not their copyright‽ That makes no sense to me. (I'm reacting to you but to what you shared, to be clear.)

[wolfcoder@lagopine.lgbt]

@Foxboron more like laundered without emptying the lint trap, can't imagine the bugs and vulns a whole AI re-write would do.

[foxboron@chaos.social]

Seems like the original author saw this as well.

No right to relicense this project · Issue #327 · chardet/chardet

Hi, I'm Mark Pilgrim. You may remember me from such classics as "Dive Into Python" and "Universal Character Encoding Detector." I am the original author of chardet. First off, I would like to thank the current maintainers and everyone wh...

GitHub (github.com)

Please do not brigade the project.

[orca@nya.one]

@Foxboron@chaos.social

Rewrite the entire codebase

Argh I can see a disaster coming

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@Foxboron @xgranade If it was solely his work, he could just change the license. He didn't do that - he felt he had to AI-wash it. That suggests there is in fact other people's work in there that he's trying to AI-wash away their copyright.

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@davidgerard @xgranade

I'm just making a claim that we can't fault people for how they on their pull requests work.

For the point you are raising see this issue from 13 years ago.

Changing license · Issue #36 · chardet/chardet

This feels strange to be posing as a question, since I'm one of the co-maintainers, but @sigmavirus24 and @erikrose, do you know if it's okay/legal for us to change the license of chardet? Because it was started by Mark Pilgrim I feel li...

GitHub (github.com)

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@Foxboron @xgranade right, confirming the issue I raised.

[njsg@mementomori.social]

@Foxboron [grabs cp(1) code from some implementation]
[compiles but installs it as cp.ai]
[chardet-fork: release 1.0: AI-based ground-up rewrite of chardet, public domain]