- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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I agree completely. AGPL 3.0 more specifically.
There could be an argument the “Prompt” is the source code otherwise. The other way is to say your Rust is compiled to machine code which is done by a machine - not a human so is it now open source/public domain? However I do think the article has a good argument.
Good news! It is! It’s actually public domain. If you get ahold of some AI generated code, you can do whatever you want with it.
I’m a lawyer that specializes in this area of IP law. It is true that code generated by an LLM lacks a human author and is therefore not copyright eligible material. However, there are a few nuances that technically make your statement somewhat incorrect.
One, the code can still be sold or licensed as personal property. However, once somebody gets their hands on that code, there few things stopping them from re-releasing it for free and entering it into the public domain. Even a contract prohibiting such transfer will likely fail due to a small provision in US copyright law.
Two, this code can still be protected as a trade secret, so don’t think you can create code at work and just freely distribute it if your employer has asked you to keep it confidential.
There are a number of other possible nuances, but those are two that I see come up most often in my practice.
Thank you for the nuance corrections. I wasn’t aware of these. :)
OK, but shouldn’t any code descended from GNU GPL code also be GNU GPL? Therefore if a model was trained on any GPL code, any output that it generates should also be GPL.
It depends how you use the GPL code. Merely training an LLM with such code is arguably fair use. I personally disagree with that assessment, buy most courts have ruled it as fair use so far. To be honest, US copyright law just merely wasn’t written with modern LLMs in mind and it is desperately in need of a number of statutory updates.
The training, sure, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m saying that any code output by a model trained on GPL code must be GPL, because it is derived from GPL code.
There is a little bit of confusion here I think. Copyright protects the expression itself (I.e., the code as it is written) and it allows the author (or owner) to stop people from infringing their code, which means performing, displaying, etc… The license – in your example, a GPL license – is just a contract that gives other people permission to do those things without committing copyright infringement. Fair use is a a defense someone can raise when they are being sued for copyright infringement.
The lawsuits against LLM companies are primarily based on the theory that LLM companies are infringing the copyright of the original authors beyond the scope of any license they might have, if any. The AI companies are saying that their scraping and use of the underlying work to train the model is fair use.
The thing you are talking about, the code being outputted by the LLMs, is sufficiently disconnected from the original copyrightable expression such that courts have so far ruled that any such output is not a derivative work of the original. This is mainly because such outputs have a randomness/temperature in how they are created, so it isn’t producing the same expression nor is it a derivative work under existing law.
There are a lot of other factors that go into all of this. For example, under Google v. Oracle, code generally gets “thinner” protection than literary or more creative works because it is functional in nature. There is an entire career’s worth of case law on this topic so it can get quite fact specific. But hopefully my explanation of the current system makes a little more sense.
That’s true but ya know, rules for thee not for me.
Kind of hoping that @NakedNateRollerSkate@lemmy.dbzer0.com has a more concrete answer, if they work professionally in this field, something less trite.
And from what I understand, LLMs are known to reproduce some text verbatim. That original text was made by a real human being, and thus would still be protected under copyright.
Too bad I don’t want to do anything with it.
All code should be open source, period.
I believe that the AGPL is the most correct license for LLM-generated software.
and in many jurisdictions, it probably is if the source code has been published at all; the article correctly explains that copyright requires human authorship and creativity
Public, proprietary code will increasingly become scarce as everything is reverse engineered.
That’s when things start going to the cloud and streamed to dumb terminals.
AI can still re-create the API and all functionality it provides.
Good in principle, hard to enforce.
(Not a lawyer) Everything AI made is stolen, therefore contracts, and so copyright, are void. Right?
Contracts that are at all unlawful are unenforceable and therefore void. But what about copyright?
If, in the middle of the night, you break into a McDonald’s and then call it McFelfs, and in the same night, steal everything out of a Starbucks and sell food and coffee with scratched out logos out of your McFelfs, does it become legally yours?
Make it open source, publish it on public sites, and allow the next generation of LLMs to be trained on it.
Proprietary code is rarely shared to the public. An enforced Creative Commons license won’t do much on this regard.
But it can be decompiled now. If the source code bears no copyright, the decompiled code won’t either.
Decompilation is a legal gray area. The Super Mario 64 decompilation is CC0, and I’m not aware of Nintendo pursuing any legal action against the decompilation itself.
