What did open source do to deserve that?
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All code should be open source and public domain.
Yes please but that's also not how copyrights work.
Nice, poisoning the training data for future models 👍
Hallucinated Open Shit Software (HOSS)
I disagree. Copyleft is built on top of copyright. Code generated with an LLM built from plundered sources should not enjoy copyright at all.
Imagine if any work made by AI was free use, public domain, uncopyrightable. Bet that would change the equation for corporations a bit.
Make a movie using AI? Anyone can make copies and distribute them freely.
And pay the rights holders from the training materials.
I think you would be suprised how much of the code that is written by AI is solving the same problems every company solves, and is totally useless outside the company. Very little of it is really novel or valuable. And that is the code not being written by AI.
Except generated code in a lot of places simply cannot be copyrighted for starters (there is degree this can vary from place to place, from having some edits to being just a small part of the entire project)
Source? I'm pretty sure that's true for images, but copywrite law can vary greatly depending on medium, and context.
This is exactly how it should work. Any code copied from GNU GPL code should legally also be GNU GPL, no ifs, ands or buts.
Oh, your training data set contains GPL code? Guess what, all the output from that model is now GPL. It's your burden to prove that your training data does not contain any GPL code.
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.
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.
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.
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
(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?
I believe that the AGPL is the most correct license for LLM-generated software.
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.
Public, proprietary code will increasingly become scarce as everything is reverse engineered.
All AI-generated source should be ineligible for copyright protection at all, just like is the case for AI-generated art.
But guess how that's going to pan out when it gets to court.
At least at the moment in the US, the copyright office makes no distinction between visual art and LLM slop, in that neither is eligible for protection. The courts have so far upheld this, though there haven't been any "blockbuster"-level cases yet.
So for the moment, AI-generated code is ineligible for protection.
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