Malus, which is a piece of "satire" but also fully functional, performs a "clean room" clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell, redistribute, etc. the software without crediting the original developers. But I have a hard time with the "clean room" argument since the LLM doing the behind-the-scenes work has already ingested the entire corpus of open source software -- and somehow the output of the LLMs isn't considered a derivative work.

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[–] 50 points 6 months ago (8 children)

It's obviously not clean room since the original code was in the training data.

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  • [–] [S] 15 points 6 months ago (7 children)

    Yep. But good luck getting a court to agree with you.

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    Omg Imagine if half of the case is just an ML course to teach the jury what training data is.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    That sounds painful. Absolutely no shade to the lovely older person I overheard today say: "so how do you get the little folks on the screen to know what buttons I pressed?"

    But I'm guessing it could be similar to music copywrite law where jurors don't have to understand audio engineering to know two samples sound the same.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Nope the class will be dropped down to teach all the basics and then up to vector databases and word embeddings to understand the case.

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Sounds like straight up bullshit.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    It's satire which brings attention to the problem. Read the reviews on the site.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    It will be fun watching those users who first make the jump to the new project.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    The legal side is usually behind the technology. This debate is only getting started.

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  • 32 comments in c/opensource@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 78 points 6 months ago (17 children)

    Also means you can feed leaked proprietary code to it and get open sourced versions

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  • [–] 56 points 6 months ago* (6 children)

    All it will take is for the reverse uno card to be implemented at a large enough scale against proprietary software before companies throw a pissy fit and this will all go away. Alternatively GPL could stipulate that AI implementation would trigger copyleft protections.

    This whole thing is stupid and in such bad faith. Maliciously clean room engineering open source software just to get around pesky licensing issues will cause so many more problems for these morons that already leech off the hard work of open source devs anyways. They literally have a steady stream of free software and all they have to do is NOT steal it. That's it. Just don't be a fucking evil goon, that's the only stipulation. They're shooting themselves in the foot so hard.

    But no, having free access to the hard work of others isn't enough, they have to hoard it for themselves, like everything else in this deeply rotten civilization.

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  • [–] 17 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Alternatively GPL could stipulate that AI implementation would trigger copyleft protections.

    I argue that it already does.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Could link to your reasoning and/or summarise it here? Thanks.

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  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago*
    • The GPL requires that derivative works must also be licensed under the GPL.
    • LLMs are trained on GPL code.
    • LLM output is a derivative work of the training data (especially if it's asked to replicate one of the works it's trained on!).
    • Therefore, all LLM output is either also GPL, or if it's also been trained on stuff with conflicting licensing, just straight-up copyright infringement to use at all no matter what.

    Laundering copyright is what LLMs do. It is fundamental to how they function, which means that they are a fundamentally illegal technology.

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  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, I was thinking along similar lines when I first learned about Malus a couple days ago. Fine, so they get a "free" copy of open-source software that they can use without restrictions. What happens as time goes by and their "free" copy no longer receives any updates, fixes, improvements? I guess they can keep repeating the process every time a new version is released, but the whole thing seems counterproductive for anyone trying this.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago

    Get console OSes since PlayStation BSD stuff could be useful for something, and Nintendo stuff just because they always lose their shit and show their true colours. Modern Windows source code for moving React OS forward because they deserve to hit a real release after so long. And of course all of the Creative Cloud shit to remove reasons for still paying the Adobe Tax.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    ..... Dude will this actually work??

    Like say I throw in Sony PlayStation's proprietary code for pkg installations on ps5 or something similar, I could just feed that into this and it would spit out a functioning open sourced alternative??

    Man the applications for piracy are insane. Lets fight fire with fire.

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  • [–] 17 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Could you imagine having to maintain it yourself though. I mean assumming it even spits out a working version, you've probably introduced a ton of new bugs and potential security threats. Additionally, unlike a fork, you can't even merge in improvements to the software.

    While it's a scary topic, in most cases you'd be shooting yourself in the foot if you incorporated anything this spits out.

    Edit:spelling

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  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago

    They expect the maintainer yo continue develop the one source version so they can use the tool again to get new versions. Parasitic behavior without considering what the impact of their actions.

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    For a small price, Malus.sh will use AI to ingest any piece of software you give and spit out a new version of it that “liberates” it from any existing copyright licenses.

    How isethat a "clean room"? The program is scanning the actual software and making a version based on what it learned from the scan.

    I think for this to be legit, you'd have to give malus a spec (no source code) of the program and then have it generate new code from that.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago

    Malus uses two AIs for that. One creates a spec and the other implements that spec.

    But that doesn't even work, because you would have to prove that the original software was not part of the training set. And with it being an LLM from a big corporation, that chance is close to zero.

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  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago

    They all do that lol

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Someone needs to make: buenus - clean room proprietary software to AGPLv3

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago

    AI doesn’t exist.

    LLMs have vanishingly narrow legitimate justifiable use cases.

    Copyright is an intrinsically hostile environment within which to conduct collaborative activities.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    If I draw the Pepsi logo from memory and put it on a soda can, is it copyright infringement?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Generally, US law has decided algorithms are not copyrightable.

    Copyright law has alot of variability depending on þe subject. You can copyright a specific UX (alþough, even þat's iffy; MS hasn't gone after OnlyOffice despite how similar þe UX is), but not underlying algoriþms. White room reverse engineering is protected.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago

    I happened to hear about that instrument from a video from FOSDEM'26: https://youtu.be/9qEtm2zx314

    It gives more context, but it really should've been a text article, imo. It talks about history of copyright, and why its application now is kinda broken, at least that was my takeaway.

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  • [+] -6 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I actually like this tool. Once code is public, it’s just information. The AI is learning patterns the same way any developer would. Trying to enforce licenses on whatever the model spits out feels like trying to own ideas, and I’m not a fan of that.

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 6 months ago

    For copyleft licenses like the GPL maybe this would be true if the original, attributed code, along with all of the new alterations, modifications, enhancements and improvements, were also fed back into the machine, but even then it seems unlikely. Copyleft is explicitly about keeping derivative works in the public sphere, not really about ownership of ideas per se.

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  • 7 comments in c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 12 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    This is why you rulw AI generated products as uncopyrightable .

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  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    THEY ATE THE ONION!

    Jokes aside, Malus is fake, but I wouldn't be surprised that a company will make it real...

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    It's satire

    The website itself is clearly satire and the 404 article also mentions it's satire

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    Of course, but it does not change anything in my view. It's satire now, but there are uncountable cases of awful serious that starts with a joke.
    I hate them, and I will always hate it. I ABHOR everything about it.
    So, F*CK them... f*ck then hard, and their f*cking awful "joke".

    "Some jokes are less agreeable than others." ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

    Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    I think when you get to the point that you are providing the service, and taking money for it, it stops being satire. They even pulled the "well somebody is going to make money off this anyway so why not us".

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  • 2 comments in c/news@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show view that post
    [–] 13 points 6 months ago

    I'm told 8 times in this article that the project is "satire," and yet, it exists, works (allegedly), and is making money by selling the product they claim to sell.

    "It's just a prank bro" doesn't really hold when you are profiting off creating the problem you claim exists.

    I believe the appropriate term is "Schroedinger's douchebag" though in a more tech bro silicon valley way.

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago

    some would argue, are built from scratch and are therefore original work that can bypass existing copyright licenses. Others would say that software produced by large language models is inherently derivative

    Others would say that, yeah. Others, like the US courts that have already ruled that this is the case.

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