A translation of a book to a different language is a derivative work. So a translation of a computer program to a different programming language is also. But if in the translation of the book you start altering the plot and the personalities of that characters, does it at some point become not a derivative work? What point? IANAL, and I have no real idea, but I imagine that point has been probed significantly in case-law with respect to creative works. Given the current climate of ever-expanding scope of "intellectual property", if they admit that the LLM had access to git source code then I would say their case is weak at best.
Related, software API compability is not a derivate work, or eligible to protection, as ruled in the US and in the EU. Google, SAP R/3, etc. cases.
Or SCO Vs IBM.
If everything would be a derivate work we would not Linux.
> translation.
It's not technically a translation, it's a re-implementation, with test suites acting as the destination. If it was a file by file translation your argument would have been valid.
Git is part of the LLM's training set though, so simply asking it to recreate git in another language is pretty equivalent. Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications)
That's something I have been wondering. If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to LLMs as well. If an LLM might have been trained on the original source code, it should be considered "tainted".
Yes, and realistically any code that LLMs produce is a derivative work of its training data. There's going to be a huge disaster licensing wise
I have absolutely no idea how LLMs got through anyone's legal departments, I guess the hope is that if everyone breaks the law enough, it'll just be fine
Problem is there's a lot more than a single repo in training data, the corpus is massive... Should the author of a blog post on cats also be compensated for simply being in the same training data as the git repo?
> If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation.
That is the difference between necessary and sufficient. Clean-room is sufficient to guarantee avoiding copyright, but it is not necessary. The line legally is south of there, but that position was chosen because they didn’t want to crossing and it was easier to argue for legally in court.
tl;dr: clean room is overkill for avoiding copyright infringement
> Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications)
Are you sure? LLMs are in some way a compressed version of their input but it's a pretty lossy compression (arguably this makes them more like a compression algorithm than a compressed version of the data). I'm not sure you can prompt a full, accurate, copy of a nontrivial codebase out of them. Even with zero temperature their accuracy is just not that high.
> I'm not sure you can prompt a full, accurate, copy of a nontrivial codebase out of them. Even with zero temperature their accuracy is just not that high.
Granted, these are some of the most widely spread texts, and not codebases, but just fyi: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671
> For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984 (Section 4).
Yes, but as soon as copyright became a problem for very rich people parts of it were cancelled.
1) re-implementation for compatibility (which was quickly "reestablished" through use of copyright-protecting encryption. In other words: do you get to write software that connects to MS/Apple/Google/Facebook servers without authorization from those companies? Yes. Do you get to copy an encryption key from their software to make it possible? No)
and, more recently,
2) violating copyright for LLM training
and, currently mostly attempted:
3) "uncopyrighting" run software through an LLM, and some people "believe" it comes out with your copyright on it! Because very rich people want to sell uncopyrighting.
Ie. the jury's still out what will happen when it's billionnaire vs billionnaire.
Of course, the question is what happens the second someone does this with a disney movie, or a big microsoft application ...
> Yes, but as soon as copyright became a problem for very rich people parts of it were cancelled.
When copyright law was established, not many poor people owned printing presses. That is to say, copyright law is a PROTECTION to the very rich, not an inconvenience
true but as the exception for model training (which can only be done by very, very rich people and organizations) shows, there's some new rich and they want new rules.
Against the will of the people, as evidenced by the court cases and protests online ...