This idea reads like a joke, but there's something to it.
One feature request: In addition to high-level milestones, it would be cool if a partially-funded project would generate a public, highly detailed implementation plan.
Also, IANAL but MIT is still a license with a copyright holder. I don't think saying "it's MIT, we all own it" is defensible. The courts might view all this code as public domain.
I wonder why people are more eager to pool money to pay a corporate-owned computer to build things than to the actual humans who have been building open source for decades? Much of which has ended up in the training set?
Exactly. This screams crowdfunding for AI labs. Who made this? Someone at Anthropic?
Humans are more expensive.
Humans can also use LLM's even a local LLM
That's even more expensive.
Fablepool spends Anthropic's inference budget and puts the output under MIT, thats not growing Anthropic's moat, its commoditizing it. Anthropic just sells the API calls either way.
LLM output is just very predictable. If you spend 200$ on that /goal you will get some output. It may or may not work perfectly, but there will be a repo with some progress. If you specced the goal well and it is feasible, a decent model will most likely get you decent progress.
Also who would take on any of these projects for a meager 200$? Most of that stuff is borderline interesting, clearly not interesting enough for the people proposing the things to start working on them themselves.
if fable is writing it, courts my declare that its not even public domain? not a copywrightable work
I don't get this. No I did not write that code but I paid money to eg. Anthropic to buy that code. To me it sounds like I own it just the same.
Ownership is not the same as authorship. Copyright is about authors rights, not owners.
If you buy a text of me, I cannot sign away my authorship, and there’s certain limitations on what you can do with my text regardless of contract. I can only sell you usage rights - which may or may not be exclusive. If the text I wrote is trivial, neither you nor me can limit when it is reproduced. The effort of collecting data is not sufficient, if the data itself is declared trivial. See rulings about phone books.
When an AI provider produces data that is deemed not copyrightable, it cannot legally sell you exclusive usage rights. It can give it to you exclusively, but since you cannot yourself claim copyright, the moment you publish it it becomes available for others to use as well. One may argue that an LLM is similar to a phone book, with its entries being “trivial“ and its composition not artistic enough.
At least that’s the line of argument.
Ownership is not the same as authorship. Copyright is about authors rights, not owners.
If you buy a text of me, I cannot sign away my authorship, and there’s certain limitations on what you can do with my text regardless of contract.
(This is correct in many jurisdictions but not in all; for example moral rights are not a thing everywhere.)
"I paid money to someone to write that code" is exactly the line of argument that would lead to no copyright. There was the famous monkey selfie court case in 2015 that ruled that at least in the US, monkeys can't hold copyright. The same arguments would apply to AI. And since the AI can't create copyrighted works on its own, it can't assign copyright for works it created for hire either
The other line of argument is the "Claude Code is to coding like a photo camera is to painting". The image is generated automatically, but the input in how you point the camera is enough to still make it a creative work protected by copyright. Under that interpretation, you are not hiring AI, you are using it like a tool
The US Copyright Office holds the former opinion. I'm sure once this goes to court, lots of companies will vehemently argue the latter. I would not be surprised if we even end up changing the law over this
>"I paid money to someone to write that code" is exactly the line of argument that would lead to no copyright.
That's news to me. I (along with many hundreds of others) was paid to develop Minecraft, candy crush and battlefield, yet last I checked, they all retain their copyright.
Because you are human, and can thus create copyrighted works, and can assign that copyright when you do work for hire. Monkeys and AIs can't create copyrighted works, so there is nothing to assign when doing it for hire
The other line of argument avoids that issue by arguing that you personally created the code with the help of a tool (like a compiler or camera), not just commissioned it
Sure, but that's not what GP stated at all, unless possibly if they're anthropomorphizing to the point that they refer to Claude as "someone".
GP's (or rather GGGP's) statement was "I did not write that code but I paid money". So they claim no authorship. Anthropic is a company, they can't be the author either. So the only one left as author in that reasoning is Claude.
I don't think that necessarily anthropomorphizes it. We speak of monkeys as authors without calling them human. And really the legally important fact is that there was no human author. You can also treat it like CCTV footage which is generally not under copyright because there is no human author (even though most would hesitate to call the camera the author either)
As a human, it is possible for you to create copyrightable works and transfer the copyright to Microsoft in exchange for money. It is not possible for Claude Code to do those things because Claude Code is not a human.
Yes, but Claude code is hardly a "someone", so that's not what the comment I replied to was arguing at all.
They retain ownership over that code because you signed a contract saying explicitly that. Did you sign the same thing with Anthropic? Did your company?
Anthropic isn't a party to such contract either because they (most likely, in the reasonable reading of relevant laws) hold no copyright over the output of their LLM.
In this case, it's more like you paid money to FablePool. FablePool used Claude as a tool, and it delivers the product so they are the owners of the code, and have the MIT copyright assigned to them.
Nope. Copyright simply doesn't work like that. Unless there's real human creativity involved in the process, they can't just claim copyright to LLM output.
That's a problem more and more products in software will face.
In a few years most saas will have 95 percent or even more AI coded code.
Could I steal it and put it on git?
That'll translate across copyright jurisdictions.
I don’t know, if the design itself is copyrighted you could argue that the AI is just a bunch of hired workers that built it for extremely low wages.
If I hired a bunch of people to build me a house, and I drafted the architectural plans with the help of a paid architect, neither the architect nor the builders have ownership over the home.
So if a collection of people design something together maybe that has merit, they collectively paid for Anthropic to build it for them…
I’m pretty sure copyright office has settled that already. Inly human expression can be copyrighted:
> As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
The United States Copyright office. There's a whole world outside the US.
And even then they can change their mind.
Does not hurt to backstop with an explicit license.
> you could argue that the AI is just a bunch of hired workers that built it for extremely low wages.
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an assertion.
With apologies to Mr. Charles Babbage.
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I think what will be interesting is not whether the code will be produced, but rather: will anybody actually use any this output?
This sort of reminds me of startups that go out of business and then open source their code. It's kind of cool when they can do that, but almost nobody ever gets value from it.
Anyway, if anyone uses the code produced this way in prod, I'd love to hear your story.
I think pooling/donating tokens will be a thing. Not sure if like this, but in some format. The Django project, for example, came out and said they don't want your tokens, but I think a lot of people/projects will (do?) want your tokens.
Why not just give a project money and let them decide how to spend?
I guess if you have a subscription with a token allowance that you are not going to use up this week, it’s better to let someone else use those tokens rather than throwing them away. So using the food analogy it’s more like a store giving away unsold sandwiches to the homeless at the end of the day instead of throwing them away.
Donating tokens to a software project is a bit like donating food to a hungry person.
I think it might be beneficial to use blockchain, so that the donor can audit which prompts the token-pool they donated too performed. Perhaps donating tokens can also give you votes on which prompts are entered.
It’s a lot more like giving a hungry Hindu a gift card to a specific non-veg restaurant. Maybe they’ll use and enjoy it, maybe they’re vegetarian and will be insulted; either way that restaurant benefits. Especially if the hungry person exceeds the value of the gift card.
It’s more like donating snack cakes to a hungry person.
Primeagen predicted this in his latest video. I just didn't think I'll see this today.
The good ones all seem to be pointing in the direction of Django. Which, on its own, says a lot about how likely people will care about vibe-coded anything, whether pooled or not.
This is exactly how I'm building an OS right now. I have a lot of things speced out, and for most of them also create an issue. And I have a friend that just points his claudr code at the repo and tells it to "find the next thing to work on and implement it" I then do the review, verification, etc, but a great way to used unused quota.
I've always wanted to figure out how to implement a cooperative source license. Something like, you're allowed to do what you want with it, but any derivative work requires the same license, and X% of any income goes to the cooperative?
Not sure how it'd work, but there's absolutely a niche for a privacy focused data cooperative out there.
> X% of any income
Any income from what? The code is free, right? X% of your company's total revenue? Might as well just say "companies can't use this".
Personally I like the idea of a "free as in freedom but not free as in beer" license. You have to pay for a copy of the software, but after that you're free to use and modify it as you please, and share/sell your modifications under the same license.
To turn that into a cooperative you could have a company own the code and pay developers in shares of the company for PRs or other contributioins.
yeah it should really be CC0
Should it? If it was real world infrastructure, like a bridge it'd be easier to say that it belongs to those who lead the project and those who put down the money
The nice thing about a CC0 work is that it belongs to everybody. The leaders of the project have the same rights to use and modify the software as they do with software they have exclusive copyright over. In fact copyright does not grant the rights holder any new rights they did not have, it only restricts the rights of other people.
it probably already is in the public domain under US law, this just gives it the same status across jurisdictions
Highly detailed plan with time for the backers to comment and suggest improvements*
The problem with running open source code is the security aspect, but with Mythos running point, how would you distribute revenue is the real question.
Which market is even left after since the sasspocaloypse?
Maybe the financiers of a project just need it, they need it working, not to generate revenue for them?
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