What AI are eroding is copyright. You can re-implement not just a GPL program, but to reverse engineer and re-implement a closed source program too, people have demonstrated it already, there were stories here on HN about it.
AI is eroding copyright, so there may no longer be a need for the GPL. GNU should stop and rethink its stance, chuck away the GPL as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and embrace LLM as the main weapon.
LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS.
I don't think that's an exciting idea for the Free Software Foundation.
Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are 'good enough', but we're not there yet.
There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations.
Edit: I guess the conclusion I come to is that LLM's are good for 'getting things done', but the context in which they are operating is one where the balance of power is heavily tilted towards capital, and open source is perhaps less interesting to participate in if the machines are just going to slurp it up and people don't have to respect the license or even acknowledge your work.
Yeah, a bit of a conundrum. But I don't think that fighting for copyright now can bring any benefits for FOSS. GNU should bring Stallman back and see whether he can come with any new ideas and a new strategy. Alternatively they could try without Stallman. But the point is: they should stop and think again. Maybe they will find a way forward, maybe they won't but it means that either they could continue their fight for a freedom meaningfully, or they could just stop fighting and find some other things to do. Both options are better then fighting for copyright.
> There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations.
I want a clarify this statement a bit. The thing with LLM relying on work of others are not against GPU philosophy as I understand it: algorithms have to be free. Nothing wrong with training LLMs on them or on programs implementing them. Nothing wrong with using these LLMs to write new (free) programs. What is wrong are corporations reaping all the benefits now and locking down new algorithms later.
I think it is important, because copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical), but not for GNU.
IMO the primary significant trend in AI. Doesn't get talked about nearly enough. Means the AI is working, I guess.
>GNU should bring Stallman back ... Alternatively they could try without Stallman.
Leave Britney alone >:(
>copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical)
I've busted out "intellectual property is a crime against humanity" at layfolk to see if that shortcuts through that entire little politico-philosophical minefield. They emote the requisite mild shock when such things as crimes against humanity are mentioned; as well as at someone making such a radical statement which seems to come from no familiar species of echo chamber; and then a moment later they begin to very much look like they see where I'm coming from.
There are near-SOTA LLM's available under permissive licenses. Even running them doesn't require prohibitive expenses on hardware unless you insist on realtime use.
It's nowhere near the order of magnitude of the kind of spending they're sinking into LLM's. The FSF and other groups were reasonably successful at enforcing the GPL, operating on a budget 1000's of times smaller than that of AI companies.
Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i think, not a high priced endeavor for an org (compared to an individual).
IMO the proposition is little fishy, but its not totally without merit and imo deserves investigation. If we are all worried about our jobs, even via building custom for sale software, there is likely something there that may obviate the need at least for end user applications. Again, im deeply skeptical, but it is interesting.
Running proprietary model would make you subject to whatever ToS the LLM companies choose on a particular day, and what you can produce with them, which circles back to the raison d'etre for the GPL and GNU.
Until all software copyright is dead and buried, there is no need for copyleft to change tack. Otherwise there rising tide may rise high enough to drown GPL, but not proprietary software.
Open source is easier to counterfeit/license-launder/re-implement using LLMs because source code is much lower-hanging fruit, and is understood by more people than closed-source assembly.
This was already the case and it just got worse, not better.
Now they've just hoovered up all the free stuff into machines that can mix it up enough to spit it out in a way that doesn't even require attribution, and you have to pay to use their machine.
Before we had RedHat and Ubuntu, who at least were contributing back, now we have Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI who are racing to lock the barn door around their new captive sheep. It's just a massive IP laundromat.
LLMs are one of the primary manifestations of 'evil software corporations' currently.
Unfortunately, there are cases where you simply can't just "re-implement" something. E.g., because doing so requires access to restricted tools, keys, or proprietary specifications.
"So, I looked for a way to stop that from happening. The method I came up with is called “copyleft.” It's called copyleft because it's sort of like taking copyright and flipping it over. [Laughter] Legally, copyleft works based on copyright. We use the existing copyright law, but we use it to achieve a very different goal."
https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/
For the right goal, he should have called it "rightcopy".
i.e. mirroring it
> use it to achieve a very different goal."
"very different goal" isn't the same as "fundamentally destroying copyright"
the very different goal include to protect public code to stay public, be properly attributed, prevent companies from just "sizing" , motivate other to make their code public too etc.
and even if his goals where not like that, it wouldn't make a difference as this is what many people try to archive with using such licenses
this kind of AI usage is very much not in line with this goals,
and in general way cheaper to do software cloning isn't sufficient to fix many of the issues the FOSS movement tried to fix, especially not when looking at the current ecosystem most people are interacting with (i.e. Phones)
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("sizing"): As in the typical MS embrace, extend and extinguish strategy of first embracing the code then giving it proprietary but available extensions/changes/bug fixes/security patches to then make them no longer available if you don't pay them/play by their rules.
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Through in the end using AI as a "fancy complicated" photocopier for code is as much removing copyright as using a photocopier for code would. It doesn't matter if you use the photocopier blind folded and never looked at the thing you copied.
Is this LLM thing freely available or is it owned and controlled by these companies? Are we going to rent the tools to fight "evil software corporations"?
Reducing it to "well you can clone the proprietary software you're forced to use by LLM" is really missing the soul of the GPL.
it's not that simple
yes, GPLs origins have the idea of "everyone should be able to use"
but it also is about attribution the original author
and making sure people can't just de-facto "size public goods"
the kind of AI usage is removing attribution and is often sizing public goods in a way far worse then most companies which just ignored the license did
so today there is more need then ever in the last few decades for GPL like licenses
A court ordered the first Nosferatu movie to be destroyed because it had too many similarities to Dracula. Despite the fact that the movie makes rather large deviations from the original.
If Claude was indeed asked to reimplement the existing codebase, just in Rust and a bit optimized, that could well be a copyright violation. Just like rephrasing A Song ot Ice and Fire a bit, and switching to a different language, doesn't remove its copyright.
There is some precedent for this, e.g. Alchemised is a recent best seller that had just enough changed from its Harry Potter fan fiction source in order to avoid copyright infringement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemised
(I avoided the term “remove copyright” here because the new work is still under copyright, just not Harry Potter - related copyright.)
Allegedly. There have been several people who doubted this story. So how to find out who is right? Well, just let Claude compare the sources. Coincidentally, Claude Opus 4.6 doesn't just score 75.6% on SWE-bench Verified but also 90.2% on BigLaw Bench.
It's like our copyright lawyer is conveniently also a developer. And possibly identical to the AI that carried out the rewrite/reimplemention in question in the first place.
Unless it is IP of the same big corpos that consumed all content available. Good luck with eroding them.
At the moment it's people that are eroding copyright. E.g. in this case someone did something.
"AI" didn't have a brain, woke up and suddenly decided to do it.
Realistically nothing to do with AI. Having a gun doesn't mean you randomly shoot.
Generative models (AI) are not really eroding copyright. They are calling its bluff. The very notion of intellectual property depends on a property line: some arbitrary boundary where the property begins and ends. Generative models blur that line, making it impractical to distinguish which property belongs to whom.
Ironically, these models are made by giant monopolistic corporations whose wealth is quite literally a market valuation (stock price) of their copyrights! If generative models ever become good enough to reimplement CUDA, what value will NVIDIA have left?
The reality is that generative models are nowhere near good enough to actually call the bluff. Copyright is still the winning hand, and that is likely to continue, particularly while IP holders are the primary authors of law.
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This whole situation is missing the forest for the trees. Intellectual Property is bullshit. A system predicated on monopoly power can only result in consolidated wealth driving the consolidation of power; which is precisely what has happened. The words "starving artist" ring every bit as familiar today as any time in history. Copyright has utterly failed the very goals it was explicitly written with.
It isn't the GPL that needs changing. So long as a system of copyright rules the land, copyleft is the best way to participate. What we really need is a cohesive political movement against monopoly power; one that isn't conveniently ignorant of copyright as its most significant source.
TheThis feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Micky Mouse"
Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been its maintainer for years. The premise is that he prompted Claude to reimplement it, without using his own knowledge of it to direct or steer.
I would argue it's irrelevant if they looked or didn't look at the code. As well as weather he was or wasn't familiar with it.
What matters is, that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it. How that tool works doesn't really matter. Neither does it make a difference if you obfuscate that it's an copy.
If I blindfold myself when making copies of books with a book scanner + printer I'm still engaging in copyright infringement.
If AI is a tool, that should hold.
If it isn't "just" a tool, then it did engage in copyright infringement (as it created the new output side by side with the original) in the same way an employee might do so on command of their boss. Which still makes the boss/company liable for copyright infringement and in general just because you weren't the one who created an infringing product doesn't mean you aren't more or less as liable of distributing it, as if you had done so.
Well, no. They fed the spec (test cases, etc) into a tool which made a new program matching the spec. This is not a copy of the original code.
But also this feels like arguing over the color of the iceberg while the titanic sinks. If you have a tool that can make code to spec, what is the value in source code anymore? Even if your app is closed-source, you can just tell claude to write new code that does the same thing.
Yes...
> and Anthropic fed the code to the tool,
Presumably, as part of the massive amount of open-source code that must have been fed in to train their model.
> so Blanchard didn't do anything wrong, and Anthropic didn't do anything wrong. Nothing to see here.
This is meant as irony, right?
I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code, unless the code is a rewrite of an open source project to change its license".
> I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code
You seem like you're on the cusp of stating the obvious correct conclusion: it isn't.
That's your opinion (since you said "IMO"), not the actual legal definition.
Then onto prompting: 'He fed only the API and (his) test suite to Claude'
This is Google v Oracle all over again - are APIs copyrightable?
Yes this is the best way to ask the question. If I take a public facing API and reimplement everything, whether it's by human or machine, it should be sufficient. After all, that's what Google did, and it's not like their engineers never read a single line of the Java source code. Even in "clean room" implementations, a human might still have remembered or recalled a previous implementation of some function they had encountered before.
> But how far away from direct and explicit representations do we have to go before copyright no longer applies?
So when you clone the behavior of a program like chardet without referencing the original source code except by executing it to make sure your clone produces exactly the same output, you may still be infringing its copyright if that output reflects creative choices made in the design of chardet that aren't fully determined by the functional purpose of the program.
Copyright infringement is a thing humans do. It's not a human.
Just like how the photos taken by a monkey with a camera have no copyright. Human law binds humans.
If we are saying AI is "more than a tool", which seems to be the case courts are leaning since they've ruled AI output without direct human involvement is not copyrightable[0], then the above seems like it would be entirely legal.
If I know it is legal to make a turn at a red light. And I know a court will uphold that I was in the right but a police officer will fine me regardless and I would need to go to actually pursue some legal remedy I'm unlikely to do it regardless of whether it is legal because it is expensive, if not in money but time.
In the case of copyright lawsuits they are notoriously expensive and long so even if a court would eventually deem it fine, why take the chance.
Anything you put out can and will be used by whatever giant company wants to use it with no attribution whatsoever.
Doesn’t that massively reduce the incentive to release the source of anything ever?
It's the same question as, if an AI can generate "art", or photographers can capture a scene better than any (realistic) painter, then will people still create art? Obviously yes, and we see it of course after Stable Diffusion was released three years ago, people are still creating.
The non IP protection has largely been in the effort involved in replicating an application's behavior and that effort is dropping precipitously.
In this case, we could theoretically prove that the new chardet is a clean reimplementation. Blanchard can provide all of the prompts necessary to re-implement again, and for the cost of the tokens anyone can reproduce the results.
My understanding was that his claim was that Claude was not looking at the existing source code while writing it.
> He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it
Difference being Claude looked; so not blind. The equivalent is more like I blindly took a photo of it and then used that to...
Technically did look.
What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code, only the API and the test suite. The new implementation is all Claude. And the implementation is different enough to be considered original, completely different structure, design, and hey, a 48x improvement in performance! It's just API-compatible with the original. Which as per the Google Vs oracle 2021 decision is to be considered fair use.
Who opened the PR? Who co-authored the commits? It's clearly on Github.
> Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at its code!
So there you have it. If he looked, he co-authored then there's that.
Blanchard is very clear that he didn't write a single line of code. He isn't an author, he isn't a co-author.
Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that.
He used Claude to write it. Difference? The fact that I write on the notepad vs printed it out = I didn't do it?
> Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that.
That's the equivalent of me saying I didn't kill anyone. The fingerprints on the knife doesn't change that.
This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the work to be truly public domain.
I think this also helps somewhat with the ethical quandary of these models being trained on public data while contributing nothing of value back to the public, and disincentivize the production of slop for profit.
https://www.carltonfields.com/insights/publications/2025/no-...
> No Copyright Protection for AI-Assisted Creations: Thaler v. Perlmutter
> A recent key judicial development on this topic occurred when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2, 2026, effectively upholding lower court rulings that AI-generated works lacking human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection under U.S. law
This was AI summary? Those words were not in the article.
The courts said Thaler could not have copyright because he refused to list himself as an author.
That's not true at all. Anyone could follow these steps:
1. Have the LLM rewrite GPL code.
2. Do not publish that public domain code. You have no obligation to.
3. Make a few tweaks to that code.
4. Publish a compiled binary/use your code to host a service under a proprietary license of your choice.
Sec has a deny by default policy. Eng has a use-more-AI policy. Any code written in-house is accepted by default. You can see where this is going.
We've been using AI to reimplement tooling that security won't approve. The incentives conspired in the worst outcome, yet here we are. If you want a different outcome, you need to create different incentives.
So of course we feel that something wrong has happened even if it's not easy to put one's finger on it.
If he is claiming to have been somehow substantively "enough" involved to make the code copyrightable, then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementation makes the new one almost certainly a derivative of the original.
The "clean room rewrite" is just an extreme way to have a bulletproof shield against litigation. Not doing it that way doesn't automatically make all new code he writes derivative solely because he saw how the code worked previously.
And if he was in fact more involved (which he appears to deny) that it's a bit weak to say that someone with huge familiarity with chardet could choose to reimplement chardet without the result being derivative.
1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world, proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not distribute it at all.
2. The coding cost reduction is all some temporary mirage, to be ended soon by drying VC money/rising inference costs, regulatory barriers, etc. In that world we should be reimplementing everything we can as copyleft while the inferencing is good.
but AI assisted code has an author and claiming it's AI assisted even if it is fully AI build is trivial (if you don't make it public that you didn't do anything)
also some countries have laws which treat it like a tool in the sense that the one who used it is the author by default AFIK
More and more I am drawn to these kinds of ideas lately, perhaps as a kind of ethical sidestep, but still:
- https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html - https://permacomputing.net/
It's not going to solve any general issue here, but the one thing these freaks need that can't be generated by their models is energy, tons of it. So, the one thing I can do as an individual and in my (digital) community is work to be, in a word, self-sustainable. And depending on my company I guess, if I was a CEO I would hope I was wise enough to be thinking on the same lines.
Everyone is making beautiful mountains from paper and wire. I will just be happy to make a small dollhouse of stone, I think it will be worth it. How can we see not just at least some small-level of hubris otherwise?
1. An LLM recreating a piece of software violates its copyright and is illegal, in which case LLM output can never be legally used because someone somewhere probably has a copyright on some portion of any software that an LLM could write.
2. You read my example as "copying a project without distributing it", vs. "having an LLM write the same functionality just for me"
It also doesn't talk about the far more interesting philosophical queston. Does what Blanchard did cover ALL implementations from Claude? What if anyone did exactly what he did, feed it the test cases and say "re-implement from scratch", ostensibly one would expect the results to be largely similar (technically under the right conditions deterministically similar)
could you then fork the project under your own name and a commercial license? when you use an LLM like this, to basically do what anyone else could ask it to do how do you attach any license to it? Is it first come first serve?
If an agent is acting mostly on its own it feels like if you found a copy of Harry Potter in the fictional library of Babel, you didn't write it, just found it amongst the infinite library, but if you found it first could you block everyone else that stumbles on a near-identical copy elsewhere in the library? or does each found copy represent a "Re-implementation" that could be individually copyrighted?
Everything for memory safety.
Think about it; the license says that copies of the work must be reproduced with the copyright notice and licensing clauses intact. Why would anyone obey that, knowing it came from AI?
Countless instances of such licenses were ignored in the training data.
A lego sculpture is copyrighted. Lego blocks are not. The threshold between blocks and sculpture is not well-defined, but if an AI isn't prompted specifically to attempt to mimic an existing work, its output will be safely on the non-copyrighted side of things.
A derivative work is separately copyrightable, but redistribution needs permission from the original author too. Since that usually won't be granted or would be uneconomical, the derivative work can't usually be redistributed.
AI-produced material is inherently not copyrightable, but not because it's a derivative work.
Add something like this to NEW gpl /bsd/mit licenses:
'you are forbidden from reimplementing it with AI'
or just:
'all clones, reimpletetions with ai etc must still be GPL'
The fundamental problem is that once you take something outside the realm of law and rule of law in its many facets as the legitimizing principal, you have to go a whole lot further to be coherent and consistent.
You can’t just leave things floating in a few ambiguous things you don’t like and feel “off” to you in some way- not if you’re trying to bring some clarity to your own thoughts, much less others. You don’t have to land on a conclusion either. By all means chew over things, but once you try to settle, things fall apart if you haven’t done the harder work of replacing the framework of law with that of another conceptual structure.
You need to at least be asking “to what ends? What purpose is served by the rule?” Otherwise you’re stuck in things where half the time you end up arguing backwards in ways that put purpose serving rules, the maintenance of the rule with justifications ever further afield pulled in when the rule is questioned and edge cases reached. If you’re asking, essentially, “is the spirit of the rule still there?” You’ve got to stop and fill in what that spirit is or you or people that want to control you or have an agenda will sweep in with their own language and fill the void to their own ends.
Copyleft could be seen as an attempt to give Free Software an edge in this competition for users, to counter the increased resources that proprietary systems can often draw on. I think success has been mixed. Sure, Linux won on the server. Open source won for libraries downloaded by language-specific package managers. But there’s a long tail of GPL apps that are not really all that appealing, compared to all the proprietary apps available from app stores.
But if reimplementing software is easy, there’s just going to be a lot more competition from both proprietary and open source software. Software that you can download for free that has better features and is more user-friendly is going to have an advantage.
With coding agents, it’s likely that you’ll be able to modify apps to your own needs more easily, too. Perhaps plugin systems and an AI that can write plugins for you will become the norm?
This whole article is just complaining that other people didn't have the discussion he wanted.
Ronacher even acknowledged that it's a different discussion, and not one they were trying to have at the moment.
If you want to have it, have it. Don't blast others for not having it for you.
> But law only says what conduct it will not prevent—it does not certify that conduct as right. Aggressive tax minimization that never crosses into illegality may still be widely regarded as antisocial. A pharmaceutical company that legally acquires a patent on a long-generic drug and raises the price a hundredfold has not done something legal and therefore fine. Legality is a necessary condition; it is not a sufficient one.
No, AI does not mean the end of either copyright or copyleft, it means that the laws need to catch up. And they should, and they will.
no, it isn't. The point of the GPL is to grant users of the software four basic freedoms (run, study, modify and redistribute). There's no restriction to distribution per se, other than disallowing the removal of these freedoms to other users.
But what happens with the new things? Has the era of software-making (or creating things at large) finished, and from now on everything will be re-(gurgitated|implemented|polished) old stuff?
Or all goes back to proprietary everything.. Babylon-tower style, noone talks to noone?
edit: another view - is open-source from now on only for resume-building? "see-what-i've-built" style
There was an issue where Google did something similar with the JVM, and ultimately it came down to whether or not Oracle owned the copyright to the header files containing the API. It went all the way to the US supreme court, and they ruled in Google's favour; finding that the API wasn't the implementation, and that the amount of shared code was so minimal as to be irrelevant.
They didn't anticipate that in less than half a decade we'd have technology that could _rapidly_ reimplement software given a strong functional definition and contract enforcing test suite.
I like the article's point of legal vs. legitimate here, though; copyright is actually something of a strange animal to use to protect source code, it was just the most convenient pre-existing framework to shove it in.
which is the actual relevant part: they didn't do that dance AFIK
AI is a tool, they set it up to make a non-verbatim copy of a program.
Then they feed it the original software (AFIK).
Which makes it a side by side copy, as in the original source was used as reference to create the new program. Which tend to be seen as derived work even if very different.
IMHO They would have to:
1. create a specification of the software _without looking at the source code_, i.e. by behavior observation (and an interface description). I.e. you give the AI access to running the program, but not to looking into the insides of it. I really don't think they did it as even with AI it's a huge pain as you normally can't just brute force all combinations of inputs and instead need to have a scientific model=>test=>refine loop (which AI can do, but can take long and get stuck, so you want it human assisted, and the human can't have inside knowledge about the program).
2. then generate a new program from specification, And only from it. No git history, no original source code access, no program access, no shared AI state or anything like that.
Also for the extra mile of legal risk avoidance do both human assisted and use unrelated 3rd parties without inside knowledge for both steps.
While this does majorly cut cost of a clean room approach, it still isn't cost free. And still is a legal mine field if done by a single person, especially if they have enough familiarity to potentially remember specific peaces of code verbatim.
My understanding is they did do the dance. From the article: "He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch."
One could still make the argument that using the test suite was a critical contributing factor, but it is not a part of the resulting library. So in my uninformed opinion, it seems to me like the clean room argument does apply.
So my understanding was that the original code was specifically not fed into Claude. But was almost certainly part of its training data, which complicates things, but if that's fair use then it's not relevant? If training's not fair use and taints the output, then new-chardet is a derivative of a lot of things, not just old-chardet...
This is all new legal ground. I'm not sure if anyone will go to court over chardet, though, but something that's an actual money-maker or an FSF flagship project like readline, on the other hand, well that's a lot more likely.
This is an interesting reversal in itself. If you make the specification protected under copyright, then the whole practice of clean room implementations is invalid.
That’s just your subjective opinion which many other people would disagree. I bet Armin Ronacher would agree that an MIT licensed library is even freer than an LGPL licensed library. To them, the vector is running from free to freer.
I'm glad we can fork things at a point and thumb our noses at those who wish to cash in on other's work.
It does feel like open source is about to change. My hunch is that commercial open source (beyond the consultation model) risks disappearing. Though I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
That's what something like AGPL does.
The answer to that, I think, is that the authors wanted to squat an existing successful project and gain a platform from it. Hence we have news cycle discussing it.
Nobody cares about a new library using AI, but squash an existing one with this stuff, and you get attention. It’s the reputation, the GitHub stars, whatever
Honestly it's a weird test case for this sort of thing. I don't think you'd see an equivalent in most open source projects.
One thing is certain, however: copyleft licenses will disappear: If I can't control the redistribution of my code (through a GPL or similar license), I choose to develop it in closed source.
If you have software your testsuite should be your testsuite, you do dev with a testsuite and then mit without releasing one. Depending on the test-suite it may break clean room rules, especially for ttd codebases.
- proprietary
- free
- slop-licensed
software?
This argument makes no sense. Are they arguing that because Vercel, specifically, had this attitude, this is an attitude necessitated by AI, reimplementation, and those who are in favor of it towards more permissive licenses? That certainly doesn't seem to be an accurate way to summarize what antirez or Ronacher believe. In fact, under the legal and ethical frameworks (respectively) that those two put forward, Vercel has no right to claim that position and no way to enforce it, so it seems very strange to me to even assert that this sort of thing would be the practical result of AI reimplementations. This seems to just be pointing towards the hypocrisy of one particular company, and assuming that this would be the inevitable universal, attitude, and result when there's no evidence to think so.
It's ironic, because antirez actually literally addresses this specific argument. They completely miss the fact that a lot of his blog post is not actually just about legal but also about ethical matters. Specifically, the idea he puts forward is that yes, corporations can do these kinds of rewrites now, but they always had the resources and manpower to do so anyway. What's different now is that individuals can do this kind of rewrites when they never have the ability to do so before, and the vector of such a rewrite can be from a permissive to copyleft or even from decompile the proprietary to permissive or copyleft. The fact that it hasn't been so far is a more a factor of the fact that most people really hate copyleft and find an annoying and it's been losing traction and developer mind share for decades, not that this tactic can't be used that way. I think that's actually one of the big points he's trying to make with his GNU comparison — not just that if it was legal for GNU to do it, then it's legal for you to do with AI, and not even just the fundamental libertarian ethical axiom (that I agree with for the most part) that it should remain legal to do such a rewrite in either direction because in terms of the fundamental axioms that we enforce with violence in our society, there should be a level playing field where we look at the action itself and not just whether we like or dislike the consequences, but specifically the fact that if GNU did it once with the ability to rewrite things, it can be done again, even in the same direction, it now even more easily using AI.
Honestly I was confused about the summarization of my blog post into just a legal matter as well. I hope my blog post will be able to flash at least a short time in the HN front page so that the actual arguments it contain will get a bit more exposure.
The idea that "information wants to be free" was always a lie, meant to transfer value from creators to platform owners. The result of that has been disastrous, and it's long past time to push the pendulum in the other direction.
I think the industry will realize that it made a huge mistake by leaning on copyright for protection rather than on patents.
I did not study in detail if copyright "has always been nonsense", but I do agree that nowadays some of the copyright regulations are nonsense (for example the very long duration of life + 70 years)
AI will destroy the current paradigm, completely and utterly, and there's nothing they can do to stop it. It's unclear if they can even slow it, and that's a good thing.
We will be forced to legislate a modern, digital oriented copyright system that's fair and compatible with AI. If producing any software becomes a matter of asking a machine to produce it - if things like AI native operating systems come about, where apps and media are generated on demand, with protocols as backbone, and each device is just generating its own scaffolding around the protocols - then nearly none of modern licensing, copyright, software patents, or IP conventions make any sense whatsoever.
You can't have horse and buggy traffic conventions for airplanes. We're moving in to a whole new paradigm, and maybe we can get legislation that actually benefits society and individuals, instead of propping up massive corporations and making lawyers rich.
If corporations are allowed to launder someone else work as their own people will simply stop working and just start endlessly remixing a la popular music.
So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial IP law - let's say, patents: it just becomes and input parameter that the AI needs to work around the patents like any other constraints.
I think it still does: IIRC, the current legal situation is AI-output does not qualify for IP protections (at least not without substantial later human modification). IP protections are solely reserved for human work.
And I'm fine with that: if a person put in the work, they should have protections so their stuff can't be ripped off for free by all the wealthy major corporations that find some use for it. Otherwise: who cares about the LLMs.
Company incorporates GPL code in their product? Never once have courts decided to uphold copyright. HP did that many times. Microsoft got caught doing it. And yet the GPL was never applied to their products. Every time there was an excuse.
Schoolkid downloads a movie? 30,000 USD per infraction PLUS armed police officer goes in and enforces removal of any movies.
So just apply "the law", right. Courts' judgement of using AI to "remove GPL"? Approved. Using AI to "make the next Disney-style movie"? SEND IN THE ARMY! Whether one or the other violates the law according to rational people? Whatever excuse to avoid that discussion is good enough.