Comment by gpm
2 months ago
I don't think it's that clear cut. The functional parts probably aren't copyrightable, only the stylistic ones. It's going to be a mix of courts applying laws in new ways that hasn't been done before and fact specific questions about what actually persisted through the LLM if it goes to court.
I'd be fascinated to see what happens if it does. Both in the analyses that we'd get of what the LLM did to the codebase and on the legal decisions on what the copyrightable creative elements in code actually are.
If I was the author though... there would be no way that I would be volunteering to be a test case like this. Also seems just rude for no reason.
It probably would have been less bad if he had chosen MPL-2.0 or LGPL-2.1-or-later. But he chose MIT, which cuts at the core of the intent of licensing the project with a share-alike license.
Tell me, can I create a copyrighted video that's not GPL licensed using ffmpeg? Now tell me how creating a rust library using the git test suite is different?
> using the git test suite
That's not actually the case at hand here - the agents were given the original source to reference: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...
But for the sake of argument: The test suite itself is copyrighted. To the extent the resulting work is a derivative of the test suite it is possibly infringing. For example you might example that the agent would derive variable names, function names, structure sequence and organization of the code from the test suite. It might even copy comments wholesale. Those are copyrightable things. (Which is of course just the first step in analyzing if it is infringement, there would be interesting fair use, de-minimis copying, etc arguments following a conclusion that any of those were copyrighted. A product produced this way definitely could be infringing given the right facts though).
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A GPL tool that processes data doesn't virally transfer the license to its output. Copyrighted ffmpeg code isn't incorporated into the video output. The LLM didn't just conjure up equivalent behavior to git without ingesting the code and transforming it as new output. There is no other behavioral description that would reproduce all needed functionality.
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Medium, substitutibility, basics of copyright law.
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If feeding the source code through a complier yields a derivative work, why wouldn't feeding it to an LLM give the same result?
Because compilers and LLMs do different things, and what is done matters, so you can't reason by stepping from one to the other.
Compilers don't axiomatically yield derivative works, they simply in practice do because for non-trivial programs they preserve copyrightable elements of the work in the output.
Well compilers are a mechanical transformation and if that were sufficient to free you of IP law then IP law wouldn't work.
An LLM is also a computer program which takes input and produces output related in some way to that input. However I don't think most people would view it as a "mere" mechanical transformation. One could tautologically argue that an LLM blends the user input with the training inputs which is a sort of transformation and further that the LLM itself is a computer program thus it is mechanical in nature. However it should be immediately obvious that such an overly literal interpretation is in danger of subsuming human work as well. Where the boundary lies is an unanswered question.
Related, compilers can pose a problem depending on what the output includes. For example common lisp compilers that aren't under a permissive license are a minefield because regardless of what anyone might say the image that gets output includes (approximately) the full language implementation verbatim in addition to the user's program.
So, if we will compile or decompile code using LLM instead of a compiler, then we can use the result for free?
(LLM can translate code to/from other code or to/from a machine code).
functional parts not being copyrightable means that you can't claim a program is a copyright violation based on the fact it does the exact same thing based on compatibility reasons (you can copy what the program does). E.g. git stores refs in .git/refs, so does grit, that's not a violation. You still can't copy the program.
Yes... and now we get to the fact specific question of "did they copy the program". Or actually the answer to that is plainly "no" - they made something similar from it - and didn't run ctrl-c ctrl-v in an unlicensed manner, but "did they copy the relevant facets of the program into the new similar thing".
Making something similar is copying for the purpose of copyright law. If I trace over a Disney character it's still copyright Disney.
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