Comment by jbotz
2 months ago
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.
The agents.md says “here’s the git source code” https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...
This isn’t even a question of training data, thy fed the full git source code directly to the llm.
I would say it's worse, the whole C Git source code is checked in https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/tree/main/git
I wonder if imitating clean room reverse engineering with two LLMs would be enough for licence compliance.
That already exists[1]. It looks like a joke but apparently they will accept your money to do it, which seems to cross the line of a joke.
[1]: https://malus.sh/
> 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)
As mentioned in another comment, it's even more clear cut in this case. They actually put the original git sources in their project repo and instructed the agent to use it as the "source of truth".
Simple thought experiment. If you handed this same agents.md file (https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...) to a human software developer and let them work on exactly the same goal, would their output be considered a derivative work?
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".
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> 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.
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Wouldn't a re-implementation be akin to 'heres how it works, write the code' rather than 'heres the code, redo it in rust'?
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 ...
Mathematically, does similarity/intelligibility of one equation to another have any bearing on whether the one was derived from the other? Philosophically? Legally? I'm not a copyright lawyer, but that's the crux of the matter to me: did you start with something, and iterate from it (even if it was so many times as to be transformed beyond recognition), or is it something more akin to clean-room reverse engineering?
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.