What is happening to the Linux kernel, Bitwarden and Epic Games? - Linux Weekly News

SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml · 6 days ago

What is happening to the Linux kernel, Bitwarden and Epic Games? - Linux Weekly News

hirihit640@sh.itjust.works · 4 days ago

If I reference some AGPL projects (without actually copying code) to write my own project, is that frowned upon in the FOSS community? My guess is no.

So to me the difference between the two sides, is about fair use. One side thinks AI training isn’t inherently violating copyright licenses, and the other side thinks it is. FWIW, I believe the US courts side with former.

klankin@piefed.ca · 3 days ago

Yeah it is, thats why you’ll hear ‘cleanroom development’ tossed around, to refer to someone that has never seen the other software’s source is developing its replacement.

This matters legally because its an airtight way to prove no copyright could have been violated. Usually the community overlooks such minor violations to support new developers, but unfortunately this sentiment is changing fast thanks to the modern piracy landscape.

The term ‘cleanroom’ has gotten pretty muddied with AI taking it over to mean ‘mathematically exclusively derived from the original source, but cleanroom makes us claim legal overship over someone else’s work so that’s what it is’. You can see how the meaning has drifted quite a lot once it reached marketing.

I haven’t seen any precedent in US or other courts on the originality of AI code, but if you have any links I’d be interested in learning more. It would be quite a monumental ruling, because it requires us to ask - how small of an AI model is technically original?

If I train an ‘AI’ on a single pice of work, can I then claim ownership over it legally? Or does it specifically require whatever the current state of the art datacenters are at? Cause then its just legal for cooperation’s to ignore copyright and no one else.

hirihit640@sh.itjust.works · 2 days ago

If I train an ‘AI’ on a single pice of work, can I then claim ownership over it legally?

I believe the US courts ruled that if you didn’t have significant input over the result, it becomes public domain. But I believe they also ruled that if the output looks significantly different from any of the inputs, it’s “transformative” and does not violate copyright.

to refer to someone that has never seen the other software’s source is developing its replacement.

AGPL is open source code though. You’re supposed to view it. If a human views an AGPL project source code once, is all code they write thereafter, inspired by that project and thus a violation of copyright?

This would completely break open source. And you can make the same argument for AI. Well aside from “AI isn’t human” argument, which is a lazy argument that you can use the justify anything in regards to AI. Just because AI and humans are different doesn’t mean that distinction matters from the perspective of fair use.