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Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens • The Register Forums
2 days
habilain
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Re: Prompts?
They did post the design document eventually - https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/f51f523506a73f89f0f9538fd31be458d007ab93.
Other people have pored over it, but I suspect that instructions to download things from the original chardet repository mean that the AI generated version can not be considered "clean room". And that's ignoring the likelihood that Claude Code has injested the entirety of the chardet repo during training.
2 days
MonkeyJuiceSilver badge
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Re: Prompts?
It's hard to see how anything an LLM produces could even remotely be described as 'clean room'.
habilain
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Re: Prompts?
Well yes, but the lawyers are still arguing over that, and the legal fights aren't all going in the way that any sensible reading of the facts would indicate.
It's much easier to say "this is not clean room" when the instructions to the AI clearly break the definition of what "clean room implementation" means.
1 day
timrichardson
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Re: Prompts?
I doubt that matters very much.. copyright infringement is based on a level of similarities in two works. A clean room implementation is a defence, but it's not a necessary defence.
3 hrs
habilain
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Re: Prompts?
The issue you'd find is that a) APIs are copyrightable, at least in the USA b) The AI in question was instructed to match the API and c) The AI in question was instructed to use code from the original source. I think that's pretty clear cut.
And besides, the reason why I highlighted "clean room" is Dan Blanchard's repeated insistence that the AI did a clean room implementation - not because of any particular legal merits.
Richard 12Silver badge
Pirate
It's LGPL or public domain now
If this v7 genuinely was mostly generated by an LLM, existing court rulings say that it is not covered by copyright.
Therefore, it cannot be licenced under the MIT either. It is public domain.
Or maybe that's not true and it's still LGPL.
Commercially, who would want to take the risk of touching v7 with a bargepole?
It now cannot ever become part of the Python standard library because it's forever tainted by licence clarity issues.
It would require a court case to sort out whether it's LGPL, MIT, or public domain, and nobody wants to burn the cash on that when they can stick with a v6 fork and avoid all the legal risk.
Charlie ClarkSilver badge
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Re: It's LGPL or public domain now
I think the release was poorly handled – a new release under a different name as with, say, PIL -> pillow (Python Imaging Library) might have been a better approach. There may be some legal challenges in the US but I can't see them going anywhere and then the taint will be gone – well, maybe add something to the licence referring to the original implementation.
A perfectly legal approach, as others have pointed out, would have been to port the library to another language, say Rust. This could then be wrapped or the basis of another perfectly legal port back to Python. All software is essentially the expression of one algorithm or another and these have never been copyrightable.
//
Charlie ClarkSilver badge
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Re: It's LGPL or public domain now
I think the release was poorly handled – a new release under a different name as with, say, PIL -> pillow (Python Imaging Library) might have been a better approach. There may be some legal challenges in the US but I can't see them going anywhere and then the taint will be gone – well, maybe add something to the licence referring to the original implementation.
A perfectly legal approach, as others have pointed out, would have been to port the library to another language, say Rust. This could then be wrapped or the basis of another perfectly legal port back to Python. All software is essentially the expression of one algorithm or another and these have never been copyrightable.
Richard 12Silver badge
Pirate
It's LGPL or public domain now
If this v7 genuinely was mostly generated by an LLM, existing court rulings say that it is not covered by copyright.
Therefore, it cannot be licenced under the MIT either. It is public domain.
Or maybe that's not true and it's still LGPL.
Commercially, who would want to take the risk of touching v7 with a bargepole?
It now cannot ever become part of the Python standard library because it's forever tainted by licence clarity issues.
It would require a court case to sort out whether it's LGPL, MIT, or public domain, and nobody wants to burn the cash on that when they can stick with a v6 fork and avoid all the legal risk.
Charlie ClarkSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: It's LGPL or public domain now
I think the release was poorly handled – a new release under a different name as with, say, PIL -> pillow (Python Imaging Library) might have been a better approach. There may be some legal challenges in the US but I can't see them going anywhere and then the taint will be gone – well, maybe add something to the licence referring to the original implementation.
A perfectly legal approach, as others have pointed out, would have been to port the library to another language, say Rust. This could then be wrapped or the basis of another perfectly legal port back to Python. All software is essentially the expression of one algorithm or another and these have never been copyrightable.
Earlier this week, Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license.
In doing so, he may have killed "copyleft." //
Blanchard says he was in the clear to change licenses because he used AI – Anthropic's Claude is now listed as a project contributor – to make what amounts to a clean room implementation of chardet. That's essentially a rewrite done without copying the original code – though it's unclear whether Claude ingested chardet's code during training and, if that occurred, whether Claude's output cloned that training data. //
The use of AI raises questions about what level of human involvement is required to copyright AI-assisted code.
The US Supreme Court recently refused to reconsider Thaler v. Perlmutter, in which the plaintiff sought to overturn a lower court decision that he could not copyright an AI-generated image. This is an area of ongoing concern among the defenders of copyleft because many open source projects incorporate some level of AI assistance. It's unclear how much AI involvement in coding would dilute the human contribution to the extent that a court would disallow a copyright claim. //
"As far as the intention of the GPL goes, a permissive license is still technically a free software license, but undermining copyleft is a serious act. Refusing to grant others the rights you yourself received as a user is highly [antisocial], no matter what method you use. Now more than ever, with people exploring new ways of circumventing copyright through machine learning, we need to protect the code that preserves user freedom. Free software relies on user and development communities who strongly support copyleft. Experience has shown that it's our strongest defense against similar efforts to undermine user freedom." //
Bruce Perens, who wrote the original Open Source Definition, has broader concerns about the entire software industry.
"I'm breaking the glass and pulling the fire alarm!" he told The Register in an email. "The entire economics of software development are dead, gone, over, kaput!
"In a different world, the issue of software and AI would be dealt with by legislators and courts that understand that all AI training is copying and all AI output is copying. That's the world I might like, but not the world we got. The horse is out of the barn and can't be put back. So, what do we do with the world we got?" ////
The courts are going to have to deal with this, but it really should be legislators thinking and debating it. I think that ultimately, material produced by A/I should be public domain, because you can't hold a computer responsible.
"Computers should not make management decisions because computers cannot be held responsible."
As we've said many times here, the normal community understanding on contribution licensing is inbound=outbound, which is to say that contributors agree for their contributions to be licensed under the project's existing licence.
In the case of copyleft licences, as the linked question says, this is actually a requirement of the licence. In the case of the permissive licences like MIT, however, it's just a community understanding. Unless the project required a CLA from you, you could make an argument that you never licensed your contributions to the project at all, but I'd expect it to be a hard, uphill business to convince a judge of that (indeed, as Bart points out (thank you, Bart!), given GitHub's embedding of in=out in their TOS, it will likely be next to impossible).
But the project is completely entitled to change to a proprietary licence, and unless you can convince a judge that you never agreed to licence your contributions, you have no right to demand they stop using your contribution. One of the many advantages of copyleft licensing is that, once contributions have been accepted, the project can no longer unilaterally relicense. The permissive licences don't give the same protection, and this is generally understood, so what they've done, though not nice, is neither unlawful nor unethical.
One thing you can do is to take the copy of the MIT-licensed source you've found, and make sure it's available from your website (or at least, not solely from your github account). You have every right to do that, and as the search engines pick it up, you may hope that their proprietary-licensed version is supplanted by the free version.
Months later, according to the SFC, AVM provided all the relevant source code and scripts, but the suit continued. AVM ultimately paid Steck's attorney fee. The case proved, once again, that not only are source code requirements real, but the LGPL also demands freedom, despite its "Lesser" name, and that source code needs to be useful in making real changes to firmware—in German courts, at least.
"The favorable result of this lawsuit exemplifies the power of copyleft—granting users the freedom to modify, repair, and secure the software on their own devices," the SFC said in a press release. "Companies like AVM receive these immense benefits themselves. This lawsuit reminded AVM that downstream users must receive those very same rights under copyleft.". //
At the top is perhaps the best-known case in tech circles, the Linksys WRT54G conflict from 2003. While the matter was settled before a lawsuit was filed, negotiations between Linksys owner Cisco and a coalition led by the Free Software Foundation, publisher of the GPL and LGPL, made history. It resulted in the release of all the modified and relevant GPL source code used in its hugely popular blue-and-black router.
The backstory, such as it exists from reports and retrospectives, is that Cisco bought Linksys, Linksys outsourced certain chipset development to Broadcom, and Broadcom outsourced firmware development to an overseas developer. Everybody up the chain ended up with a lawsuit once people started looking.
Cisco made history yet again in 2007 when it was the first entity to be actually sued by the FSF over GPL violations, which started in 2003 and continued to come up with new hardware products. Cisco settled the case with the FSF in 2009, making a donation to the FSF and appointing a Free Software Director at the company to keep track of its licensing obligations.
According to the SFC, GPL/LGPL lawsuits have tended to focus on copyright enforcement, but Steck's claim was about user rights. "There is now no doubt that both GPL and LGPL mandate the device owner's ability to make changes to the software in the flash memory so those changes persist across reboots," the SFC said. //
Denver Gingerich, director of compliance for the SFC, told The Register that this is the first time to his knowledge that the LGPL has been successfully litigated.
"The AVM lawsuit is an excellent example of how users can make practical use of the courts to receive the freedoms owed to them by the companies that sell devices to them," he said. //
50 mins
rgjnk
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Re: Stretching
The LGPL might mean the manufacturer have to publish their modifications to the source code but that's still not "mandate the device owner's ability to make changes to the software in the flash memory so those changes persist across reboots"
The GPL license doesn't even come close to what's claimed there, especially what's very specifically described.
They apparently claim a right to be able to reflash a device and the GPL has nothing to do with that. An implemented right to repair may grant that in various forms (often in reality very limited by other legislative concerns) but the GPL is about the 'source code' only and nothing more.
I can only hope something has got lost in translation from German and they didn't actually say anything about a mandate at all. //
hr
PyLETS
Choice of jurisdiction and distributors
In this case a German developer went though German courts to get redress from a German company. Not all software access claims will be so easy in relation to local law where the manufacturer operates. However, for consumer electronics containing free software with enforceable licenses, these apply to distributors also, and effective cease and desist demands against distributors until conditions are met will force the manufacturers hand if distributors decline to distribute the offending product otherwise.
Internet reader's rights
Some people think that every Internet user is a copyright violator. Downloading a document means making a copy of it, they say; and copying generally isn't legal without the author's permission. They argue about whether making material available through FTP or HTTP or USENET grants some sort of ``implied license'' to download the material---or whether an author can demand payment for the reader's copies.
Other people advocate a much simpler theory. When an author tells his FTP server to send a document to anyone who asks, he is the one making copies. In legal jargon, the author's command to the computer is the ``proximate cause'' of the copying. The reader is merely requesting a copy, not making it.
I don't know which of these theories will succeed in court. I also don't think you should have to care. So I promise I won't sue you for copyright violation for downloading documents from my server.
Does it bother you that this should even be an issue? Check out Richard Stallman's essay on The Right to Read.
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