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."
