Recently saw a youtube video about a service created to change an open source software license.
- One agent reads code and gather specs
- Another agent, without access to the original code, creates equivalent software
In theory this should allow someone to take any open source software and change it’s license.
For a large portion of open source likely this is not an issue, because nobody may care for the particular software, but for larger projects I wonder what sort of impact this may have. In particular any open source software where it’s authors are making a living from donations or public support.
Has anyone read, or thought, of a way to prevent getting one’s code license changed this way?
Copyright law only has teeth when it’s owned by corporations, but the cleanroom reimplementing technique does still seem to create a derivative product which in this layman’s opinion would still violate licenses like the GPL, but IANAL.
The “good” news is this is pretty rare these days.
Honestly the best defense is probably just writing maintainable software though, AI slop is going to be hard to maintain.
100%. It is funny how any individual can be sued for copying a handful, of pretty much anything copyrighted, yet these AI companies copy literally thousands upon thousands of copyrighted materials.
Will likely have to wait for a case to go to trial, but in theory at least, it is possible these clean room implementations may pass a legal challenge. The youtube video I was watching about this topic had phoenix technologies as an example (for those of us old enough to remember what that company was). In their case it was even more so; they took a commercial piece of software and reverse engineered. If that is possible, then doing similar to an open source software may be considered legal, but again we probably won’t know until something like this comes to courts. Different countries may also treat this differently so we will have to wait and see.
Sadly yes. But even those that don’t make money, or much money, must feel demoralized when someone steals their code.
I think it might be hard to argue that it is a clean room implementation if the project is in the training data for the model, which it probably will have been
Yeah this is a key point. It’s pretty safe to say that AI generated code that’s based on open source projects is going to be trained on open source projects. If the people running the AI software make any mistake then they could be facing massive copyright violations.
So I’m kind of interested in whether that type of risk is something that would be pragmatic for a company to take. There probably are some situations where it would be, but I’m not convinced that would happen too often.
The irony here is if you host your open source project somewhere where it isn’t being scraped by LLMs your legal case might be weaker.
What an interesting idea