How is it contradictory? Tell it to the corporations who defend copyright for you and public domain fair use for themselves. If they were honest, they'd abolish copyright straight up instead of creating this idiotic caste system.
> Copyright shouldn't exist, but the businesses infringing on it are the bad ones?
Yes. Copyright shouldn't exist to begin with, but since it does, one would expect the corporations to work within the legal framework they themselves created and lobbied so heavily for. One would expect them to reap the consequences of their actions and be bound by the exact same limitations they seek to impose on us.
It is absolutely asinine to watch them make trillions of dollars by breaking their own rules while simultaneously pretendinf that nothing is happening and insisting that you mortal citizen must still abide by the same rules they are breaking.
The sheer dishonesty of it makes me sick to my core.
> If someone read your code and paraphrased it and tweaked it, it would be a completely new work not subject to the original copyright.
Derivative work.
I was once told that corporate programmers are warned by legal not to even read AGPLv3 source code, lest it subconsciously infect their thought processes and the final result. This is also the reason we have clean room reverse engineering where one team produces documentation and another uses it to reimplement the thing. Isolating minds from the copyrighted inputs is the whole point of it. All of this is risk management meant to disallow even the mere possibility that a derivative work was created in the process.
There is absolutely no reason to believe LLMs are any different. They are literally trained on copyrighted inputs. Either they're violating copyrights or we're being oppressed by these copyright monopolists who say we can't do stuff we should be able to do. Both cannot be true at the same time.
> At least it would be really hard to get a court to regard it as an infringement.
It's extremely hard to get a court to do anything. As in tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars difficult. Nothing is decided until actual judges start deciding things, and to get to that point you need to actually go through the legal system, and to do that you need to pay expensive lawyers lots of money. It's the reason people instantly fold the second legal action is threatened, doesn't matter if they're right. Corporations have money to burn, we don't.
And that's assuming that courts are presided by honest human beings who believe in law and reason instead of political activist judges or straight up corrupt judges who can be lobbied by industry.
>I was once told that corporate programmers are warned by legal not to even read AGPLv3 source code, lest it subconsciously infect their thought processes and the final result.
There are different views out there about this. If you literally just copy a piece of code and make stupid changes, it might be a derivative work. But this is not guaranteed. There are times when there is one idiomatic way to do a thing, so your code will necessarily be similar to other code in the world. That type of code is not copyrightable, even if it appears in a larger work that is copyrightable. A small amount of bog standard code resembling something in another project is not in and of itself evidence of infringement.
Corporations would rather not have to deal with unnecessarily similar code or deliberate copyright or patent infringement. So they generally tell you not to look at anything else.
The biggest issue is that any individual part of a copyrighted work may not be copyrightable. If you dissect a large copyrighted work, it probably contains many uncopyrightable structures. For example, in a book, most phrases and grammatical structures are not copyrightable. The style is not copyrightable. In code, common boilerplate is probably not copyrightable. Please don't make your stuff bizarre to add to its originality though. We need to be able to read and understand it lol.
>There is absolutely no reason to believe LLMs are any different. They are literally trained on copyrighted inputs. Either they're violating copyrights or we're being oppressed by these copyright monopolists who say we can't do stuff we should be able to do. Both cannot be true at the same time.
People who learn to program by reading open-source code are also trained on copyrighted inputs. Copyright may need some rethinking to cope with the reality of LLMs. Unless it is proven that AI is spitting out unique and copyrightable blocks of code from other projects, it really isn't infringing. People do this type of shit all the time. Have you ever looked at Stack Overflow and copied a couple of lines from it? You probably infringed on someone's copyright.
Ultimately, even if you prove copyright infringement happened, you have basically no recourse unless you also prove damages. Since open-source code is public and given away for free, the only possible damage is generally in being deprived of contributions that might have resulted from direct usage of your code. But direct integration of your entire project might have been highly unlikely anyway. Like it or not, people can be inspired by your work in a way that can't be proven without their direct confession.
How is it contradictory? Tell it to the corporations who defend copyright for you and public domain fair use for themselves. If they were honest, they'd abolish copyright straight up instead of creating this idiotic caste system.
> Copyright shouldn't exist, but the businesses infringing on it are the bad ones?
Yes. Copyright shouldn't exist to begin with, but since it does, one would expect the corporations to work within the legal framework they themselves created and lobbied so heavily for. One would expect them to reap the consequences of their actions and be bound by the exact same limitations they seek to impose on us.
It is absolutely asinine to watch them make trillions of dollars by breaking their own rules while simultaneously pretendinf that nothing is happening and insisting that you mortal citizen must still abide by the same rules they are breaking.
The sheer dishonesty of it makes me sick to my core.
> If someone read your code and paraphrased it and tweaked it, it would be a completely new work not subject to the original copyright.
Derivative work.
I was once told that corporate programmers are warned by legal not to even read AGPLv3 source code, lest it subconsciously infect their thought processes and the final result. This is also the reason we have clean room reverse engineering where one team produces documentation and another uses it to reimplement the thing. Isolating minds from the copyrighted inputs is the whole point of it. All of this is risk management meant to disallow even the mere possibility that a derivative work was created in the process.
There is absolutely no reason to believe LLMs are any different. They are literally trained on copyrighted inputs. Either they're violating copyrights or we're being oppressed by these copyright monopolists who say we can't do stuff we should be able to do. Both cannot be true at the same time.
> At least it would be really hard to get a court to regard it as an infringement.
It's extremely hard to get a court to do anything. As in tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars difficult. Nothing is decided until actual judges start deciding things, and to get to that point you need to actually go through the legal system, and to do that you need to pay expensive lawyers lots of money. It's the reason people instantly fold the second legal action is threatened, doesn't matter if they're right. Corporations have money to burn, we don't.
And that's assuming that courts are presided by honest human beings who believe in law and reason instead of political activist judges or straight up corrupt judges who can be lobbied by industry.