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This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright (www.404media.co)

submitted 1 week ago by artifex@piefed.social to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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Malus, which is a piece of "satire" but also fully functional, performs a "clean room" clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell, redistribute, etc. the software without crediting the original developers. But I have a hard time with the "clean room" argument since the LLM doing the behind-the-scenes work has already ingested the entire corpus of open source software -- and somehow the output of the LLMs isn't considered a derivative work.

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[-] aReallyCrunchyLeaf@lemmy.ml 53 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

All it will take is for the reverse uno card to be implemented at a large enough scale against proprietary software before companies throw a pissy fit and this will all go away. Alternatively GPL could stipulate that AI implementation would trigger copyleft protections.

This whole thing is stupid and in such bad faith. Maliciously clean room engineering open source software just to get around pesky licensing issues will cause so many more problems for these morons that already leech off the hard work of open source devs anyways. They literally have a steady stream of free software and all they have to do is NOT steal it. That's it. Just don't be a fucking evil goon, that's the only stipulation. They're shooting themselves in the foot so hard.

But no, having free access to the hard work of others isn't enough, they have to hoard it for themselves, like everything else in this deeply rotten civilization.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago

Alternatively GPL could stipulate that AI implementation would trigger copyleft protections.

I argue that it already does.

[-] madnificent@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Could link to your reasoning and/or summarise it here? Thanks.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The GPL requires that derivative works must also be licensed under the GPL.
LLMs are trained on GPL code.
LLM output is a derivative work of the training data (especially if it's asked to replicate one of the works it's trained on!).
Therefore, all LLM output is either also GPL, or if it's also been trained on stuff with conflicting licensing, just straight-up copyright infringement to use at all no matter what.

Laundering copyright is what LLMs do. It is fundamental to how they function, which means that they are a fundamentally illegal technology.

[-] Cricket@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I was thinking along similar lines when I first learned about Malus a couple days ago. Fine, so they get a "free" copy of open-source software that they can use without restrictions. What happens as time goes by and their "free" copy no longer receives any updates, fixes, improvements? I guess they can keep repeating the process every time a new version is released, but the whole thing seems counterproductive for anyone trying this.