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Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

This was inevitable. Copyright law has always used a "color of your bits" argument [0]. GPL and other libre/free/open licenses were a great hack to circumvent draconian copyright laws but the laws themselves are not designed for a rigorous treatment of similarity (maybe even by design?).

Also, it's worth noting in the example of ChatGPT emitting LGPL code without attribution or license, the code is actually different [1]. Is the difference enough to circumvent a copyright violation claim? I don't know but a big part of determining whether it does is now muddled because of the way the system was designed. Even if we could get an entropy distribution on which training data was used to generate the text, it's not even clear the courts could use it in any meaningful way.

[0] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

[1] https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554

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> Copyright law has always used a "color of your bits" argument

This is an excellent point in the context of this question. Typical computer programmer responses like "but there are only so many ways to write a function that does X" or "how small of a matching section counts as copyright infringement" ignore the color of the bits.

A judge can look at ChatGPT or Copilot, decide that it took in license-limited copyrighted data in its training set, observe that a common use is to have it emit that data - to emit bits that are still colored with copyright - and tell OpenAI, or Copilot, or their users that they are guilty of copyright infringement. There may be no coherent mathematical or technical formula to determine the color of a bit, but that's understandable, because the color doesn't exist in mathematical, technical, coherent domains anyways: Only the legal domain sees color, and it can take care of itself.

> GPL and other libre/free/open licenses were a great hack to circumvent draconian copyright laws

The GPL relies on copyright law.

That's an unkind reading. The implication is that GPL circumvents some relevant restrictions of copyright law in question by creating a legal framework to do so.

No it isn't. The GPL does not circumvent anything: it relies very heavily on the fact that the rights holders are able to license their creation as they see fit.

You continue to argue in bad faith. Copyright law is often used to prevent people from copying work. The GPL and its ilk are legal mechanisms designed to allow people to share their work.

> You continue to argue in bad faith.

You continue to argue in bad faith.

> Copyright law is often used to prevent people from copying work. The GPL and its ilk are legal mechanisms designed to allow people to share their work.

Yes, by relying on copyright law, which enables the very existence of those legal mechanisms. Without copyright law, said legal mechanisms are worth less than the paper on which they're printed.

GPL specifically relies on copyright law as a mechanism to prevent the sharing of work, by enforcing it's virality clause.

Without copyright law there would be no way to require GPLed code to continue to be shared with it's users.

The GPL is in no way a circumvention of 'draconian copyright law'. To spell it out: the GPL enumerates the rights and obligations of the recipients of a piece of software and critically relies on copyright in order to be able to do so. Without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable. So this is the polar opposite of your assertion, copyright is indeed used to prevent people from copying work without authorization. But the GPL and it's ilk are designed to allow people to share their work as long as the recipients respect the terms of the license. It's the critical bits that you left out that make all the difference, and without those critical bits the GPL would be useless and all of those critical bits have teeth only because of the existing framework of copyright law, which allows the rights holder to set the terms under which they license their work.

After all, if someone want to share a work without preventing people to do with it as they please then they are utterly free to do so by placing their work in the public domain or by sharing it using a permissive license.

It is ok to admit that you didn't understand how the GPL uses copyright law.

A central part of the GPL is forcing people to publish their modifications in source form. Without copyright law those requirements would be unenforceable and you would be stuck de-compiling encrypted/obfuscated binary blobs of your vendors customized copy of gcc.

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