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Comment by rwl4 | Hacker News Reader

This project is designed to allow people to use ChatGPT via reversed engineered private APIs. It's not surprising they went after this.

Here's the project description from the README:

  Have you ever come across some amazing projects that you couldn't use just because you didn't have an OpenAI API key?

  We've got you covered! This repository offers reverse-engineered third-party APIs for GPT-4/3.5, sourced from various websites. You can simply download this repository, and use the available modules, which are designed to be used just like OpenAI's official package. Unleash ChatGPT's potential for your projects, now! You are welcome ; ).

Source: https://github.com/xtekky/gpt4free/blob/6719bee133ce8202129e...

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Releasing code to use undocumented APIs is speech, and is regulated as such

You have to run the code to violate the terms of use, which is primarily used to bar you from the service for misusing it.

Time and time again.

You are protected in your speech from the government. Commercial law does and will still apply. Arbitrary company decisions happen all the time, and GitHub makes it clear that they won’t refrain from deleting repos for whatever reason.

First amendment! Censorship! 2nd amendment for some reason!

Yeah in all seriousness people trot out perceived constitutional infringements about 500x times more than it actually happens.

Also they assume the entire world lives in America.

In this case both OpenAI and Microsoft are US companies, so US law applies.

Your rights are your rights, don't give them up.

Totally. It’s just that not every restriction in the world is an infringement on your rights.

Well that's not correct.

You are actually very protected in documenting security flaws, and even republishing them.

I am unsure of who you think enforces laws... as far as I know OpenAI doesn't have their own police force yet.

They can sue you of course, but they generally can't demand compliance with takedowns in this case without first going to a judge and requesting a court order.

There is no "commercial law" unless you mean UCC.. which doesn't apply here.

I'm not a lawyer or even an American but that certainly isn't how the DMCA works. The takedown is issued against the hosting company and, if they comply, they have no further liability. If they don't comply, they are liable in court so, of course, they all comply.

What does DMCA stand for?

Hint, that C letter is important!

In your mind, maybe. In the real world, the actual words of the statute are important.

There's a difference between being compelled by a court order to take down a repo and choosing to comply with a DMCA takedown notice of dubious validity because you don't want to waste any more time on the issue and are happy to screw your users.

There’s also a difference between how you’d like the world to be and the way the world actually is.

Still, there's nothing illegal about GitHub deleting your repo for any reason they choose as long as they're a private entity not owned by the government.

Not sure if that distinction applies here. I understand that the 1st amendment doesn't protect you from a company refusing to publish what you've said - that makes sense. But this is a case of a company attempting to use commercial law (created by the government) to cause someone else to stop their speech. That seems like a simple violation of the "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech"

But idk because i'm not a lawyer and we have copyright and ip laws so clearly congress can pass SOME laws that prohibit speech. Free speech absolutism is weird to me

In this case, it is really GitHub’s company policy which is being applied, right? They aren’t required to host anything in general, and they have a policy of taking down repos based on their interpretation of the DMCA, or some similar law (which might be a misinterpretation).

Any law is ultimately enforced by the government. There isn’t a different type of law to which the constitution doesn’t apply (I mean it doesn’t say a ton about limiting various types of laws—laws around contracts, state law, etc etc—but it still applies, it just doesn’t say much).

However, this seems more like an issue of corporate policy than law.

Github needs to have some policy that ends up with them taking down repos that actually host illegal content, they don’t have any legal obligation to host files, so they can respond to takedown notices by just taking down the files. This wouldn’t be the government forcing them to take down files, it would be them deciding not to try and parse the law very closely. But this is different from having an area of law where the constitution doesn’t apply, and it bears repeating, because the constitution is really important and the idea that there should be some sort of cutout where it doesn’t apply is bad for society.

Something we should grapple with as a society is whether poorly written, ambiguous laws should be interpreted as the government taking action by essentially forcing companies into be over zealous in their corporate policy.

> Any law is ultimately enforced by the government

So? That’s not what the first amendment applies to. You do not have first amendment rights in civil cases. This is not “an idea”. It’s just how it is. See libel.

> > Any law is ultimately enforced by the government

> So? That’s not what the first amendment applies to.

Yes it is.

> You do not have first amendment rights in civil cases.

Yes, you do; that’s why US defamation law is more limited than the common law it derives from, and where Fair Use as a judicial application of the First Amendment came from before it was codified in statute.

> See libel.

Libel is a perfect example of how you do have First Amendment rights in civil cases. Here's a long list of cases applying the First Amendment in the libel/defamation context:

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/encyclopedia/case/63/li...

> You are protected in your speech from the government. Commercial law

...is the government.

> You are protected in your speech from the government

In theory. In practice we see in the Twitter files, the new rule is that government agencies are free to send takedown requests to social media platforms for speech that disagrees with our (abhorrent) foreign policy.

>In practice we see in the Twitter files, the new rule is that government agencies are free to send takedown requests to social media platforms for speech that disagrees with our (abhorrent) foreign policy.

Where in the Twitter files did it show that social media platforms would be punished with jail time or violence or anything if they refused to obey the government's orders?

Because unless you can demonstrate the government was putting a gun to Twitter's head and would not take no for an answer, that isn't a "new rule" it's literally just the government making a request. Which they and anyone else is and has always been allowed to do. And which social media platforms have sometimes refused without reprisal. I mean, I see speech that disagrees with American foreign policy all the time on social media. No one's being sent to the camps for it. It doesn't even get censored.

Twitter didn’t need any additional pressure beyond what’s monumentally implicit, they had an FBI spook running the other side inside Twitter.

Not to mention that the requests constituted a gross 1st amendment violation.

> Not to mention that the requests constituted a gross 1st amendment violation.

IAAL and am unaware of any case law that holds that the mere act of requesting material be removed from publication is a First Amendment violation.

Do you have any case law to cite?

I think an interesting legal case could be made about publishing the code as a web page somewhere that could play around with the speech/action distinction - but I certainly don't think Microsoft is going to host ways for people to backdoor OpenAI under any circumstances - honestly I'm surprised it took an actual DMCA notice

In general it's certainly true that private internet companies are not bound by the USA first ammendment in that way, and routinely "censor" speech, I agree. Including for things that they think will be bad PR for them, or will be legally risky for them. But.

> GitHub makes it clear that they won’t refrain from deleting repos for whatever reason.

What actions or speech do you think Github has taken that makes that clear?

In general, I have seen Github stick to only taking things down according to the actual DMCA law, more than most companies that take things down pretty much whenever anyone asks them to.

Github has a DMCA Takedown Policy [1], that is better than most companies. Most companies policies -- if they even transparently publish them at all, which they often don't -- go well beyond what the DMCA requires in what they will take down. Compare to eg YouTube [2], which isn't really using a DMCA process at all, doesn't really have a transparent policy at all, and does not allow you to counter-notice. Github's policy is way better than most; but maybe there are occasions where they have been known not to follow their own policy, is that what you're saying?

From what I've seen, github has actually made it much more clear than most companies that they won't just randomly take things down for arbitrary reasons, but have a clear and transparent policy based on the DMCA. But maybe there are things I don't know.

In this particular case, though, someone else pointed out to me in another part of this thread -- it's not totally clear Github is even involved. From the text on the repo, it seems possible that OpenAI contacted the repo owner directly, and the repo owner decided to change the text of the repo README to say that, and that may all that has happened? If Github had actually done a "takedown" according to their usual procedures, I think the repo wouldn't be there anymore? But it's not really clear what's going on, or even what the repo owner _claims_ is going on, unless we have more info than appears in the linked repo README. It's not currently clear that Github is involved at all.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/content-removal-polic...

[2] https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-yo...

> What actions or speech do you think Github has taken that makes that clear?

Github has deleted Iranian / Russian / etc. Repos before purely for political reasons. GitHub belongs to Microsoft, and Microsoft has a stake in OpenAI. Seems like a reason to me.

By purely political reasons, do you mean to comply with US law? Those are the only cases I can find [1] [2] [3]. Or if there are other cases, I'd love to see a link to more info!

I don't like the US law much either, personally. I just don't consider a US corporation complying with US law to be a demonstration they will do arbitrary things for "any reason", it's sort of the default I expect from corporations and very predictable. If there's an example of a US corporation that chose to intentionally violate those sanction laws as an ethical stance, I'd love to find out more about that, and the outcome, too! I would imagine they would be penalized by the US government.

Microsoft was in fact recently so penalized [4], but I don't think it had anything to do with github, and I definitely don't think it was an ethical stance, just a mistake/profit-motivated one, or because these laws are a mess and hard to comply with. But I expect US corporations to try to comply with US laws, and don't consider doing so to be arbitrary or unpredictable "any reason".

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-starts-blocking-develop...

[2] https://github.blog/2019-09-12-global-software-collaboration...

[3] https://techweez.com/2022/04/18/github-suspending-accounts-r...

[4] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1394

This is why Microsoft's takeover of Github (and OpenAI for that matter) is so tragic. They weren't required to take this down. It got taken down because Microsoft didn't like it. Microsoft now has their hooks in the open source community and can crush any project who does something they don't like.

Yup this is just code, the people running the code might be at fault but the code is an example.

If the code in any way includes private API keys, or circumvents protections on another entity's private API keys, then this is intellectual theft and punishable by the law. I'm willing to bet that without those private keys, the repo is worthless.

it doesn't contain private keys, arguably it contains irresponsible disclosures of various ways some large API users can predictably get their keys hijacked

I find it extremely sad that nowadays the EFF, FSF and ACLU are so watered down compared to the 90s (when I first read about abuses). With the wave of information and abuses that will come in the next years due to proprietary LLMs, i wish there was a new person with the drive of Stallman. Hunanity desperately NEED the new Stallmans, Lech Johansens, Russinovichs and Linuses of these new generations generations.

How does using private APIs violate copyright?

Not copyright but illegal data access and service use.

In exactly what respect is it illegal. Keeping in mind that "not complying with a corporation's policies" is not the same as breaking the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

I remember when this passed and thinking that it was all the big, incompetent businesses that can afford lawyers on retainer making sure that only big businesses that can afford lawyers on retainer maintain their position of superior power over individuals. Snuffing out any hope that the little guy - who through sheer talent - can do things on this incredible newfangled equalizing innovation called the Internet will finally have some real chance at power.

Bank of America used it to make people who simply changed the account number in their URL bar the criminals instead of them, who were completely incompetent at securing access to their customer's accounts. What previously would have been arguably criminal negligence.

It placed intent above competence - but only for those who can afford lawyers.

And here it is again, being abused the same way.

Hot take: It should be repealed completely.

Assuming that those third-party services are ones that the public can access via their own web interfaces, such that the only thing unauthorized is the manner in which the APIs are consumed, this would seem (unless I am missing more specific precedent) to fall out of CFAA coverage as a result of the Van Buren v. United States decision.

I remember seeing "Help: FBI criminally charged me with $6MM loss for hotlinking. I didn't do it" on HN earlier this year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30589489). Was this person lying?

I often wondered what the full story behind that one has as OP never posted in it again and never heard a peep in any sort of media story

There is no indication of what the charge was, and usually with hotlinking to an asset the legal issue is copyright infringement (which can be criminal as well as civil); that’s very different from suggesting that use of an API endpoint intended to be used by a public web frontend is a CFAA violation.

It's still trespassing if the private property owner did not invite you in, even if there wasn't a locked door.

Is it still trespassing if you ask to be let in, and the butler lets you in when he's not supposed to?

Yep.

If you trick the butler into letting you in by lying when you are aware that the home owner doesn't want you there then probably

If someone I didn't grant access broke (in a very smart way) into my house, turned on the lights for a minute and then left, I'd still be pissed and would call it illegal.

The situations aren't really comparable. We're talking about sending a request from a computer to a publicly available API endpoint that Open AI would rather you didn't, and then using the data that endpoint sends in response.

(Somewhat tangential, the "networks as a 3D space you travel around in with locations you visit" analogy does more harm than good. It's not what's happening and it results in muddled thinking.)

Something being accessible does not mean you're authorized to access it. Someones house being unlocked doesn't mean it's okay for you to enter. Authorization is the key part here and you likely can be convicted under the CFAA[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

Again, I don't think the analogy holds—no one is entering anything. A better analogy would be someone standing outside your house and asking you to pass a book to them through the open door, which you then voluntarily do.

I don't disagree your second paragraph, I'm just curious - can you elaborate more on why is that?

This is almost certainly an instance of Unauthorized Use under the CFAA and therefore criminal in the USA and any jurisdictions with similarly broad anti-hacking laws.

If those are APIs consumed by public sites, then they are APIs the public is authorized to use by way of those sites, and Van Buren v. United States says that if you are authorized to access a system, accessing it a different “manner or circumstances” is not “unauthorized” as that term is used in the CFAA.

What part of "private API" is the one you don't understand? We could elaborate.

These are the exact same “private API”s your browser utilizes when visiting chat.openai.com and require your own API keys granted to you by OpenAI.

Calling it illegal is utterly insane. It’s just a different user-agent and they’d prefer people use their official ones. OpenAI literally controls the keys so if they don’t want someone using an alternate mechanism, they can and will just ban the account.

I wasn't aware companies could, by fiat, declare certain publicly available endpoints private, thereby compelling everyone by force of law to pretend they don't exist.

My bank's website is publicly available. That doesn't mean anyone is free to access my bank account. Just 'cause something is accessible on the internet doesn't mean you have the right to access it. Case law and statute goes back at least to the 1980s on this point.

The aforementioned tools do nothing whatsoever to grant to access accounts which aren’t theirs.

I know. That’s not what I said.

> That doesn't mean anyone is free to access my bank account.

They can. Now you know.

So, if I create a cat GIF API, but announce that it's a private cat GIF API only I am allowed to use, I can sue anyone else who uses it to retrieve a cat GIF?

Legally and literally: yes.

Knowingly using a private API without authorization can fall under CFAA, contract law, copyright law, trespass to chattel, etc -- and you can issue a C&D and/or sue for whatever is relevant.

People have gone to prison over guessable GET parameters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse_Security#AT&T/iPad_emai...

https://www.praetorianprefect.com/2010/06/114000-ipad-owners...

Citing convictions overturned on appeal probably isn't the strongest evidence of illegality. (Because they were overturned on threshold issues that didn’t involve inquiry into the substantive merits of the charges, its not evidence against illegality, either, but...)

My point is people have gone to prison over GET parameters, not the legality of the it. DOJ has CFAA. Abusing private APIs is flying close to the sun. Even if you do get out of prison eventually

> My point is people have gone to prison over GET parameters, not the legality of the it. DOJ has CFAA.

And CFAA is limited by Van Buren.

My website is private. If you visit it I will sue you.

If someone bypasses authentication I understand but if your api is open on the public internet on purpose, you don't get to randomly declare what's private and what isn't.

> mycoolsite.com is the same as mycoolsite.com/api/bb8d4cc4-1453-473b-8594-95db0f41877d/3c9242b8-2394-48c1-9643-618ca38eb13d for which you'll also need these dozen parameters and custom headers for, which there is no public documentation for

Whoo whoo, go easy on the straw man, man.

> Keeping in mind that "not complying with a corporation's policies" is not the same as breaking the law.

Actually, the law says that the Terms of Service is a legally-binding contract unless you can prove any provision is legally considered unconscionable. However, if that happens, all provisions except that provision still bind. It is illegal to break a legally-binding contract, and you can be sued or taken to arbitration at a minimum in a civil court for "breach of contract." And that's before any Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations.

Yes, corporations don't sue users for "breach of contract" almost... ever. It's expensive, risky, has low compensation for doing so, and is just bad PR. But they legally always can.

I'm assuming the users of Gpt4free haven't signed up to OpenAI's terms and conditions, even if they do contain language prohibiting use of these private APIs. A corporation can't unilaterally impose their TOS on the entire population (or, at least, one would hope they can't).

In that case though, let's say OpenAI decided to enforce their Terms of Use by potentially suing. The defendant would likely have to show, whether he likes it or not, that he never once signed up for ChatGPT, never once signed up for the official OpenAI API, and managed to perfectly reverse-engineer the API from the outside. Seems unlikely to me.

But then of course... CFAA and DMCA. The DMCA in particular, for example, doesn't consider the strength of the lock in the criminality. DVDs can be cracked with 7 lines of Perl since 2001, but it's still a DMCA violation.

> The defendant would likely have to show, whether he likes it or not, that he never once signed up for ChatGPT, never once signed up for the official OpenAI API, and managed to perfectly reverse-engineer the API from the outside.

These aren’t reverse engineering the OpenAI API, they are reverse engineering the APIs of public services that in turn call the OpenAI API.

I’m not sure under what theory OpenAI would even sue.

> But then of course... CFAA and DMCA. The DMCA in particular, for example, doesn't consider the strength of the lock in the criminality.

The DMCA only applies to technology addressing copyrights, and CFAA seems inapplicable to consuming the backend APIs used by publicly accessible services because that’s just use of authorized access by a different manner, outside of CFAA scope under the Van Buren precedent.

> Actually, the law says that the Terms of Service is a legally-binding contract unless you can prove any provision is legally considered unconscionable

No, it doesn’t.

It says they can state the terms of a contract if all the requirements of contract formation have been met, which are more than just the absence of unconscionable terms.

>projects that you couldn't use just because you didn't have an OpenAI API key?

It's amazing how the repo phrases this like "having an OpenAI API key" is something that's gatekept, rather than something you get by making a free account. (You may not be able to use it, but the more honest phrasing of "don't want to pay for your own API usage" is apparently too transparent for what this is offering.)

You can’t currently get a GPT4 API key without being handpicked by OpenaAI sadly.

I’m not saying this makes the above repo right, but it is gatekept.

If they've actually reverse engineered I see no reason in this going anywhere.

They didn't reverse engineer OpenAI's API, they reverse engineered random websites so you could spend their resources instead of your own.

That's a great reason for it to go somewhere.

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