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_odey

Who/what is the:

1. Author

2. Copyright holder

3. Copyright license

...of the code generated by this tool?

Unless the answer to all of these is unambiguously "the original", then you shouldn't be using such tool on any code, especially on your employer's intelectual property.

Sorry to be so negative about it but this is something that I see skipped over in all discussions related to AI. Just because it's AI does not make it immune to copyright law. You're giving away your code to a 3rd party company under their terms and conditions, and receivig some new code back, again under their terms and conditions. The fact that it uses AI under the hood is irrelevant, you're dealing with a business that produces you an output and you should know the terms before submitting anything to them, especially if you don't own that thing.

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You’re making a few claims implicitly here:

- the copyright status of the output of LLMs is ambiguous

- this ambiguity represents a legal risk to the users of LLMs

- given that ambiguity, nobody should use LLMs for work that is intended to be copyrighted

It’s not clear to me if any of these are true individually, never mind all together.

Maybe the copyright status is ambiguous but I think the probability that the output of LLMs is owned by anyone other than API caller is very low. You can copyright works, but you can’t copyright the ideas within those works.

Possibly this represents a liability issue but I think the probability of that is vanishingly small. Just because a legal theory exists doesn’t mean it’s going to be enforceable - one of the reasons for the existence of Uber, youtube, etc. if it’s a fait-accompli it’s not a risk.

Finally, it representing a risk of copyright liability is still just a business decision. I would guess that existing software projects are riddled with code snippets of ambiguous or incompatible licenses. All it takes is one person to copy a function that is GPL and label it otherwise and then it’s out in the world, technically running amok. It is probable that under the strictest definitions, every software company is engaging in some low level of copyright infringement. All-in, this means that while it’s a risk, it’s a risk you’re probably already taking and so you might reasonably conclude to ignore.

At least the first two are true if you are a lawyer, as every lawyer I know is waiting for AI legislation to make the two first points clear.

Any lawyer will tell you if the first two points are unclear the third point is rock solid - don't use tools that have ambiguous copyright terms until AFTER the big legal fallout/legislation unless you are willing to bet the entire farm.

From my non-lawyer "common sense" point of view, the reasoning that 1 and 2 implies 3 seems absurd in the face of the "no penalty without law" principle.

If the law is so unclear that lawyers can't determine legality and are waiting for additional guidance from the lawmakers, shouldn't it be legal by default?

The risk is not "being punished under a new law for things your business did before the law existed". The risk is "there's a new law that made your whole business model illegal, now what?"

Well, I guess that's also a risk - that a future law forces you to stop selling your software until you remove all AI-generated code.

A law like this seems pretty much impossible to enforce, though. Even if it turns out that GPT is just parroting remixes of GPL code, all examples of generated code I've seen are fully indistinguishable from code someone may have come up on their own - with the exception of contrived cases where someone is actively trying to get it to output a particular fragment of code verbatim.

It's perfectly possible to have a new untested act judged illegal under existing laws, but only after performing the questionable act, and it being examined and judged.

My common sense says that without a tiny bit of doubt, copilot is utterly outlaw so far, essentially stealing gpl code where the only price was credit. It probably has several other problems but that is one that anyone can see. I don't mean everyone agrees, I mean the information needed to make the judgement is all present to all observers without needing to see the code or the training process or be a lawyer. There are countless examples of regurgitated gpl code, with no credit. End of search.

It's inexcusable because it would have been almost zero burden to get everyone's consent to be included in a collective credit. They didn't even do that.

So, whether or not this assertion of mine ever amounts to anything, it's a simple example of something being illegal all along, but maybe you don't know it until after you do it, and it gets examined and judged, and the judgement goes the way that burns you.

It doesn't require any new law.

Or you start a limited liability company, win the market from all the people who are terrified of maybes and worst case your liability is limited to company assets.

This period if legal ambiguity is the period when gold (meaning significant wealth) is spun from pressing the legal margins. Remember Napster, an illegal from the get-go startup? Yet one of it's founder, Sean Parker, is one of the Internet Goldenboys with the c-suites, legal, drug and celebrity problems only crazy wealth can afford. It's not an easy path, but right now is when the first movers are starting to sprint...

Last I heard the output of an AI was uncopyrightable. Didn't some court case determine that?

I suspect the raw output of an LLM will not be considered copyrightable but the composition of those raw outputs into a coherent work is likely protected.

What a mind-bogglingly stupid decision if so, I can just train a network on the identity function and get royalty free mickey mouse now?

It's court precedent, so a loophole like that probably won't work

Your comment is very valid. I'd just add that AI tools are clearly taking the "YouTube approach": they provide a large value added, ignore copyright for the moment, and hope to resolve it peacefully at some later point in time. This worked very well for YouTube.

I wouldn't describe the Content ID regime and the myriad lawsuits and backroom deals as "peaceful".

YouTube wasn't killed and thrived as a platform throughout the process. Meanwhile YT ads funded the lawsuits and negotiations, with a surplus. It is pretty much a solved problem now. This is as peaceful as it gets when you genuinely infringe on someone's very valuable rights.

Yeah they survived but I think we're worse off in a world of Content ID, copystrikes, erosion of fair use, theft of ad revenue by game companies. The list goes on. YouTube should probably be a lesson, not a model to copy.

Yes, the lesson is not to contribute anything of value to open source or another person's platform.

Creators need to use restrictive licenses, then all of these parasitical corporations will cease to exist.

Limiting the scope to software, I'd say it's fair to distinguish MIT licenses from GPL. The latter provides way more freedom for the user (as opposed to corporations willing to profit without giving back). I am fair more comfortable contributing to an AGPLv3 software as opposed to a MIT licensed one.

I can't talk about licensing for content creators (like youtube), because I do not have much experience about it.

You're right, but I don't see how we could not have those things with the copyright laws as they stand and people being what they are. Maybe it could be a little bit better, but not substantially better.

> Sorry to be so negative about it but this is something that I see skipped over in all discussions related to AI.

I don't know which forums you are discussing these things in, but this is the first comment on all discussions about AI on HN.

I don’t know what’s the actual legal status on LLMs right now, but here’s my thought: if you created artwork in Adobe Photoshop, does Adobe own your art work? If you made a world in Minecraft, does Minecraft own your world? What about using the AI tools in Adobe Photoshop? Or WorldEdit in Minecraft?

I’m sure these question can be easily answered by looking it up, so why would LLMs be any different? You have control over what the LLM generates (prompts).

Thanks for saying this, this is my perspective as well and I've been kinda dumbfounded by all the questions about copyright from LLMs. They're just tools and computer programs right? Why would copyright be any different while using them than other tools.

Never seen it questioned that Windsor & Newton could actually be the copyright holder for half the world's art.

Because the inputs to the models are copyrighted works?

If I open up Photoshop and make a new file, I own my art. So why would me opening up an existing PSD and moving all the pieces around and then claiming it as my own be an issue?

I don’t think anyone would question this at all if the model were trained only on your own data. It’s the part where a bunch of other people’s stuff was involved that makes it fuzzy enough to be an open legal question.

I read your position as being the copyright should belong to the holders of the copyright for the training works?

I can sort of see that but a) I'm also seeing it posited that the copyright could belong to either ht model or the company that produced the model (where does that logic come from?) and b) My own creativity is trained on the works of many others but my work is still my own, why is this different for an LLM?

It’s different because rules are written and enforced by humans not robots. So it’s whatever the copyright office says at the moment.

I think a same result though is that any work translated by the original author counts as a translation that maintains but doesn’t extend copyright.

I'd say that the difference is in the ownership of the data the tool has as it does it's job. In the case of Photoshop, these are the algorithms possibly owned by Adobe and the bytes you feed it. In the case of LLMs it is the model which was built using data with disputed ownership and the bytes you feed it.

Consider a hypothetical LLM that was trained on data having a single undisputed copywrite owner. What would be the legal status of it's output?

> Consider a hypothetical LLM that was trained on data having a single undisputed copywrite owner. What would be the legal status of it's output?

In that case the tool would almost certainly generate a derivative work, which would be a copyright violation. It's the same as if I took sick strong inspiration from a certain song that I wrote a new one with the same melody and chords, which has happened a bunch of times.

But generally LLMs are most useful when they're trained on a broad enough corpus to avoid these issues.

It's not really about the size of the corpus but about its ownership.

Anyway, now consider an LLM that was trained on two corpuses(?) with two distinct undisputed owners.

What difference does that make? The question is whether the work that is produced is derivative or not surely.

That is the question indeed.

But then the presence of the LLM doesn't change anything right?

hell Pantone claims to own colors let alone art

The question is more like this, if google books has an api that lets you retrieve one sentence from any book, and you use it to fetch whole chapters of valuable books written by actual insightful authors.

Do you really deserve to claim to have written the book you patch together from that? Especially, do you really deserve to not only benefit from selling the new book, but not even acknowledge nor pay a percentage to the original authors?

It depends how derivative my resulting book is. If I put all the sentences in the same order then I've created a derivative work, but if I create a meaningfully new work then I'd expect the copyright to be mine.

How do you know what deserves credit and what doesn't, when the tool doesn't tell you? How do I know whether you had the valuable insight to craft an artful line, or ot was handed to you and you glued it to another and another?

When you write a program using a library, there is no such ambiguity or credit-washing. You wrote your app, the library authors wrote the library.

copilot is essentially stripping that. You get to not only write your app, but look like, and even, apparently, feel like, you produced everything that went into it. All that stuff that was done by someone else and gifted to you, well that's all just the tools you the real artist used. It's absurd to credit a paint brush eh?

What’s the ownership of code that’s translated into another programming language by a human, given that usually there’s not a complete 1:1 of all features, so some of it will need to be rewritten?

It’s weird all of these fringe legal theories are coming out now in response to “AI”, which isn’t much more than a fancy search engine.

No one was asking those questions when the backbone of any modern tech company was, ironically, thousands of copy/pasted lines of code from StackOverflow and any other references that come up in a Google search. The number of SDE’s I know who can write code without a web browser is vanishingly small.

Valid points, and it needs to be said. But it's a PR away from switching from an external API call to using a locally installed gippity brain to do the migration.

Surprise you just paid a few pennies and gave all LLM users and another company you don't know all of your IP, while exposing yourself to future litigation.

People continue to parrot this point, but API use is not used to train models.[1]

Don’t trust OpenAI? Use Microsoft.

Don’t trust Microsoft? Run TII Falcon locally.

1: https://openai.com/policies/api-data-usage-policies

Most companies' IP is mostly worthless. It's their brand and market position that's much more valuable.

If you disagree, how many users are on your twitter clone right now? Exactly.

Great feedback.

I'm not the author of this project, but in my understanding, it's the same as if you were to write the code yourself. The project doesn't publish anything and it works entirely locally aside from LLM calls (which could in the future be 100% local as well). So you remain the author and have complete control over the license of the generated code.

> and it works entirely locally aside from LLM calls

So not entirely locally. Yes these could eventually also run locally but OP’s point still stands.

This is great to hear but I don't fully know how far reaching are openai's claws (since it does require an openai api key).

If it runs 100% locally then yes, it would be safe to use.

totally agreed that diff projects need to be careful w/ sharing proprietary code w/ third parties.

openai's official stance is that it will never use API calls as training data, and that in my understanding it may retain API call data for up to 30 days for compliance purposes, but that it legally won't store it beyond that (whereas chatgpt convos are meant to be stored and used for training purposes).

as a next step, they could provide a swappable version of the LLM provider using something like https://github.com/imartinez/privateGPT, https://github.com/alexanderatallah/window.ai, etc. would love to have a standard develop here as the community matures around LLM usage

How does running it locally make a difference to copyright?

If I run an OCR software 100% locally, do I get the copyright on the scanned result of Harry Potter?

Don't understand: using a giant LLM locally negates all the copyrights contained in the LLM? In which country is that a law?

I think GP means that at least you aren't dealing with a SaaS middleman that _also_ may intercept your code or claim authorship of the conversion.

You mean ownership nor license changes.

No, you don't "remain the author". You have never been the author if you translate the real author's code base.

The license is the one of the original, since this is unambiguously a derivative work.

Recommended edit: IANAL

I find this reasoning a bit flimsy. Copyright doesn't have anything to do with publishing, and is it really that clear that you are the sole author of the derived work?

Hmm not sure, I'll let you know after I use it and receive a cease and desist letter.

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