FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub
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This is not allowed under the LGPL, which mandates dynamic linking against the library. They copy-pasted FFmpeg code into their repo instead.
Seriously, if we copied in violation their code, how many hours would pass before a DMCA violation?
FLOSS should be dictatorial in application of the license. After all, its basically free to use and remix as long as you follow the easy rules. I'm also on the same boat that Android phone creators should also be providing source fully, and should be confiscated on import for failure of copyright violations.
But ive seen FLOSS devs be like "let's be nice". Tit for tat is the best game theory so far. Time to use it.
Also, it's better to gently apply pressure and set a track record of violators taking corrective measures so when you end up in court one day you've got a list of people and corporate entities which do comply because they believed that the terms were clear enough, which would lend weight to your argument.
Saying this as a GPL hardliner myself.
The problem here isn't a technical violation of the LGPL, it's that Rockchip doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL. What they should have done is put their modified FFMPEG code into a forked project, clearly label it with an LGPL LICENSE file, and link against that.
I think the devs of that Chinese company seemed to immediately acknowledge the attribution.
Now the OSS community loses the OSS code of IloveRockchip, and FFmpeg wins practically nothing, except recognition on a single file (that devs from Rockchip actually publicly acknowledged, though in a clumsy way) but loses in reputation and loses a commercial fork (and potential partner).
> - Rockchip's code is gone > - FFmpeg gets nothing back > - Community loses whatever improvements existed > - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner
This is all conjecture which is probably why you deleted it.
Their code isn't gone (unless they're managing their code in all the wrong ways), FFmpeg sends a message to a for-profit violation of their code, the community gets to see the ignorance Rockchip puts into the open source partnership landscape and finally... If Rockchip becomes an adversary of one of the most popular and notable OSS that they take advantage of, again, for profit then fuck Rockchip. They're not anything here other than a violator of a license and they've had plenty of warning and time to fix.
He offer perspective from a Chinese POV, so I think it is worth people reading it. ( Not that I agree with it in any shape or form )
You are right, and the FFmpeg devs are also 100% right and I perfectly understand that.
In fact I like the idea to push the big corps and strongly enforce devs' rights.
I think earlier enforcement would have been beneficial here, just that dropping a bomb after 1 year of silence and no reminder (and we still don't know if that was the case), is a bit unpredictable, so I wanted to raise that question
All they could say was "we are too busy with the other 1000s chips we have, we will delay this indefinitely".
Ridiculous.
"Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too"
reconcile with
"doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL"
They should be covered as an aggregation, provided the LGPL was intact.
Not sure what you're trying to say here. DMCA takedown enforcement is 100% the responsibility of the Online Service Providers per statute. It's the mechanism by which they receive safe harbor from liability for hosting infringing content.
Once a valid (from a process perspective) claim is submitted, the provider is required to take the claimed content down for 10 days. From there the counter claim and court processes can go back and forth.
You can post your thoughts, feelings, and opinions on google blog, and I can submit a DMCA and google is required to take down your thoughts feelings and opinions immediately without verification.
If you don’t own it and cannot legally relicense part as LGPL, you’re not allowed to publish it.
Just because you can merge someone else’s code does not mean you’re legally allowed to do so.
> This may or may not be possible
I am not sure what you are saying, that is different from the comment you replied to.
Fair use doesn't get thrown out the window because GPL authors have a certain worldview.
Second, there are a lot of non-copyrightable components to source code - if you can't copyright it - you certainly can't GPL it. These can be copied freely by anyone at any time.
In the specific ffmpeg case, you are allowed to dynamically link against it from a project with an incompatible license.
If they aren't compatible, then you can't use them together, so you have to find something else, or build the functionality yourself.
Copyleft licenses are designed to prevent you mixing code as the licenses are generally incompatible with mixing.
More permissive license will generally allow you to mix licenses. This is why you can ship permissive code in a proprietary code base.
As for linking, “weak copyleft” license allow you to link but not to “mix” code. This is essentially the point of the LGPL.
I'm honestly quite confused what FFmpeg is objecting to here, if ILoveRockchip wrote code, under a compatible license (which Apache 2.0 is wrt. LGPLv2+ which FFmpeg is licensed under) -- then that seems perfectly fine.
The repository in question is of course gone. Is it that ILoveRockchip claims that they wrote code that was written FFmpeg? That is bad, and unrelated to any license terms, or license compatibility ... just outright plagiarism.
The notice has a list of files and says that they were copied from ffmpeg, removed the original copyright notice, added their own and licensed under the more permissive Apache license.
To those downvoting, curious why? Many of the links are not viewable, since GitHub hides them, so any discussion becomes quite tricky.
https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/directory/ed4b20...
And yep, they only included the most openly permissive ones there (APL2 and MIT), completely skipping everything else. Ugh.
The simplest way to comply while keeping your incompatible license is to isolate the LGPL part into a dynamic library, there are other ways, but it is by far the most common.
thank you!
Patents != copyright
... yet, you did it anyway, without going into detail or providing any clue where these violations (as you claim) are.
If there's any substance to what you say, provide some details and proof, so it can be a constructive discussion, rather than just noise.
It's an open question (the FSF has their opinion, but it has never been adjudicated) if the GPL impacts dynamic linking.
One could argue that if one ships GPL dynamic libraries together with one's non GPLd code, one is shipping an aggregate and hence the GPL infects the whole, but its more complicated to say if one ships a non GPLd binary that runs on Debian, Redhat et al and uses GPLd libraries that they ship.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251103193914/https://github.co...
Archive won't load the remaining 3 items for me.
They were never really working on it, they thought it would just go away. Maybe some junior/senior dev took a shot at it, gave a project plan and it went nowhere.
Really, it comes down to encoding. Arbitrarily short utf-8 encoded strings can be generated using a coin flip.
It's trivially true that arbitrarily short reconstructions can be reproduced by virtually any random process and reconstruction length scales with the similarity in output distribution to that of the target. This really shouldn't be controversial.
My point is that matching sequence length and distributional similarity are both quantifiable. Where do you draw the line?
Picking randomly out of a non-random distribution doesn't give you a random result.
And you don't have to use randomness to pick tokens.
> If you mean chance=uniform probability you have to articulate that.
Don't be a pain. This isn't about uniform distribution versus other generic distribution. This is about the very elaborate calculations that exist on a per-token basis specifically to make the next token plausible and exclude the vast majority of tokens.
> My point is that matching sequence length and distributional similarity are both quantifiable. Where do you draw the line?
Any reasonable line has examples that cross it from many models. Very long segments that can be reproduced. Because many models were trained in a way that overfits certain pieces of code and basically causes them to be memorized.
Right, and very short segments can also be reproduced. Let's say that "//" is an arbitrarily short segment that matches some source code. This is trivially true. I could write "//" on a coin and half the time it's going to land "//". Let's agree that's a lower bound.
I don't even disagree that there is an upper bound. Surely reproducing a repo in its entirety is a match.
So there must exist a line between the two that divides too short and too long.
Again, by what basis do you draw a line between a 1 token reproduction and a 1,000 token reproduction? 5, 10, 20, 50? How is it justified? Purely "reasonableness"?
There are very very long examples that are clearly memorization.
Like, if a model was trained on all the code in the world except that specific example, the chance of it producing that snippet is less than a billionth of a billionth of a percent. But that snippet got fed in so many times it gets treated like a standard idiom and memorized in full.
Is that a clear enough threshold for you?
I don't know where the exact line is, but I know it's somewhere inside this big ballpark, and there are examples that go past the entire ballpark.
I don't care where specifically the bound is.
[0] https://githubcopilotlitigation.com [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai...
Doesn’t invalidate your story in the slightest - I just know they’ve gotta be chasing this, specifically, like it’s life or death.
Copyright and patents are completely independent concepts.
The “perpetual” part is the issue but “rent seeking” is the entire reason that copyright and patents exist to begin with.
This sounds pedantic, but it’s important to not mistake the means for an end:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
Did you know that Facebook owns the patent on autocompletes? Yahoo owned it and Facebook bought it from them as kind of a privately owned nuclear weapon to create a doctrine of mutually assured destruction with other companies who own nuclear-weapons-grade patents.
Of course the penalty for violating a patent is much worse if you know you are doing it, so companies are very much not eager to have the additional liability that comes with their employees being aware that every autocomplete is a violation of patent law.
The real (legal) question in either case, is how much is actually copied, and how obvious is it.
It’s also incredibly hard to tell if a LLM copied something since you can’t ask it in court and it probably can’t even tell you if it did.
But the issue with copyright I think comes from the distribution of a (potentially derivative or transformative in the legal sense) work, which I would say is typically done manually by a human to some extent, so I think they would be on the hook for any potential violations in that case, possibly even if they cannot actually produce sources themselves since it was LLM-generated.
But the legal test always seems to come back to what I said before, simply "how much was copied, and how obvious is it?" which is going to be up to the subjective interpretation of each judge of every case.
Questions about LLMs are primarily about whether it's legal for them to do something that would be legal for a human to do and secondarily about the technical feasibility of policing them at all.
It's already fixed. Anything you make with AI cannot be protected in any way (UK gives some leeway on certain types of creations).
So if it mimics code from ffmpeg for example, then ffmpeg wins.
But if you change or add something in building ffmpeg.so that should be GPLed.
Apparently they copied some files from ffmpeg mixed with their propitiatory code and compiled it as a whole. That's the problem here.
Dynamic linking is a condition for LGPL compliance, but it is not sufficient. Dynamic linking does not automatically prevent a combined work from being a derived work.
No, it isn’t. The condition says to allow your users to make and use their own modifications to the part of the software which falls under the LGPL. Dynamic linking is only a convenient way of allowing this, not a requirement.
The law exists mostly to oppress. It's exactly the argument that gun proponents make "Only the good guys obey gun laws, so only the bad guys have guns."
All the good guys are losing following the law, all the bad guys are winning by violating the law. Frankly, at this stage, they write the laws.
I remember Rowan Atkinson (the UK actor) made a speech about this effect a couple of years ago and never heard about it since but definitely feeling it more and more... No exposure, no money, no legal representation. And at the same time we are being gaslit about our privilege.
It took 2 years because FFmpeg waited 2 years to send a DMCA notice to Github, not because of delays in the legal system. I think you are conflating different unrelated issues here.
Another example exists in Ontario's tenant laws constantly being criticized as enabling bad tenant behavior, but reading the statute full of many month delays for landlords and 2 day notices for tenants paints a more realistic picture.
In fact, one such landlord lied, admitted to lying, and then had their lie influence the decision in their favor, despite it being known to be false, by their own word. The appeal mentioned discretion of the adjudicator.
Not sure how long that can go on before a collapse, but I can't imagine it's very long.
I think it should be perfectly OK to make value judgements of other people, and if they are backed by evidence, make them publicly and make them have consequences for that person's position.
I do agree however with your assessment because any (additional) accountability would improve matters.
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/11487484/cra-tax-service-calls-au...
Rockchip is a hardware platform, what hardware the code runs on isn't relevant here.
It remains to be seen how much 'pull' FFmpeg has against the 'push' of Rockchip.
If everyone just actively boycotted that site, it would become irrelevant overnight. Anything else is simply condoning it continued existence. Don't kid yourself.
Intentional noncompliance with copyright law can get you quite a distance, but there's a lot of money involved, so if you ever catch the wrong kind of attention, usually by being too successful, you tend to get smacked.
It's fairly trivial to block torrent traffic.
Checks out sufficiently dystopian, yep.
If you could work some gratuitous LLM in there, we could be a little closer to torment-nexus territory. Keep working at it.
That's the most techbro-brained idea I could come up with.