Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

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Knowing what you don't know is such an important skill in life and your career. And I 100% agree with you that the author is, well, off their rocker.

Let me give an example: I could take Goldeneye from the N64, extract the binary and then run it through an LLM to disassemble it and possibly rewrite it in a modern higher-level language. Do you think Nintendo would look at that and say "well, he did a lot of work so he's escaped our license"? Of course not. It's just silly.

ingesting the source code and producing output in another language is quite clearly a derivative work. You don't need to be an IP lawyer to figure that out.

Now, if you went to Calude and gave it documentation and told it to produce something that was compatible, would that be a derivative work and thus covered by the GPL? I would guess probably. But I'm not 100% sure anymore. I wouldn't risk it however.

Here's another thought experiment: what if someone takes this supposedly MIT licensed source tree, plugs it into another LLM and asks it to produce the output in C? Now how is it licensed? It might be very similar. After all, there are only so many ways to produce a SHA1 hash and so many ways to do a command line parser.

But this then makes it an interesting legal issue. In the Oracle v. Google court case, this was a key issue. Google successfully argued there's only so many ways to write a loop so just because a loop is similar to the source, that doesn't mean it's copyright infringement (as Oracle argued).

Anyway, it's a crazy position to take.

> Knowing what you don't know is such an important skill in life and your career. And I 100% agree with you that the author is, well, off their rocker.

They aren't the only ones - look at the number of people in this thread who are arguing that this is analogous to producing a movie with ffmpeg - just because ffmpeg is GPL, does not make your movie GPL.

I am struggling to understand how such a high level of cognitive dissonance is possible: They believe both a) that the license can be laundered in this manner, and that b) the license they put on the result is effective!

Well that is already how it is done with numerous multi-decade open rewrites of closed games. They usually require the asset pack.

I don't know how this squares with law, but Oracle v Google gave a very valuable judgment to the public that an API is not copywritable. If we take the LLM out of it, that's all we are talking about in the pure case.

Of course, we can't take the LLM out, but it is the starting point.

> Well that is already how it is done with numerous multi-decade open rewrites of closed games

Serious such rewrites don't start with the code of the closed game!

> I don't know how this squares with law, but Oracle v Google gave a very valuable judgment to the public that an API is not copywritable. If we take the LLM out of it, that's all we are talking about in the pure case.

Not at all. The LLM used to write grit has seen the git code. That is what we're talking about here.

> Of course, we can't take the LLM out, but it is the starting point.

The LLM isn't the important thing. The important thing is that the git source code was used to make grit.

>Serious such rewrites don't start with the code of the closed game!

No, but they often involve reverse engineering the binary pretty heavily.

> No, but they often involve reverse engineering the binary pretty heavily.

… and those often end up in legally dubious situations.

heh - https://github.com/n64decomp/007

game decompilation and emulation is as old as computing

> Do you think Nintendo would look at that and say "well, he did a lot of work so he's escaped our license"? Of course not. It's just silly.

That's because you're re-using assets.

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