danlitt

> If power being disproportionate is sufficient to void terms, why not those terms too?

Power being disproportionate is obviously not sufficient to void terms - that's not what the comment you're replying to said. It is necessary to void terms when there is a power imbalance.

> Should the state just prohibit all agreements between two parties unless the state's adjudicator decides they are exactly equal in "power" and permits it?

This is obviously ridiculous and makes me think you are not arguing in good faith. Terms have to justify their existence according to logical principles that we argue about. It does not follow that there has to be a "state's adjudicator"! I am just describing how democracies come up with laws - it is not some fantasy Orwellian nightmare.

> I get that many people are subservient and would much prefer that

Ironic comment!

> Why should a government prohibit private parties from agreeing to anything other than those 3 things?

> I'm not saying any term should be enforceable. Contract law has a long history against that. I just wonder how and where you draw the line and what existing law is insufficient.

This is not a magic list of 3 things that I think is complete.

I think there is a compromise between allowing companies to add arbitrary terms, including some which are enforceable but (by my feeling) unreasonable, and excluding unreasonable terms completely with a blanket ban, which no doubt would result in some companies being unable to add reasonable terms that are not in the list.

I think if we picked the 3 terms I outlined in my comment, the result would be a more pleasant situation than the one we have.

You could just say I disagree about what is an enforceable term. The point of the analogy is to show how ridiculous I find the current judicial reasoning, which is something along the lines of "if you don't like the term, you don't have to use the service, so it doesn't really matter how restrictive the terms are". I really think this is how particularly US judges think about this sort of thing, and I think it does a lot of harm to society. People find it obviously unreasonable for McDonalds to say how you can eat your burger, or for a book store to say what you can do with the information in your book, but when a service tells you how you can use the data you get from them, it's fair game. It's ethically inconsistent.

This quote is both funny and sad. It reads like an advertisement.

The entire notion of being allowed to enforce arbitrary terms of service is absurd. There are probably a handful of terms everyone agrees are reasonable (no attempted hacking, rate limits, do not break laws) and everything else should be unenforceable. Especially garbage like what you're allowed to do with the stuff you get from the service even while not using the service, or about setting up competing products. It's like McDonald's selling you a burger and telling you how to eat it.

Uh yes of course, I thought of that and thought "isn't that neat" but of course it goes against exactly what the author wants. I don't find this fear very natural I suppose! A different trusted third party could be nominated, I guess (KDE project nominate KDE e.V. for instance).

A risk of putting in a literal person is that you might stop maintaining the project, and changing the maintainer is now effectively a license change. It may be better to say "consensus among whoever is currently maintaining the project, as specified by the file MAINTAINERS".

> 'Illegal' doesn't really mean anything in this

This is a thread arguing about what the law should be.

> Fact is hacking can get to those keys.

Everything made by humans is fallible.

> Perhaps the maintainer wants to force the issue?

I doubt it, and I don't see any evidence that's what they're doing. There are probably better ways, if that's what they want.

> Checking the license of the transitive closure of your dependencies is table stakes for using them.

Checking the license of the transitive closure of your dependencies is only feasible when the library authors behave responsibly.

I did not expect people to take "API" so literally. This point is what I was referring to when I said "I am simplifying slightly". The point is that a clean room impl begins from a specification of what the software does, and that the new implementation is purported to be derived only from this. What I am trying to say is that "not looking at the implementation" is not exactly the point of the test - that is a rule of thumb, which works quite well for avoiding copyright infringement, but only when humans do it.

> If you somehow actually randomly produce the same code without a reference, it's not a copy and doesn't violate copyright.

I don't believe this, and I doubt that the sense of copying in copyright law is so literal. For instance, if I generated the exact text of a novel by looking for hash collisions, or by producing random strings of letters, or by hammering the middle button on my phone's autosuggestion keyboard, I would still have produced a copy and I would not be safe to distribute it. There need not have been any copy anywhere near me for this to happen. Whether it is likely or not depends on the technique used - naive techniques make this very unlikely, but techniques can improve.

It is also true that similarity does not imply copying - if you and I take an identical photograph of the same skyline, I have not copied you and you have not copied me, we have just fixed the same intangible scene into a medium. The true subjective test for copying is probably quite nuanced, I am not sure whether it is triggered in this case, but I don't think "clean room LLMs" are a panacea either.

> dirty phase produces a specification ... it is NOT defined as producing an API

This does not really sound like "the opposite of correct". APIs are usually not copyrightable, the truth is of course more complicated, if you are happy to replace "API" with "uncopyrightable specification" then we can probably agree and move on.

> it's probably not as dramatic as you think it is

In reality I am very cynical and think nothing will come of this, even if there are verbatim snippets in the produced code. People don't really care very much, and copyright cases that aren't predicated on millions of dollars do not survive the court system very long.

As long as you never read the original code, it is very likely that whatever you write is yours. So I would not be surprised to read judges indicating in this direction. But I would be a little surprised to find out this was an actual part of the test, rather than an indication that the work was considered to have been copied. There are for instance lots of ways of reproducing copyrighted work without using a copy directly, but naive methods like generating random pieces of text are very time consuming, so there is not much precedence around them. LLMs are much more efficient at it!

I disagree that information flow is required. Do you have a reference for that? Certainly it is an important consideration. But consider all the real literary works contained in the infinite library of babel.[1] Are they original works just because no copy was used to produce them?

[1]: https://libraryofbabel.info/

Thank you for providing a reference! I certainly admit that "very similar photographs are not copies" as the reference states. And certainly physical copying qualifies as copying in the sense of copyright. However I still think copying can happen even if you never have access to a copy.

I suppose a different way of stating my position is that some activities that don't look like copying are in fact copying. For instance it would not be required to find a literal copy of the GCC codebase inside of the LLM somehow, in order for the produced work to be a copy. Likewise if I specify that "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the text file with hash 165hdm655g7wps576n3mra3880v2yzc5hh5cif1x9mckm2xaf5g4" and then someone else uses a computer to brute force find a hash collision, I suspect this would still be considered a copy.

I think there is a substantial risk that the automatic translation done in this case is, at least in part, copying in the above sense.

I only said the probability is higher, not that the probability is 1!

This is exactly what I had in mind when I said I was simplifying :) it is a valid point.

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanishingly small probability of matching the original codebase enough to be considered a copy. With LLMs, the probability is much higher (since in truth they are very much not a "clean room" at all).

The actual meaning of a "clean room implementation" is that it is derived from an API and not from an implementation (I am simplifying slightly). Whether the reimplementation is actually a "new implementation" is a subjective but empirical question that basically hinges on how similar the new codebase is to the old one. If it's too similar, it's a copy.

What the chardet maintainers have done here is legally very irresponsible. There is no easy way to guarantee that their code is actually MIT and not LGPL without auditing the entire codebase. Any downstream user of the library is at risk of the license switching from underneath them. Ideally, this would burn their reputation as responsible maintainers, and result in someone else taking over the project. In reality, probably it will remain MIT for a couple of years and then suddenly there will be a "supply chain issue" like there was for mimemagic a few years ago.

in public is the operative word (and surveillance cameras in public are extremely recent and very controversial, so not as strong an argument as you might be thinking)

What are you talking about? It is illegal to tap people's phone lines or to interfere with mail. Are you saying people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy even when it's illegal to be spied on?

> This is a false equivalency.

I'm not making an equivalency. I'm just trying to get you to think how something that is at surface level true is not necessarily a "fair argument".

> I don't have to use TikTok DMs if I want E2EE.

I don't know why you think this is a convincing argument. It is currently illegal to tap people's phone lines, but when phones were invented it obviously was not illegal. It became illegal in part because people had a reasonable expectation of privacy when using the phone. They also have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using TikTok DMs - that's why people call them "private messages" so often!

> Exactly why I suggested that as a possible alternative.

My point is that you are offering these as alternatives when they are profoundly different proposals. It is like me saying I am pro forced sterilization and then offering as an alternative "we could just only allow it when people ask for it". That's a completely different thing! Having autonomy over your online life as a family rather than necessarily as an individual is totally ok. Surrendering that autonomy is not.

It certainly can be - destruction of evidence is a crime. If they can prove you destroyed evidence, even if they can't prove that the destroyed evidence incriminates you, that's criminal behaviour. For instance if it's known by some other means you have a conversation history with person X, but not whether that conversation history is incriminating, and then when your phone is searched the conversation history is completely missing, that is strong evidence of a crime.

Not answering my question!

> Police cannot access your E2EE DMs with a warrant.

They can and do, regularly. What they can't do is prevent you from deleting your DMs if you know you're under investigation and likely to be caught. But refusing to give up encryption keys and supiciously empty chat histories with a valid warrant is very good evidence of a crime in itself.

They also can't prevent you from flushing drugs down the toilet, but somehow people are still convicted for drug-related crimes all the time. So - yes, obviously, the police could prosecute more crimes if we gave up this protection. That's how limitations on police power work.

It should be obvious from how contrived your wording is that nobody thinks of them this way.

I don't think you confused anything, except for the terminology the platform uses. There is an obvious expectation of privacy when sending direct messages!

> I think it's a fair argument in this scenario to say that a platform has a better opportunity to protect minors if messages aren't encrypted

Would it be a fair argument to say the police have a better opportunity to prevent crimes if they can enter your house without a warrant? People are paranoid about this sort of thing not because they think law enforcement is more effective when it is constrained. But how easily crimes can be prosecuted is only one dimension of safety.

> However, an alternative could be allowing the sharing of the encryption key with a parent

Right, but this is worlds apart from "sharing the encryption key with a private company", is it not?

> there is more of an expectation of privacy on those medium

What does the "p" in "pm" stand for?

Can it generate one? Sure. But it won't mean anything, since you don't know (and nobody knows) the "true" distribution.

From your exact link,

> The aeolipile is considered to be the first recorded steam engine or reaction steam turbine, but it is neither a practical source of power nor a direct predecessor of the type of steam engine invented during the Industrial Revolution.

>>> How Many Hoops Are Too Many Hoops?

>> It's really not that many hoops

> That's... What the article is about

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

This is too strong of a statement. There are perfectly sensible reasons to NIMBY certain activities. For instance, burning wood is probably ok in general, but a horrible idea in heavily populated cities.

Obviously, California is not composed exclusively of heavily populated cities. But it does contain a lot of them! So it is not completely insane that the regulation is skewed in favour of this.

Of course, for things that are equally polluting no matter where you do them (like burning fossil fuels), moving production outside of the location but still buying produced materials is simply passing the buck. But it's not totally clear to me that's what's happening here.

Why does the title say "You better have a ... account" when the end of the article is literally a link to the form which does not require an account? I agree that the UI here is bad, but I feel like the title is just misrepresenting the content of the article.