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poVoq

@ poVoq @slrpnk.net

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1084
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4 yr. ago

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • It is not my argument, but the official stance of the US copyright office and some other similar bodies around the world.

    But yes, it poses some interesting philosophical questions, but those are not of very high relevance to copyright law.

  • What instance of Lemmy would you recommend to use, lemmy world or something else?

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  • Our https://old.slrpnk.net/ should currently work without any javascript, but we might have to add additional anti-scraper protection in the future if Iocaine becomes ineffective against an aggressive scraper.

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • Basically the transformative abilities of LLMs can make copyright obsolete.

    That is wishful thinking. Copyright was originally designed to protect human creativity, and a lot of the laws and precedence cases involve human effort specifically to distinguish between plagiats and original works.

    As long as courts don't start to rule otherwise, LLM generated code is not considered to be copyrightable itself, thus it can not be original work as defined under copyright laws. This in turn lowers the threashold for such code to be considered a derivative regardless of if there is a clear pathway from one to the other. All it takes is someone to claim that it is derivative, and the burden of proof that it isn't largly falls onto the person accused. And if the code is functionally identical and with no significant human involvement, that is very hard to proove.

    IANAL of course.

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • Copyright can also apply to code rewritten in another programming language, if the overall structure and functionality is identical. Although tbh, that is a bit of a grey area, and in previous rulings there is some precedence that if the "translation" involves significant human effort then it can be considered to be sufficiently transformative. But promting an LLM to "rewrite this in Go" very likely doesn't pass that relatively high bar.

    The study you linked is interesting (and likely underestimates the issue*), but it also shows that it is possible to automate detection of copyright infringing code in LLM output, and even just 2% is more than enough to open a case for malicious litigation. Large companies can write that off as the cost of doing business, but for small individual open-source developers this is a significant risk.

    '*' Because human programmers usually reuse existing licensed code as libraries, while LLMs are prone to rewrite them, and as explained above a rewrite is at an elevated risk of being considered copyright infringing.

  • Removed

    Tesseract Dev (AdmiralPatrick) Final Goodbye Message After Censorship Scandal

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  • Everyone is the hero in their story 🤷

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • And what do you think "concerns over licensing" means? 🤦

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • You realized that those parts refer to two different things? But since you clearly live in a world entirely detached from reality I don't think this makes sense to discuss further.

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • Yes, that's why they put up a big banner informing everyone after they decided on the ToS change.

    I really get the feeling there are a bunch of people here commenting that have never visited Codeberg even once 🤦

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • It is not. There are plenty of studies showing that LLMs spit out code that is near verbatim to existing code and LLM companies even go so far as to instruct their models to not also add the corresponding license/copyright headers with that code.

    There are probably law firms analysing common code patterns LLMs often use right now and are approaching copyright holders of similar enough code to buy up the rights. It might not all stand up in court, but it will be enough to scare some people into settling for fee that guarantees a profit for these law firms. This is a tried and true method for an entire industry of law firms.

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • At this point I must assume you are trolling 🤦

    It is a totally different thing to have the occasional copyright take down request from a legitimate copyright holder, or hosting code that is in the majority likely copyright infringing and just waiting for someone to start targeting for mass copyright litigation.

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • No, these malicious law firms intentionally go after the small fish, who are much more likely to be intimidated and give in to a settlement payment before it even reaches the courts.

    And for Codeberg it makes absolutly sense to minimize the issue for them now before it becomes an even bigger issue.

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • What hasn't happened? Sure, this isn't wide spread yet, but it also took malicious law firms a while before they realized going after p2p torrent users is a lucrative business.

    And I seem to have a much better grasp at copyright than you do.

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • It is still a parody project 🤷

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • You are linking to a parody project 🤦

    And you are also misunderstanding my point. Yes the cat is out of the bag and companies will absolutely copyright wash their codebases like that, but they have big legal teams to defend against copyright trolls and generally do not publish most of their code base for anyone to see.

    Small hobbyist open-source projects that make up near 100% of the projects hosted on Codeberg on the other hand are easy marks for malicious litigation, just like home users torrenting movies were in the 1990ties and early 2000.

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • You are still not understanding the issue.

    LLMs cause a lot of people to unknowingly violate copyright, and those people then become easy targets for malicious copyright litigation. And Codeberg is caught in the middle of that and doesn't want to be involved in the resulting mass legal cases because they are just a small volunteer organisation without a legal team.

    And Codeberg's explanation is very clear that is isn't a blanket ban on LLM generated code for "purity" reasons. It is a risk mitigation strategy against projects that are mostly LLM generated.

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • Yes, they can upload copyrighted stuff, but people typically don't do so on large scale and when they knowingly do it these days they typically try to hide their tracks well enough that law firms know it will not be a lucrative business to try and blackmail them.

    And one of Codeberg's main points is the unknown copyright status, you just failed to understand it.

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • You are missing the point entirely. LLMs regularly generate code that is a near verbatim copy of existing copyrighted code, but with almost no way for the LLM using person to notice that. LLMs being sufficiently transformative might be an argument about the use of training material, making the resulting model not a copyright violation itself, and thus might protect the companies that produce and offer these models, but it says nothing about the actual output of a model.

    It is only a question of time before some enterprising law firm decides to mass scan open-source projects and weaponize their findings similar to patent trolls or file-sharing legal threats. This has a long history in Germany where Codeberg is located, and even if a court rules that the host itself is only responsible for removing such copyright violating code, it will require significant effort to do so with constant legal fights as the attacking lawyers will try to figure out the identity of the person responsible so that they can blackmail them with cease and desist legal fees.

    Politics will not care about some hobbyist open-source projects and large companies will spend a lot of effort to obfuscate their code to prevent this legal trolling to affect them.

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • something nobody ever told you about

    Other than it being explained in big letters on the very front page of Codeberg?

  • [AIT] The Codeberg ban on LLM content

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  • It was a lenghty process with their members voting on both ToS changes. Just because you only hear from it now, doesn't mean it was "made rather rapidly".

    And the ambiguity is necessary to prevent overburdening the moderators. This isn't some legal code with a well funded state apparatus behind it.

  • Opensource @programming.dev
    poVoq @slrpnk.net

    Happy Birthday OpenStreetMap – Celebrating 20 Years

    birthday20.openstreetmap.org
  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    poVoq @slrpnk.net

    Pixelfed groups are finally here!

    mastodon.social /@dansup/112902813708108554
  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    poVoq @slrpnk.net

    Pixelix: Alternative Android Client for Pixelfed

    github.com /daniebeler/pixelix
  • Selfhosted @lemmy.world
    poVoq @slrpnk.net

    Running a OPNsense firewall in a VM?