An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post (https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter.
A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters.
We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error thinking that taking what were previously de jure policies that were de facto quite different in the real world, and thoughtlessly "upgrading" the de jure policies directly into de facto policies without realizing that that is in fact a huge change in policy. One that nobody voted for, one that no regulator even really thought about, one that we are just thoughtlessly putting into place because "well, the law is, 55 mph" without realizing that, no, in fact that never was the law before. That's what the law said, not what it was. In the past those could never really be the same thing. Now, more and more, they can.
This is a big change!
Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce.
And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having law enforcement make the laws is bad.
The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...
The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this doesn't cause a lot of damage in practice (though it can be abused), but if you start enforcing the letter of every law precisely it suddenly becomes the obligation of every citizen to know every law — in a de facto way, rather than just the de jure way we currently have as a consequence of ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’. So an increase of precision in law enforcement must be preceded by a drastic simplification of the law itself — not a bad thing by any means, but also not an easy (or, perhaps, possible) task.
The reason speed limits make such a great example for these arguments is because they're a preemptive law. Technically, nobody is directly harmed by speeding. We outlaw speeding on the belief that it statistically leads to and/or is correlated with other harms. Contrast this to a law against assault or theft: in those kinds of cases, the law makes the direct harm itself illegal.
Increasing the precision of enforcement makes a lot more sense for direct-harm laws. You won't find anyone seriously arguing that full 100% enforcement of murder laws is a bad idea. It's the preemptive laws, which were often lazily enforced, especially when no real harm resulted from the action, where this all gets complicated. Maybe this is the distinction to focus on.
This unwritten distinction exists only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression. There is no upside (even if getting away with speeding feels good). We should strive to enforce all laws 100% of the time as that is the only fair option.
If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).
> If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).
Isn't this the point of the whole conversation we are having here?
Laws on copyright were not created for current AI usage on open source project replication.
They need to change, because if they are perfectly enforced by the letter, they result in actions that are clearly against the intent of the law itself.
The underlying problem is that the world changes too fast for the laws so be fair immediately
The reason that has to be done is precisely that the law has no common, well-architected rationale. The vast majority of law in common-law jurisdictions is ad hoc precedent from decades or centuries ago, patchwork laws that match current, ephemeral intuition about what the law should be, etc. Perfect and inevitable enforcement makes this situation a nightmare, given the expectation that the average US citizen commits multiple felonies per day. Something will have to give.
The speed limit example is a great one. Consider a road that has a 35mph limit. Now - which of the following scenarios is SAFER:
a) I'm driving on the road in a brand new 4x4 porsche on a sunny day with great visibility and brand new tyres. Doing 40mph.
b) I'm driving on the same road in a 70s car with legal but somewhat worn out tyres, in the dark, while it's raining heavily. Doing 35mph.
Of course technically option a is violating the law but no sane police officer will give you a fine in this case. Nor should they! A robot will, however. This is stupid.
The Cayenne would be safer going 35 instead of 40 regardless of all other variables. It's a trivial physics question, kinetic energy is a function of mass and velocity.
If speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of the time, it would be impossible to drive.
>only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression
That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign. And me driving 120 km/h out of complete disregard for human life. Should I get a fine for driving 90? Yea, probably. Is it a first time offence? Was anyone else on the road? Did the sign get knocked down? Is it day or night? Have I done this 15 times before? Is my wife in labour in the passenger seat? None of those are excuses, but could be grounds for a warning instead.
> If speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of the time, it would be impossible to drive.
Why? Plenty of people drive in areas with speed cameras, isn't that exactly how they work?
> That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign.
I'm not sure it is hyperbole or that we should assume competence/good faith. Multiple studies have shown that traffic laws, specifically, are enforced in an inconsistent matter that best correlates with the driver's race.
I think I would expect certain laws that are currently considered statutory / strict-liability laws, to be shifted to instead constitute only "evidence of negligence" and/or act as "aggravating conditions."
So, in the case of speeding:
- Speeding on its own would only automatically "warrant" the police to stop you / interview you / tell you off, and perhaps to follow you around for a while after they pull you over, to ensure you don't start speeding again (and to immediately pull you over again if you do.) I say "warrant" here because this doesn't actually give them any powers that private citizens don't have; rather, it protects them from you suing them for harassment for what they're doing. (Just like a "search warrant" doesn't give the police any additional powers per se, but rather protects them from civil and criminal damages associated with them breaking-and-entering into the specified location, destroying any property therein, etc.)
- But speeding while in the process of committing some other "actual" crime, or speeding that contributes to some other crime being committed, may be an aggravating factor that multiplies the penalty associated with the other act, or changes the nominal charge for the other act.
We might also then see a tweak for "threshold aggravations", such that e.g.
- Speeding while also doing some other dumb thing — having your brake-lights broken, say — may be considered to "cross a threshold" where they add up to an arrest+charge, even though none of the individual violations has a penalty when considered independently.
This would, AFAICT, translate well into a regime where there are little traffic-cop drones everywhere, maximizing speeding enforcement. If speeding is all they notice someone doing, they'd just be catch-and-release-ing people: pulling them over, squawking at them, and flying away. Literal slap-on-the-wrist tactics. Which is actually usefully deterrent on its own, if there are enough of these drones, and they just keep doing it, over and over again, to violators. (Do note that people can't just "not pull over" because they know there are no penalties involved; they would still be considered police, and "not complying with a police stop" would, as always, be a real crime with real penalties; if you run from the drone, it would summon actual cars to chase you!)
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Oddly, I think if you follow this legal paradigm to its natural conclusion, it could lead to a world where it could even be legal to e.g. drive your car home from the bar while intoxicated... as long as you're driving at 2mph, with your hazards on, and avoiding highways. But miss any of those factors, and it "co-aggravates" with a "driving recklessly for your reaction speed" charge, into an actual crime.
Precise law enforcement would motivate political will to proactively law change to be more precise and appropriate, or tuned, to the public sentiment.
Imprecise law enforcement enables political office holders to arbitrarily leverage the law to arrest people they label as a political enemy, e.g. Aaron Swartz.
If everyone that ever shared publications outside the legal subscriber base was precisely arrested, charged, and punished, I dont think the punishment amd current legal terrain regarding the charges leveraged against him would have lasted.
"Law is about justice" is one of those things a good professor gets every 1L to raise their hands in agreement to before spending the next semester proving why that's 100% not the case.
Justice is part of a moral framework. Law is part of a procedural framework. You can structure the law to try to optimize for justice, but the law has never been about morality, the law is about keeping society operating on top of whatever structure is dominant.
Example: the Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States in 1922 that a Japanese descended person could not naturalize as a US citizen despite having white skin because he was not technically Caucasian. The next year in 1923 they ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that an Indian descended man could not natural despite being Caucasian because his skin was not white.
Why did the court give two contradictory reasons for the rulings which would each be negated if the reasoning were swapped? I wouldn't say it was for justice. It was because America at that time did not want non-white immigrants, and what 'white' is, is a fiction that means something completely different than what it claims to mean, and the justices were upholding that structure.
Imperfect enforcement is a feature as often as it is a bug. You can't make "antisocial behavior" in general illegal but you can make certain behaviors (loitering, public intoxication) illegal and selectively enforce against only those who are behaving in an antisocial manner. Of course the other edge of this sword is using this discretion to blanket discriminate against racial or class groups.
The existing laws are rarely well specified enough for precise enforcement, often on purpose.
You cannot have precise enforcement with imprecise laws. It’s as simple as that.
The HN favorite in this respect is “fair use” under copyright. It isn’t well specified enough for “precise enforcement”. How do you suggest we approach that one?
Dean Ball made this exact point on the Ezra Klein show a few days ago. I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement -- the people passing mandatory sentencing laws for minor drug offenses would think twice if their own children, and not just minorities and unfavourable groups, were subject to the same consequences (instead of rehab or community service).
But if I've learned anything in 20 years of software eng, it's that migration plans matter. The perfect system is irrelevant if you can't figure out how to transition to it. AI is dangling a beautiful future in front of us, but the transition looks... Very challenging
> I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement
As Edward Snowden once argued in an AMA on Reddit, a zero crime rate is undesirable for democratic society because it very likely implies that it's impossible to evade law enforcement. The latter, however, means that people won't be able to do much if the laws ever become tyrannic, e.g. due to a change in power. In other words, in a well-functioning democratic society it must always be possible (in principle) to commit a crime and get away.
Yep, not ever being able to break a law means that whatever the current set of laws are will never be able to be changed. If people can't ever push the boundaries of the law, we can never realize that the boundaries are in the wrong place.
Take some examples of laws that have changed over time. Say, interracial marriage. It was illegal in many places to marry someone of a different race. If this had been perfectly enforced, no one would have ever dated or see couples of different races, and people would have had a lot harder of a time exploring and realizing that the law was wrong.
The same thing could be said about marijuana legalization. If enforcement was perfect, no one would have ever tried marijuana, and there would have never been a movement to legalize by people who used it and decided it was not something that should be banned.
We need to be able to push boundaries so they can move when needed.
> Dean Ball made this exact point on the Ezra Klein show a few days ago. I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement -- the people passing mandatory sentencing laws for minor drug offenses would think twice if their own children, and not just minorities and unfavourable groups, were subject to the same consequences (instead of rehab or community service).
The problem with perfect enforcement is it requires the same kind of forethought as waterfall development. You rigidly design the specification (law) at the start, then persist with it without deviation from the original plan (at least for a long time). In your example, the lawmakers may still pass the law because they don't think of their kids as drug users, and are distracted by some outrage in some other area.
They do, but letting mob rule decide criminal sanction is beyond fucked. See: Any discussion thread of literally any criminal being sentenced, receiving parole, or better yet, committing any crime after being released for serving a different one.
This is of course assuming that politicians aren't largely duplicitious and actually believe in a word they say. I grew up in Indonesia, and the number of politicians who were extremely anti-porn getting caught watching porn in parliament is frankly staggering, yet alone the ones who are pro death penalty for drugs caught as being part of massive drug smuggling rings.
You raise an interesting point: One question that I think about developing countries: Most of them have higher perception of corruption compared to highly developed (OECD) nations. How do countries realistically reduce corruption? Korea went from an incredibly poor country in 1960 to a wealthy country in 2010. I am sure they dramatically reduced corruption over this time period... but how? Another example, in the 1960s/1970s, Hongkong dramatically increased the pay for civil servants (including police officers) to reduce corruption. (It worked, mostly.)
I live in a developing country. What I find is that the corruption is generally easier to navigate here that it was in the USA. The corruption in the USA is much more entrenched, in the form of regulatory capture. At the local level this can look like a local ordinance where “only a contractor with xy and z (only one of which is needed for the job) can bid, favoring a specific contractor. Here you just figure out compliance with the person in charge.
Corruption is eliminated by properly aligning incentives. Capitalism is also all about properly aligning incentives. Moving to a more capitalism-heavy system usually causes countries to get much richer.
Eastern Europe went through a similar transition. Before the iron curtain fell, the eastern bloc operated on favors more than it operated on money. This definitely isn't the case any more.
How many times have we seen politicians advocate for laws against something, then do a 180 when one of their kids does it? Even if you had that system, I don't think it would work the way you say. People are dumb and politicians are no exception.
Many governments around the world have entities to which you can write a letter, and those entities are frequently obligated to respond to that letter within a specific time frame. Those laws have been written with the understanding that most people don't know how to write letters, and those who do, will not write them unless absolutely necessary.
This allows the regulators to be slow and operate by shuffling around inefficient paper forms, instead of keeping things in an efficient ticket tracking system.
LLMs make it much, much easier to write letters, even if you don't speak the language and can only communicate at the level of a sixth-grader. Imagine what happens when the worst kind of "can I talk to your supervisor" Karen gets access to a sycophantic LLM, which tells her that she's "absolutely right, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior, I will help you write a letter to your regulator, who should help you out in this situation."
I have some lawyer friends, who work as internal council to companies, that are already experiencing this.
People are cranking out legal requests and claims with LLMs and sending them to companies. Almost all of them are pretty much meaningless, and should be ignored.
However, they legally can't just ignore them. They have to have someone review the claim, verify that it is bullshit, and then they can ignore it. That takes time, though.
So people can generate and send millions of legal claim instantly, but the lawyers have to read them one by one.
The asymmetry of effort is huge, and causes real issues.
which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic.
I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.
> Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce.
Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective.
We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public spaces, etc... that really took for granted that police effort was limited and that enforcement would be imperfect.
But they break down when you read all the license plates, or you can subpoena anyone's email, or... whatever.
Making the laws rigid and having perfect enforcement has a cost-- but just the baseline cost to privacy and the squashing of innocent transgression is a cost.
(A counterpoint: a lot of selective law enforcement came down to whether you were unpopular or unprivileged in some way... cheaper and automated enforcement may take some of these effects away and make things more fair. Discretion in enforcement can lead to both more and less just outcomes).
This is my problem with Americans and their "but the constitution" arguments.
The U.S. constitution has been written in an age before phones, automatic and semi-automatic rifles (at least in common use), nuclear weapons, high-bandwidth communications networks that operate at lightning speed, mass media, unbreakable encryption and CCTV cameras.
The problem is that "all sides" agree that if the constitution was written today, surprise, surprise, it'd totally agree with them; the gun control people are sure that the 2nd wouldn't cover military weapons, the gun lovers are sure that it would mandate tanks for everyone.
But since having 300 million people have a detailed, nuanced discussion about anything is impossible, everyone works at the edges.
"The future of software is not open. It is not closed. It is liberated, freed from the constraints of licenses written for a world in which reproduction required effort, maintained by a generation of developers who believed that sharing code was its own reward and have been comprehensively proven right about the sharing and wrong about the reward."
This applies to open-source but also very well to proprietary software too ;) Reversing your competitors' software has never been easier!
If they really believed that their process eliminated any licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to open source projects?
High quality decompilers have existed for a long time, and there's a lot more value in making a cleanroom implementation of Photoshop or Office than of Redis or Linux. Why go after such a small market?
I suspect the answer us that they don't believe it's legal, they just think that they can get away with it because they're less likely to get sued.
(I really suspect that they don't believe that at all, and it's all just a really good satire - after all, they blatantly called the company "EvilCorp" in Latin.)
Privacy protection has the exact same issue. Wiretapping laws were created at the time there was literally a detective listening to a private phone conversation as it was happening. Now we record almost everything online, and processing it is trivial and essentially free. The safeguards are the same but the scale of privacy invasion is many orders of magnitude different.
I think this distinction also gets at some issue with things like privacy and facial recognition.
There’s the old approach of hanging a wanted poster and asking people to “call us if you see this guy”. Then there’s the new approach matching faces in a comprehensive database and camera networks.
The later is just the perfect, efficient implementation of the former. But it’s… different somehow.
The answer to this is just changing the law as enforcement becomes different, instead of leaning on the rule of a few people to determine what the appropriate level of enforcement is.
To do this, though, you're going to have to get rid of veto points! A bit hard in our disastrously constitutional system.
This has also been a common theme in recent decades with respect to privacy.
In the US, the police do not generally need a warrant to tail you as you go around town, but it is phenomenally expensive and difficult to do so. Cellphone location records, despite largely providing the same information, do require warrants because it provides extremely cheap, scalable tracking of anyone. In other words, we allow the government to acquire certain information through difficult means in hopes that it forces them to be very selective about how they use it. When the costs changed, what was allowed also had to change.
I think of this in reverse. It's legal for the government to track mail - who sent a message, and who it's going to. They have access to the "outside of the envelope". But it's not legal for them to read the message inside.
And this same principle allows them to build massive friend/connection networks of everyone electronically. The government knows every single person you've communicated with and how often you communicate with them.
Absolutely! We're not all making that error, I've been venting about it for years.
"Costs matter" is one way to say it, probably a lot easier to digest and more popular than the "Quantity has a quality all it's own" quote I've been using, which is generally attributed to Stalin which is a little bit of a problem.
But it's absolutely true! Flock ALPRs are equivalent to a police officer with binoculars and a post-it for a wanted vehicle's make, model, and license plate, except we can put hundreds of them on the major intersections throughout a city 24/7 for $20k instead of multiplying the police budget by 20x.
A warrant to gather gigabytes of data from an ISP or email provider is equivalent to a literal wiretap and tape recorder on a suspect's phone line, except the former costs pennies to implement and the later requires a human to actually move wires and then listen for the duration.
Speed cameras are another excellent example.
Technology that changes the cost of enforcement changes the character of the law. I don't think that no one realizes this. I think many in office, many implementing the changes, and many supporting or voting for those groups are acutely aware and greedy for the increased authoritarian control but blind to the human rights harms they're causing.
> We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error
> Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific case of the 55 mph limit, would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot, but the law remained the same?
OK, but that would be a consequence of the specific enforcement method, not a consequence the law becoming de facto stricter due to stricter enforcement.
For one thing, the speed limit is intentionally set 5-10mph too low, specifically to make it easier to prove guilt when someone breaks the "real" speed limit.
Anyway. I come from the UK where we've had camera based enforcement for aeons. This of course actually results in people speeding and braking down to the limit as they approach the camera (which is of course announced loudly by their sat nav). The driving quality is frankly worse because of this, not better, and it certainly doesn't reduce incidence of speeding.
Of course the inevitable car tracker (or average speed cameras) resolve this pretty well.
The issue with strictly enforcing the speed limit on roads is that sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision, etc.
If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it.
Stop and think about what it means to be human. We use judgement and decide when we must break the laws. And that is OK and indeed... expected.
> sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision
I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding leads to direct worse consequences.
Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding increases the risk of accident and especially the consequences of an accident.
I don't trust people to drive well in a stressful situation, so why would it be a good idea to let them increase the risk by speeding.
The worst part is that it's not even all that likely that the time saved by speeding ends up mattering.
The “wife giving birth” exception for speeding is always so amusing to me.
In the U.S., the average distance from a hospital is 10 miles (in a rural area). Assuming 55 mph speed limits, that means most people are 11 minutes from a hospital. Realistically, “speeding” in this scenario probably means something like 80 mph, so you cut your travel time to 7.5 minutes.
In other words, you just significantly increased your chances of killing your about to be born kid, your wife, yourself, and innocent bystanders just to potentially arrive at a hospital 210 seconds sooner.
Edit: the rushing someone to an ER scenario is possibly more ridiculous, since you can’t teleport yourself, and if the 3.5 minutes in the above scenario would make a difference, then driving someone to the ER is a significantly worse option than starting first aid while waiting for EMTs to arrive.
E(accident due to going faster) vs E(worse outcome due to waiting)
Your argument only makes sense if the only possible bad thing is a car accident -- to make my point clearer, would you take a 1% chance of losing 100$ to avoid a 50% chance of losing 10$?
Depends how much money you have, but it can be a perfectly rational decision.
No, that's not the reason why people speed. True emergencies are a rounding error.
The real reason is that speed limits are generally lower than the safe speed of traffic, and enforcement begins at about 10mph over the stated limits.
People know they can get away with it.
If limits were raised 15% and strictly enforced, it would probably be better for society. Getting a ticket for a valid emergency would be easy to have reversed.
The answer is not a governor but a speed camera, they have them all over in Brazil and they send you a ticket if you speed through them. Put an exception in the law for emergencies, provide an appeal process, and voila.
Seconded, thirded, fourthed. I spend a lot of time thinking about how laws, in practice, are not actually intended to be perfectly enforced, and not even in the usual selective-enforcement way, just in the pragmatic sense.
> There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters.
...and there's also a large difference between any of those three shifts, and the secular shift (i.e. through no change in regulatory implementation whatsoever!) that occurs when the majority of traffic begins to consist of autonomous vehicles that completely ignore the de facto flow-of-traffic speeds, because they've been programmed to rigorously follow the all laws, including posted de jure speed limits (because the car companies want to CYA.)
Which is to say: even if regulators do literally nothing, they might eventually have to change the letter of the law to better match the de facto spirit of the law, lest we are overcome by a world of robotic "work to rule" inefficiencies.
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Also, a complete tangent: there's also an even-bigger difference between any of those shifts, and the shift that occurs when traffic calming measures are imposed on the road (narrowing, adding medians, adding curves, etc.) Speed limits are an extremely weird category of regulation, as they try to "prompt" humans to control their behavior in a way that runs directly counter to the way the road has been designed (by the very state imposing the regulations!) to "read" as being high- or low-speed. Ideally, "speed limits" wouldn't be a regulatory cudgel at all; they'd just be an internal analytical calculation on the way to to figuring out how to design the road, so that it feels unsafe to go beyond the "speed limit" speed.
Not exactly the same but at least in Spain, the cost of constructing a new building subject to all the regulations makes them completely unafforfable for low salaries.
(There are other problems, I know, but the regulations are crazy).
Tangentially, this is also the reason why many forms of corruption can be done away with right now with modern technology.
Meaning that democratizing our existing political structures is a reality today and can be done effectively (think blockchain, think zero knowledge proofs).
On the other hand, the political struggle to actually enact this new democratic system will be THE defining struggle of our times.
> Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters.
I think that the failure to distinguish them is due to a really childish outlook on law and government that is encouraged by people who are simple-minded (because it is easy and moralistic) and by people who are in control of law and government (because it extends their control to social enforcement.)
I don't think any discussion about government, law, or democracy is worth anything without an analysis of government that actually looks at it - through seeing where decisions are made, how those decisions are disseminated, what obligations the people who receive those decisions have to follow them and what latitude they have to change them, and ultimately how they are carried out: the endpoint of government is the application of threats, physical restraint, pain, or death in order to prevent people from doing something they wish to do or force them to do something they do not wish to do, and the means to discover where those methods should be applied. The police officer, the federal agent, the private individual given indemnity from police officers and federal agencies under particular circumstances, the networked cameras pointed into the streets are government. Government has a physical, material existence, a reach.
Democracy is simpler to explain under that premise. It's the degree to which the people that this system controls control the decisions that this system carries out. The degree to which the people who control the system are indemnified from its effects is the degree of authoritarianism. Rule by the ungoverned.
It's also why the biggest sign of political childishness for me are these sort of simple ideas of "international law." International law is a bunch of understandings between nations that any one of them can back out of or simply ignore at any time for any reason, if they are willing to accept the calculated risk of consequences from the nations on the other side of the agreement. It's like national law in quality, but absolutely unlike it in quantity. Even Costa Rica has a far better chance of ignoring, without any long-term cost, the mighty US trying to enforce some treaty regulation than you as an individual have to ignore the police department.
Laws were constructed under this reality. If we hypothetically programmed those laws into unstoppable Terminator-like robots and told them to enforce them without question it would just be a completely different circumstance. If those unstoppable robots had already existed with absolute enforcement, we would have constructed the laws with more precision and absolute limitations. We wouldn't have been able to avoid it, because after a law was set the consequences would have almost instantly become apparent.
With no fuzziness, there's no selective enforcement, but also no discretion (what people call selective enforcement they agree with.) If enforcement has blanket access and reach, there's also no need to make an example or deter. Laws were explicitly formulated around these purposes, especially the penalties set. If every crime was caught current penalties would be draconian, because they implicitly assume that everyone who got caught doing one thing got away with three other things, and for each person who was caught doing a thing three others got away with doing that thing. It punishes for crimes undetected, and attempts to create fear in people still uncaught.
An interesting read, however I'd like to know how to stop websites from screwing around with my scrollbars. In this case it's hidden entirely. Why is this even a thing websites are allowed to do - to change and remove browser UI elements? It makes no sense even, because I have no idea where I am on the page, or how long it is, without scrolling to the bottom to check. God I miss 2005.
It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could be a way for OSS devs to get paid.
What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay-me-to-implement.com. Companies that want to use that package go get their own custom implementation that is under a license strictly for that company and the OSS maintainer gets paid.
I wonder what the MVP for such a thing would look like.
Copyleft was intended as a principle to keep the software free (as in 'freedom'). Proposing to lock out certain areas of the codebase is directly opposite to this principle.
I am only 50% certain that your idea is expanding on the satire, if not: project owners can provide dual licensing. I'm sorry if you are serious and didn't understand you.
This could work out great, because the OSS devs can focus on building their project instead of marketing to businesses, running sales processes, consulting on implementation and supporting the implementation. No need to find corporate sponsors either.
LOL. Same here. But the footer disclaimer and testimonials gave it away immediately:
> "We had 847 AGPL dependencies blocking our acquisition. MalusCorp liberated them all in 3 weeks. The due diligence team found zero license issues. We closed at $2.3B." - Marcus Wellington III, Former CTO, Definitely Real Corp (Acquired)
> This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services.
"I used to feel guilty about not attributing open source maintainers. Then I remembered that guilt doesn't show up on quarterly reports. Thank you, MalusCorp."
◆
Chad Stockholder
Engineering Director, Profit First LLC
Certain views of OSS and its relation to commercial software always seemed to be fraught with highly voluntarist and moralizing attitudes and an intellectual naivete.
Don't believe in hell but I were I hope they'd be a special place for them.
It's like... revert patent troll? I'm not even sure I get it but the wording "liberation from open source license obligations." just wants to make me puke. I also doubt it's legit but I'm not a lawyer. I hope somebody at the FSF or Apache foundation or ... whomever who is though will clarify.
"Our proprietary AI systems have never seen" how can they prove that? Independent audit? Whom? How often?
This is satire, but the very notion of open source license obligations is meaningless in context. FLOSS licenses do not require you to publish your purely internal changes to the code; any publication happens by your choice, and given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever, publishing your software with a proprietary copyright isn't going to exactly save you either.
No, no, some open source licenses require you to publish internal changes. Eg some are explicitly written that you have to publish even when you 'only' use the changes on your own servers. (Not having to publish that was seen as a loophole for cloud companies to exploit.)
Those clauses exclude those licenses from some very important definitions of free/open-source software. For example they would fail the Desert Island Test for the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
The Debian project guidelines are not the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn't free software, they are just some of many useful guidelines to consider. Another useful guideline is that the user shall have freedom.
You are either talking about a license nobody is using (at least I've never heard of it) or misconstruing what the AGPL obligates you to do.
I am going to assume it's the latter.
If you in your house take an AGPL program, host it for yourself, and use it yourself, nothing in the AGPL obligates you to publish the source changes.
In fact, even if you take AGPL software and put it behind a paywall and modify it, the only people who the license mandates you to provide the source code for are the people paying.
The AGPL is basically the GPL with the definition of "user" broadened to include people interacting with the software over the network.
And the GPL, again, only requires you to provide the source code, upon request, to users. If you only distribute GPL software behind a paywall, you personally only need to give the source to people paying.
Although in both these cases, nothing stops the person receiving that source code from publishing it under its own terms.
The point he's making is that who is going to actually enforce that? If I take something that has that license and make changes to it, who is going to know? That's the underlying premise here.
Your point is circular, let me bring it all around. If I make a 'clean-room' implementation using an LLM of a software that has a GPL license. How does the court enforce that my black box didn't use the original software in any way if there's no way to know? Does having that software as part of it's training corpus automatically enroll all output as GPL enforceable? This is essentially the question some courts are attempting to answer right now.
"given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever"
I'm missing something there, that's precisely what I'm arguing again. How can it do a clean-room reimplementation when the open source code is most likely in the training data? That only works if you would train on everything BUT the implementation you want. It's definitely feasible but wouldn't that be prohibitively expensive for most, if not all, projects?
If I hired a human to write a clone of GNU grep to be released under a MIT license, and he wrote one that was performed exactly the same as GNU grep, it would be impossible for me to prove that the guy I hired didn't look at the GNU code.
But we'd be able to look at his clone code and see it's different, with different algorithms, etc. We could do a compare and see if there are any parts that were copied. It's certainly possible to clone GNU grep without copying any code and I don't think it would fail any copyright claims just because the GNU grep code is in the wild.
If that was the case, the moment any code is written under the GPL, it could never be reimplemented with a different license.
So instead of a human cloner, I use AI. Sure, the AI has access to the GPL code - every intelligence on the planet does. But does that mean that it's impossible to reimplement an idea? I don't think so.
What you argue is a non-sequitur and regardless of case law really makes no sense when the spirit of the action is to replicate something. Reasonable people would say that replicating and disseminating code with the express purpose of avoiding copyright is a violation of copyright and why it exists in the first place.
Just because something is trivial enough to copy does not mean it was trivial to conceive of and codify. Mens rea really does matter when we are talking about defrauding intellectual property holders and stealing their opportunity.
"Reasonable people would say that replicating and disseminating code with the express purpose of avoiding copyright is a violation of copyright and why it exists in the first place."
But then how can the FSF reimplement AT&T utilities? The FSF didn't invent grep. They wrote a new version of it from scratch under a different license.
Am I right in thinking that is not even "clean room" in the way people usually think of it, e.g. Compaq?
The "clean room" aspect for that came in the way that the people writing the new implementation had no knowledge of the original source material, they were just given a specification to implement (see also Oracle v. Google).
If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?
At the end of the day the supposed reimplementation that the LLM generates isn't copyrightable either so maybe this is all moot.
> If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?
I didn’t RTFA but I suppose that by clean room here they mean you feed the code to ”one” LLM and tell it to write a specification. Then you give the specification to ”another” LLM and tell it to implement the specification.
Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM.
It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.
Maybe I’m missing something but big corps do this, right? I legitimately expect folks like Musk and Zuckerberg to say these things. I get why that’s exactly the reason it’s satire but it’s a little too close to the truth for me to chuckle about it.
Try to take the stance of someone who doesn't really know too much about open source other than it's a nuisance to use, this is a great idea! I wanted to use this tool that corporate said we couldn't touch, but now I can!
If people lack sense of humor or satire, even if pathologically, well, too bad for them. Why should the rest be denied of that satire? It's not harming anyone at all.
Unfortunately it's not too bad for them, it's too bad for everyone they're around. They aren't the ones that lose out when we start dismantling open source communities.
I didn't see it was satire (having only skimmed the site) until scrolling through the comments and seeing this fake review being quoted. That's when I went "surely not", checked the site, saw it was really there, and was quite relieved this is not yet an actual thing!
As any etymology/Latin nerd will tell you, "this name" (MalusCorp) literally translates to EvilCorp, everything about the site is over the top satire. I know Poe's law and all that, but I'm looking askew at commenters in this thread who fail to realize it as either only reading the headline, or are AI-controlled.
E.g. Palantir, the surveillance analytics company named after the magic orb that purports to let you remotely view anything you want, but actually allows its creator to view you while manipulating you by selectively showing some things and not others.
I really got fooled here for a second, but the unfortunate reality is that people will try this soon, and someone will have to litigate this, if open source is to survive, which will take years and millions of dollars to resolve
Not just "tried"; the current state is that they've done so and are ignoring people telling them they cannot. The "destroy as an example to others" phase hasn't finished yet, but hopefully they'll get sufficient backlash from the projects they supposedly did this to work with to deter future attempts. e.g. they supposedly did this in order to make it part of the Python standard library, so hopefully the response from Python is a massive WTF and "nope".
In fairness to the original mythos that that particular family of awful companies has misused: the palantiri were in fact designed purely for far-seeing, and Sauron wasn't the creator of them, he just got his hands on one and corrupted it into a tool for manipulation.
It also shows why this approach is questionable. Opus 4.6 without tool use or web access can provide chardets source code in full from memory/training data (ironically, including the licensing header): https://gist.github.com/yannleretaille/1ce99e1872e5f3b7b133e...
This comes with the uncomfortable implication that its impossible to tell actually to what extent are LLMs pulling together snippets of GPLd code, and to what extent is that legally acceptable.
Parallel creation is a very minimal defense to copyright infringement claims. It is practically impossible to prove in humans, to much annoyance of musicians. "Go prove in a court that you have never heard this song, not even in the background somewhere".
LLMs having been trained on all software they could get their hands on will fail this test. There is no parallel creation claim to be had. AI firms love to trot out the "they learn just like humans" which is both false and irrelevant; It's copyright when humans do it to. If you view a GPL'd repo and later reproduce the code unintentionally? Still copyright infringement.
De-facto though, things are different. The technical details behind LLMs are irrelevant. AI companies lie and frustrate discovery, whilst begging politicians to pass laws legalizing their copyright infringement.
There won't be a copyright reckoning, not anymore. All the dumb politicians think AI is going to bail out their economies.
Wow. The guy who’s been thanklessly maintaining the project for 10+ years, with very little help, went way out of his way to produce a zero-reuse, ground-up reimplementation so that it could be MIT licensed... and the very-online copyleft crowd is crucifying him for it and telling him to kick rocks.
Unbelievable. This is why we can’t have nice things.
> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.*
I love it. Brilliant satire that foreshadows the future.
On a quick glance, or skim read, you could be excused for believing this is real, but they drop just enough nuggets throughout that by the end there is no ambiguity.
Really helps illustrates how realistic this could be.
I first encountered the concept of "clean room" in the context of Sean Lahman's free baseball stats database. While technically baseball stats are free, their compiling and manner of presentation in any given format may be claimed as proprietary by any particular provider. And so there's an extensive volunteer effort from baseball fans to "clean room" source them from independent sources such that they are verifying the stats independently of their provenance as a legally permitted basis for building out the database.
I even recall Baseball Mogul relied on the Lahman DB for a period of time. It does make me wonder if we'll see more of that.
This is extremely good satire. Question is, why hasn't anyone done this for real? There's enough people with the right knowledge and who would love to destroy open source for personal gain. Is it that this kind of service would be so open to litigation that it would need a lot of money upfront? Or is someone already working on this, and we're just living out the last good days of OSS?
What would be the incentive for someone to do this for real?
We all have access to SOTA LLMs. If I want a "clean room" implementation of some OSS library, and I can choose between paying a third party to run a script to have AI rebuild the whole library for me and just asking Claude to generate the bits of the library I need, why would I choose to pay?
I think this argument applies to most straightforward "AI generated product" business ideas. Any dev can access a SOTA coding model for $20p/m. The value-add isn't "we used AI to do the thing fast", it's the wrapping around it.
Maybe in this case the "wrapping" is that some other company is taking on the legal risk?
There's a lot of things you could do to be malicious towards other people with minimal effort, yet strangely few people do it. Virtually everyone has morals, and most people's are quite compatible with society (hence we have a society) even if small perturbations in foundational morals sometimes lead to seemingly large discrepancies in resultant actions
You need the right kind of person, in the right life circumstances, to have this idea before it happens for real. By having publicity, it becomes vastly more likely that it finds someone who meets the former two criteria, like how it works with other crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_crime). So thanks, Malus :P
Also, there's a difference between "willing to do a bad thing for money" and "actively searching out a bad thing, then proactively building a whole company out of it in the hopes of making money."
It's the difference between a developer taking a job at Palantir out of college because nobody had a better offer, and a guy spending years in his basement designing "Immigrant Spotter+" in the hopes of selling it to the government. Sure, they're both evil, but lots of people pick the first thing, and hardly anybody does the second.
It's an inevitable outcome of automatic code generation that people will do this all the time without thinking about it.
Example: you want a feature in your project, and you know this github repo implements it, so you tell an AI agent to implement the feature and link to the github repo just for reference.
You didn't tell the agent to maliciously reimplement it, but the end result might be the same - you just did it earnestly.
The bottleneck is trust and security. I'd rather defenestrate 3rd party libraries with a local instance of copilot than send all my secret sauce to some cloud/SaaS system.
Put differently, this system already exists and is in heavy use today.
because LLMs can't program anything of non-trivial complexity despite the persistent delusions from its advocates, same reason the lovers of OSS haven't magically fixed every bug in open source software.
Most LLMs are trained on a lot of the source code for many open-source projects. This 'project' has the whole song-and-dance about never seeing the source code and separating the system to skirt around legal trouble. Why didn't anyone do that yet?
For each project you want to rip off, you'd have to first train an entirely new LLM on all sources except for the target project. Prohibitively expensive.
No, according to everything I've read before, the parent post was correct and you're not. This article clearly says "art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law":
Could the prompt used to generate the art be considered human input, or is it that a human must to make some contribution to the art for it to be copyrightable?
If you’re referring to Thaler v. Perlmutter, that is not binding precedent nationwide, only in courts under the D.C. Circuit. And it only applies to “pure” AI-generated works; it did not address AI-assisted works, which seem very likely to be copyrightable.
If I want to clone some GPL clone into a MIT license, if it ends up in the public domain because it can't be copyrighted, what do I care? I've still got the code I want without the GPL.
There are two teenagers who learned about Malus in the last hour and have started figuring out how to actually build it, right now. They will not cite their source in their IPO statements.
it is straightforward to build this for real, here is my nearly one-shotted tldraw clone from a couple of weeks ago, https://x.com/c_pick/status/2028669568403578931 - the implementation side never saw the code, only the spec (in reality it did see the tldraw code in its training data, but you can't escape that anymore)
I wonder about this training data. There's so much profit from open source code in training data, actually the most of the code it was taught was open source, shouldn't it be then free? Or at least open weight?
At least you think that this is satire, until the author receives a DMCA from one of the big corps saying that he leaked the transcript of their last meeting
I don't know - if you upload a package.json with any dependencies that map to real npmjs.com packages, it does lead you to a Stripe payment page which appears to be real... and it appears you'd be sending real money.
W.r.t. intent, yes. But w.r.t. content, we are long past a situation where it is unrealistic enough to function as satire.
While such tactics would render certain OSS software licenses absurd, the tactic itself, as a means to get around them, is entirely sound. It just reveals the flawed presupposition of such licenses. And I'm not sure there is really any way to patch them up now.
It would also entirely obviate the need for those very same OSS licenses, if LLMs can simply do a clean-room reimplementation of any copywritten software whatsoever.
This is satire but this is where things are heading. The impact on the OSS ecosystem is probably not a net positive overall, but don't forget that this also applies to commercial software as well.
There will be many questions asked, like why buy some SaaS with way too many features when you can just reimplement the parts you need? Why buy some expensive software package when you can point the LLM into the binary with Ghidra or IDA or whatever then spend a few weeks to reverse it?
I was discussing that very point yesterday with a colleague after telling him of recent events. I pointed out that leaning on copyright/copyleft for software has always been a risky move.
Sounds like my CTO. Overuse of LLMs in c-suites is like overuse of weed by teenagers - it may not cause delusions, but it sure seems to make them worse.
Actually I have been told that replacements to (restricted subsets of) open source libraries, generated by LLM’s, vendored next to our code using the dependency, cannot be vulnerable since they don’t have cve’s, and therefore they don’t ever have to be maintained.
That’s how deep we are in neoliberal single truth shit now
Yes, we hate the abuse of open source, in its everlasting legal purgatory, by large evil "other" shadows acting at a distance...
But I'm stupefied at m/y/our own oblivious excitement when extracting our expertise for others in the form of skills we share. It's a profound hacking of our reward system, on the fear of losing a job and the hope of climbing the ladder of abstraction.
Tech companies have for decades subsidized developer training and careers with free tools and tiers, support for developer communities and open-source -- in order to reduce the costs of expertise and to expand their markets. Now skills do both. For developers, the result will be like developing for or at Apple: the lucky few will work in secret, based on personal connections and product skills.
I know this is satire, but I have an adjacent problem I could use help with. In my company, we have some legacy apps that run, but we no longer have the source, any everyone that worked on them has probably left the planet.
We need to replatform them at some point, and ideally I'd like to let some agents "use" the apps as a means to copy them / rebuild. Most of these are desktop apps, but some have browser interfaces. Has anyone tried something like this or can recommend a service that's worked for them?
I have actually very convincingly recreated a moderately complex 70s-era mainframe app by having an LLM reimplement it based on existing documentation and by accessing the textual user interface.
The biggest trick is that you need to spend 75% of your time designing and building very good verification tools (which you can do with help from the LLM), and having the LLM carefully trace as many paths as possible through the original application. This will be considerably harder for desktop apps unless you have access to something like an accessibility API that can faithfully capture and operate a GUI.
But in general, LLM performance is limited by how good your validation suite is, and whether you have scalable ways to convince yourself the software is correct.
I've done a little bit of this and Claude is pretty great. Take the app and let Claude run wild with it. It does require you to be relatively familiar with the app as you may need to guide it in the right direction.
I was able to get it to rebuild and hack together a .NET application that we don't have source for. This was done in a Linux VM and it gave me a version that I could build and run on Windows.
We're past the point of legacy blackbox apps being a mystery. Happy to talk more, my e-mail is available on my profile.
Interested to keep updated on this point. As a consultant, I've worked on transformation of legacy applications so this would help me greatly as well. We've worked on pretty archaic systems where no one knows how the system works even if we have the source code.
> Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code.
For this to be plausible satire, they need to show how they've trained their models to code, without mit, apache, bsd or GPL/agpl code being in the training set...
This time it's satire, but I bet someone will offer exactly that for real in the next few days. The idea is unethical but far too lucrative from a business perspective.
Often OSS is used not because you want the software, but the software and the upkeep. So even with such a service, you're now just taking code in-house that you have to maintain as well.
…scanning… …fuming… …blood pressure rising… sees a quote attributed to “Chad Stockholder
Engineering Director, Profit First LLC” …oh phew, thank god for that. I actually believed this could be real for a moment!
This is essentially 'License Laundering as a Service.' The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because the contamination happens at the training phase, not the inference phase. You can't claim independent creation when your 'independent developer' (the commercial LLM) already has the original implementation's patterns and edge cases baked into its weights.
In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs from scratch that had no exposure whatsoever to open source code which they may be asked to reproduce. Those models in turn would be terrible at coding given how much of the training corpus is open source code.
This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services.
"Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?"
The solution here seems to be to impose some constraint or requirement which means that literal copying is impossible (remember, copyright governs copies, it doesn't govern ideas or algorithms - that would be 'patents', which essentially no open source software has) or where any 'copying' from vaguely remembered pretraining code is on such an abstract indirect level that it is 'transformative' and thus safe.
For example, the Anthropic Rust C compiler could hardly have copied GCC or any of the many C compilers it surely trained on, because then it wouldn't have spat out reasonably idiomatic and natural looking Rust in a differently organized codebase.
Good news for Rust and Lean, I guess, as it seems like everyone these days is looking for an excuse to rewrite everything into those for either speed or safety or both.
> copyright governs copies, it doesn't govern ideas or algorithms
The second part is true. The first is a little trickier. The copyright applies to some fixed media (text in this case) rather than the idea expressed, but the protections extend well beyond copies. For example, in fiction, the narrative arc and "arrangement" is also protected, as are adaptations and translations.
If you were to try and write The Catcher in the Rye in Italian completely from memory (however well you remember it) I believe that would be protected by copyright even if not a single sentence were copied verbatim.
Obviously satire, but it will clearly be what happens in the future (predicting here, I'm not endorsing this practice). We can scratch train a new LLM on code generated from "contaminated" LLMs. We can then audit all the training data used and demonstrate that the original source wasn't in the training data. Therefore the cleanroom implementation holds. Current LLM training is relying less and less on human generated code. Just look at the open source models from China. They rely heavily on distilling from other models. One additional point. Exposure to the original source isn't enough to show infringement. Linus looked at UNIX source before writing linux.
I think this site is either satire, or serious but with a certain kind of humor in which both they and the reader know they're lying (but it's in everyone's interest to play along).
They do say this:
> Is this legal? / our clean room process is based on well-established legal precedent. The robots performing reconstruction have provably never accessed the original source code. We maintain detailed audit logs that definitely exist and are available upon request to courts in select jurisdictions.
Unless they're rejecting almost all of open source packages submitted by the customer, due to those packages being in the training set of the foundation model that they use, this is really the opposite of cleanroom.
As if the models have not seen the open source software before. That should be considered in the upcoming ruling. Technically the models are trained on exactly that.
> You have been so generous, so unreasonably, almost suspiciously generous, that you have made it possible for an entire global economy to run on software that nobody technically owns, maintained by people that nobody technically employs, governed by licenses that nobody technically reads. It is a miracle of human cooperation. It is also, from a fiduciary standpoint, completely insane.
The issue is how do you interact with other industries/trades who protect their profit making potential.
Ok great - all software and networks are "free." How do you pay for Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians whose earnings are legally protected by the state but whose skill bases are also freely available to be used within the margin of error of a professional or a layman?
Issues like this are great to have conversations about, but if people don't start broadening the scope very quickly, it just turns into the IT/CS worker's worth going to 0 in a world where others worth are protected. And history states, if only 1 group sees the threat, the remaining trades/industries will let it die.
It's not clear to me what your argument has to do with the license laundering service that Malus (Malice?) is offering. Their stealing from the digital commons does nothing to address paying Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians.
It's directed at the person I replied to. It's not directed at the top level OP or Malus which is hilarious, monetized satire.
Focusing overly on corporate structures or specific skills tends to miss the point of how value is assigned in a capitalistic structure when knowledge is cheap. Knowledge has been the capital used by the labor force for hundreds of years. The reason some jobs are resistant is 100% the result of legislation at that point, not anything unique about the job.
"The Trades" seems to be the sales pitch used on the public. In the end they're just labor at that point since I can pump a 20 year old with a master electricians knowledge, keep one master on staff and fire every other person who hits that level when their earnings demand it in the same way we're firing many mid/upper level people in their 30's and 40's now instead of 50's and 60's which is the scenario in Tech today.
Software/IT is just the quickest to be absorbed. Many other industries are just in the slow boil, not seeing it yet.
The value from FOSS is the collaboration between all parties.
There is a mutual agreement between all collaborating parties that "hey we ALL need these core fundamental building blocks of software. why dont we all collaborate in this open space?" And everyone wins.
There is tremendous value in the Linux kernel, and these large open source programs. And this is basically an attack by corporations to attempt to privatize it all.
It's nothing new. This is simply the latest example of capitalist "growth at any cost". We sailed past any immorality hazards a LONG time ago.
What's this 'fun' you mention? As far as the incentives in our systems are concerned, anything that's not done in pursuit of monetary gain is certifiably insane. What really matters in life is using all the tricks, manipulation, abuse and loopholes to attain the biggest number in your asset counter. Anyone who doesn't follow the only thing that matters in life is alien, inhuman even. How do they not see it?
* Many of the people maintaining FOSS are paid to do so; and if we counted 'significance' of maintained FOSS, I would not be surprised if most FOSS of critical significance is maintained for-pay (although I'm not sure).
* Publishing software without a restrictive license is not 'generous', it's the trivial and obvious thing to do. It is the restriction of copying and of source access that is convoluted, anti-social, and if you will, "insane".
* Similarly, FOSS is not a "miracle" of human cooperation, and it what you get when it is difficult to sabotage human cooperation. The situation with physical objects - machines, consumables - is more of a nightmare than the FOSS situation is a miracle. (IIRC, an economist named Veblen wrote about the sabotaging role of pecuniary interests on collaborative industrial processes, about a century ago; but I'm not sure about the details.)
* Many people read licenses, and for the short, paragraph-long licenses, I would even say that most developers read them.
* It is not insane to use FOSS from a "fiduciary standpoint".
>Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch.
Fact that this is satire aside, why would a company like this limit this methodology to only open source? Since they can make a "dirty room" AI that uses computer-use models, plays with an app, observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.
> observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.
and tbh, i cannot see any issues if this is how it is done - you just have to prove that the clean room ai has never been exposed to the source code of the app you're trying to clone.
I find surprising that the polemic I heard more talking, seems to be in the open source to close source direction.
It seems to me, that the more relevant part of this new development, for the software industry, it's a teenager working in the weekend with a LLM and making a functional clone of Autocad, for instance.
Couldn't this be done on proprietary software as well? Have an agent fuzz an interface (any type) for every bit of functionality and document it. Then have it build based on the document?
Good idea, but as several comments here suggest, the time when this sort of thing could be taken as satire is gone. I promise you there are multiple people here thinking that this is a good idea. I predict that within a year we will see a service that does exactly this.
You take Wikipedia, an LLM rewrites every single article giving them your preferred political spin and generates many more pictures for it. You make it sleeker, and price it at 4.99$ per month.
EDIT: That's crazy. They already did that. Waiting for the torment nexus now I guess.
Look, outside of your corner, a world is much much bigger and every nation and every political leaning has rights to have their own POV(for better or worse), as quite frankly this style of thinking on enforcing what others should do is really irritating.
Wikipedia for a time being had already different POVs and it was great for that time period, but as someone that does not have English as first language, I don't dream of a world, where everybody uniformly think the same - because that place already exists where that is a case and that is a graveyard.
The law should be updated to limit clean room reimplementation to a strictly human endeavor. Person, in a faraday cage room, with a machine that is too underpowered to run local LLMs. Reference material (stack overflow archives, language docs, specs, etc) are permitted.
I have a feeling this will lead to huge interoperability and ecosystem fragmentation issues.
Well, there is one way... You can have a government steal all open source code and force its citizens to only use proprietary hardware and proprietary code, all government sanctioned btw. I wonder if we're headed this way.
Not sure their attempted point lands the way they think it will. I view this as an unmitigated good. Open source every damn thing. Open the floodgates. Break the system.
I'd cheer for a company like this.
It seems to dance just on the other side of what's legal, though.
This entire software ecosystem depends on volunteering and cooperation. It demands respect of the people doing the work. Adhering to their licensing terms is the payment they demand for the work they do.
If you steal their social currency, they may just walk away for good, and nobody will pick up the slack for you. And if you're a whole society of greedy little thieves, the future of software will be everyone preciously guarding and hiding their changes to the last open versions of software from some decades ago.
You should read Bruce Perens' testimony in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case that explained all this (and determined that licensing terms are enforceable, and you can't just say "his is open mine is open what's the difference?")
I mean in the context of AI - we're already seeing the conflagration of SAAS, and software jobs are going kaput. It's my deeply considered opinion that the faster this happens, the better, because it'll force a reckoning with impending AI job loss across the board.
We need to deal with the issues now. The worst possible outcome is a gradual drip-drip-drip of incremental job losses, people shuffling from job to job, taking financial hits, some companies pretending everything is fine, other companies embracing full-bore zero employee work. The longer it goes on, the more wealth and power gets siphoned up by corporations and individuals who already have significant wealth, the bigger the inequality, and the bigger the social turmoil.
Software, graphics design, music, and video (even studio level movies) should cope with this now. It's not going to stop, AI isn't going to get worse, there's not going to be some special human only domain carved out. The sooner we cope with this the better, because it'll set the foundation for the rest of the job loss barreling down on us like the Chicxulub asteroid.
It sounds like you'd advocate for accelerationism (by which I mean "to worsen capitalism to promote revolution against it")
The end result could well be the people bringing out the guillotines for tech executives, or even the Butlerian Jihad.
But I'm not sure everyone would agree we need to race to those dystopian futures. They might prefer a more conservative future where they nip the scamming / copyright infringement at scale / "disruption" in the bud.
The trouble seems to revolve mainly around money. Give enough of it to someone, or even promise it, and so many people just lose their minds and their moral backbone. Politicians in charge of regulating these shenanigans especially so, I'm not sure they had moral backbones to begin with.
It's not naked accelerationism, I just don't want to see years and years of suffering and exploitation and chaos giving a permanent advantage to those already in a position to take that advantage. One significant industry is all it will take; light a fire under the ass of congress and the general public, get people motivated to start taking sensible steps to move towards UBI or some sort of Coasean scheme with nationalized shares distributed to people, or whatever. Doing anything is extraordinarily more effective than doing nothing as this plays out.
Open sourcing all the things sounds fun right up until you hit the point where clean room claims collapse under real legal cross-examination. If you think companies with money on the line are just going to roll over and accept it all as fair play I'd like to introduce you to the concept of discovery at $900/hr. If your business model is a legal speedrun you better budget harder than you code.
I feel like we live in an interesting time, where you have to second guess whether someone would actually build something like this. Like, the language is very tongue in cheek, but given how messed up copyright law is, you'd think that by now someone would be doing this, and proudly.
The frustrating thing is I also thought about this as a natural conclusion - but as a natural workflow that corporations will do when they see AGPL dependencies they want to use. (I also think there's a world where we start tightening our software bill of materials anyway.)
I do not believe it will ever again make sense to build open source for business. the era of OSS as a business model will be very limited going forward. As sad and frustrating as it is, we did it to ourselves.
I was on this talk expecting to hear about MongoDB abusing open source (as you could guess from my profile, that’s a topic dear to my heart). Instead, I saw the most entertaining talk in my life.
> MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. is not responsible for any moral implications, existential crises, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from the use of our services.
You'll find all the answers if you read more carefully:
> Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright
> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.
> "Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?" - Patricia Bottomline, VP of Legal, MegaSoft Industries
Let’s say instead it consolidated a few packages into 1. This might even be a good idea for security reasons.
Then it offered a mandatory 15% revenue tip to the original projects.
So far GPL enforcement usually comes down to “umm, try and sue us lol”.
How much human intervention is needed for it to be a real innovation and not llm generated. Can I someone to watch Claude do its thing and press enter 3 times ?
Some parties wouldn't be thrilled about their "source available" getting cleaned this way. So when this gets completed it would only "clean" real open source that can't afford legal trouble. Satirically structured LLM text is not a defence.
The smells suspiciously like a well positioned gag that is secretly seeking VC attention. The emotional reaction turned attention seeking feels a bit like having ulterior motives... or maybe Moltbook has made me paranoid?
I'd have mined the copied libraries with something that makes it possible to later change terms and extract fees, as it'd be expected that nobody reads the terms for such service
I did try to upload a requirements.txt with "chardet < 7.0" in it ("Copyright (C) 2024 Dan Blanchard"? I don't think so buddy, it's mine now), but despite claiming otherwise, the satirical site only takes package.json so I uploaded the one from https://github.com/prokopschield/require-gpl/
It does actually generate a price (which is suspiciously like a fixed rate of $1 per megabyte), and does actually lead you to Stripe. What happens if someone actually pays? Are they going to be refunding everything, or are they actually going to file the serial numbers off for you?
It's interesting that the focus is just on open source licenses. If one can strip licenses from source code using LLMs, then surely a Microsoft employee could do the same with the Windows source code!
This is satire, but I actually have built something that can do this extremely well as an unintentional side effect. I will not be building my business around this capability however
interesting name. The opposite of a bonus. So what is, the fact that your fork looses the thousands of eyes (meat and ai) that spot and fix bugs and security leaks?
It's an interesting word in Latin, because depending on the phonetic length of the vowel and gender it vary greatly in meaning. The word 'malus' (short a, masculine adjective) means wicked, the word 'mālus' (long ā, feminine noun) means apple tree, and 'mālus' (long ā, masculine noun) means the mast of a ship.
Presumably this is a joke, based on the "Success Reports" and the footer, among other things.
"This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."
if it were true that indeed was legal to rewrite and relicense open source code, would that also be true for non-open source code? as in, could someone do a similar rewrite of their employers proprietary code and release it publicly?
The name was too much of a giveaway. I just hope that somebody who inevitably builds this for real is self-aware enough to name themselves so transparently.
About the only reason nobody would actually build this is there's no money in it. Who'd pay for a CRaaS version when they're not even paying for the original open source version?
I do think somebody will eventually vibe-code it for the lulz.
This is quite literally the end of open source. projects will find themselves in the position of making their test suites private to avoid being sherlocked like this
Edit: I did it. Paid them $0.51 to clean room `copyleft`, just to see what would happen. A clean package is now sitting on my desktop, custom-built (I presume) and fully documented. Deleting it now, for obvious reasons. But is it still satire if they actually provide the literal service they're satirizing?
How far do they take the satire? If you pay them do they actually generate output?
1. Best part of this (satirical) post is, the service they offer isn't really needed. LLM's can do this already for small projects, and soon likely will for large ones too. You don't need a company to do this, we all have the LLM tooling to do it. Critical we're all spending time thinking about what that means in a thoughtful way.
2. For the sake of argument assume 1 is completely true and feasible now and / or in the near term. If LLM generated code is also non copyrightable... but even if it is... if you can just make a copyleft version via the same manner... what will the licenses even mean any longer?
> 2010, Jordan Peterson: clean your room
> 2026, Malus: Clean Room as a Service
> 2026, Jordan Peterson: how could I have missed this business opportunity
>*Full legal indemnification: *Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright*
Heh, ok. So, the thinking is:
1. You contract them.
2. The actual Copyright infringement is done by an __offshore__ company.
3. If you get sued by the original software devs, you seek indemnification from the offshore subsidiary.
4. That offshore subsidiary is in a country without copyright laws or with weak laws so "you're good!"
...
5. Profit.
This is a ridiculous legal defense since this "one-way-street" legal process will almost certainly result in you being sued first... the company actually using the infringing code.
The indemnification is likely worthless since the offshore company won't have any assets anyway and will dissolve once there's a lawsuit and legal process is established.
The "guarantee" is absurd: Their "MalusCorp Guarantee" promises a refund and moving headquarters to international waters if infringement is found. This is not a real legal remedy and is written to sound like a joke, which is telling about their seriousness...
This whole "clean room as a service" concept is a legal gray area at best. In practice, it's extremely difficult to prove tha ta "clean room" process was truly clean, especially with AI models that have been trained on vast amounts of existing code (including the very projects they are "recreating").
The indemnification is a marketing gimmick to make a legally dangerous service seem safe. It creates a facade of protection while ensuring that any financial liability stays with you, the customer who wants to avoid infringement .
I think we've already seen this with "AI writes a web-browser" type PR. I guess we can still look forward to when they make license evasion an explicit part of their marketing. Then I can wryly laugh when somebody robo-whitewashes leaked commercial software, knowing that they'll get sued anyways.
blegh, i like the motivation but why again and again do you need to write the content of the page with Slop-LLM-GPT? Your motive and points are valid, why waste it on a word filter that cannot capture it?
I wish we'd distinguish between bullshit and clearly identified things that _may_ be future threats.
The linked post contains a whopping lie - "What does it mean for the open source ecosystem that 90% of our open source supply chain can currently be recreated in seconds with today's AI agents"
It can't. Not even close. Please, do show a working clean-room implementation of a major opensource package. (Not left-pad)
We really need to stop hyperventilating and get back to reality.
I unironically want this service to exist. The GNU GPL "is a tumor on the programming community, in that not only is it completely braindead, but the people who use it go on to infect other people who can't think for themselves."
Historically, it was a good license, and was able to keep Microsoft and Apple in check, in certain respects. But it's too played out now. In the past, a lot of its value came from it being not fully understood. Now it's a known quantity. You will never have a situation where NeXT is forced to open source their Objective-C frontend, for example
edit: it's satire. but likely not too far off from the reality in 6 months.
> Our process is deliberately, provably, almost tediously legal. One set of AI agents analyzes only public documentation: README files, API specifications, type definitions.
since nearly all open source dependencies couple the implementation with type definitions, I'm curious how this could pass the legal bar of the clean room.
Even if they claim to strip the implementation during their clean room process -- their own staff & services have access to the implementation during the stripping process.
I wrote about that recently: [1] One of the ways that code will be valued in the AI era is the extent to which it has contact with the real world. It doesn't matter how smart the AI is, the real world is always more perverse and complicated, and until their code has been tested by the real world you can't really trust it. (Even if we get superhuman AIs in the future, we have the same superhuman AIs producing superhuman amounts of new code in the world that your AI will have to interact with, and a single AI won't be able to overpower all the superhuman output in that world without testing.)
In practice even with much better AIs this would still be a pretty big risk. The testing you'd need would be extensive.
When people rewriting open source libs with a bot then come crying to maintainers that their rewrites have bugs, and they would like for someone to fix said bugs for free, there is absolutely no one who will feel obligated to help them out.
Eh I think part of the joke is that LLMs have gobbled up the original source code, and if you help them enough (identical type signatures and specs), they will output the same code, it's the copyright laundering problem.
I know this is satire but we're in the process of rewriting the .NET Mediatr library because ... it's nothing but a simple design pattern packaged as a paid nuget package. We don't even need LLMs to reprogram it.
So the need is real, at least for enshittified libraries.
I am blown away. Just 16 days ago, we were discussing this HN post: "FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129361
In this post that I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131572 ... I theorised about how a company could reuse a similar technique to re-implement an open source project to change its license. In short: (1) Use an LLM to write a "perfect" spec from an existing open source project. (2) Use a different LLM to implement a functionally identical project in same/different programming language then select any license that you wish. Honestly, this is a terrifying reality if you can pay some service to do it on your behalf.
A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters.
We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error thinking that taking what were previously de jure policies that were de facto quite different in the real world, and thoughtlessly "upgrading" the de jure policies directly into de facto policies without realizing that that is in fact a huge change in policy. One that nobody voted for, one that no regulator even really thought about, one that we are just thoughtlessly putting into place because "well, the law is, 55 mph" without realizing that, no, in fact that never was the law before. That's what the law said, not what it was. In the past those could never really be the same thing. Now, more and more, they can.
This is a big change!
Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce.
And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...
Increasing the precision of enforcement makes a lot more sense for direct-harm laws. You won't find anyone seriously arguing that full 100% enforcement of murder laws is a bad idea. It's the preemptive laws, which were often lazily enforced, especially when no real harm resulted from the action, where this all gets complicated. Maybe this is the distinction to focus on.
If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).
Isn't this the point of the whole conversation we are having here?
Laws on copyright were not created for current AI usage on open source project replication.
They need to change, because if they are perfectly enforced by the letter, they result in actions that are clearly against the intent of the law itself.
The underlying problem is that the world changes too fast for the laws so be fair immediately
Of course technically option a is violating the law but no sane police officer will give you a fine in this case. Nor should they! A robot will, however. This is stupid.
There are numerous cases, both in history and in fiction, that demonstrate as much.
>only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression
That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign. And me driving 120 km/h out of complete disregard for human life. Should I get a fine for driving 90? Yea, probably. Is it a first time offence? Was anyone else on the road? Did the sign get knocked down? Is it day or night? Have I done this 15 times before? Is my wife in labour in the passenger seat? None of those are excuses, but could be grounds for a warning instead.
Why? Plenty of people drive in areas with speed cameras, isn't that exactly how they work?
> That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign.
I'm not sure it is hyperbole or that we should assume competence/good faith. Multiple studies have shown that traffic laws, specifically, are enforced in an inconsistent matter that best correlates with the driver's race.
[0] https://www.aclu-il.org/press-releases/black-and-latino-moto...
[1] https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/bl...
If you find it impossible to follow a simple speed limit, then getting you off the road is the ideal outcome.
So, in the case of speeding:
- Speeding on its own would only automatically "warrant" the police to stop you / interview you / tell you off, and perhaps to follow you around for a while after they pull you over, to ensure you don't start speeding again (and to immediately pull you over again if you do.) I say "warrant" here because this doesn't actually give them any powers that private citizens don't have; rather, it protects them from you suing them for harassment for what they're doing. (Just like a "search warrant" doesn't give the police any additional powers per se, but rather protects them from civil and criminal damages associated with them breaking-and-entering into the specified location, destroying any property therein, etc.)
- But speeding while in the process of committing some other "actual" crime, or speeding that contributes to some other crime being committed, may be an aggravating factor that multiplies the penalty associated with the other act, or changes the nominal charge for the other act.
We might also then see a tweak for "threshold aggravations", such that e.g.
- Speeding while also doing some other dumb thing — having your brake-lights broken, say — may be considered to "cross a threshold" where they add up to an arrest+charge, even though none of the individual violations has a penalty when considered independently.
This would, AFAICT, translate well into a regime where there are little traffic-cop drones everywhere, maximizing speeding enforcement. If speeding is all they notice someone doing, they'd just be catch-and-release-ing people: pulling them over, squawking at them, and flying away. Literal slap-on-the-wrist tactics. Which is actually usefully deterrent on its own, if there are enough of these drones, and they just keep doing it, over and over again, to violators. (Do note that people can't just "not pull over" because they know there are no penalties involved; they would still be considered police, and "not complying with a police stop" would, as always, be a real crime with real penalties; if you run from the drone, it would summon actual cars to chase you!)
---
Oddly, I think if you follow this legal paradigm to its natural conclusion, it could lead to a world where it could even be legal to e.g. drive your car home from the bar while intoxicated... as long as you're driving at 2mph, with your hazards on, and avoiding highways. But miss any of those factors, and it "co-aggravates" with a "driving recklessly for your reaction speed" charge, into an actual crime.
Likewise if act in a way that makes someone feel that you're going to hit them that's assault regardless of whether you actually ever touch them.
etc. Many such cases.
Imprecise law enforcement enables political office holders to arbitrarily leverage the law to arrest people they label as a political enemy, e.g. Aaron Swartz.
If everyone that ever shared publications outside the legal subscriber base was precisely arrested, charged, and punished, I dont think the punishment amd current legal terrain regarding the charges leveraged against him would have lasted.
But this is a feature, not a bug.
https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2025/10/29/code-is-law-sparks...
Additionally, law is not logical. Law is about justice and justice is not logical.
Example: the Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States in 1922 that a Japanese descended person could not naturalize as a US citizen despite having white skin because he was not technically Caucasian. The next year in 1923 they ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that an Indian descended man could not natural despite being Caucasian because his skin was not white.
Why did the court give two contradictory reasons for the rulings which would each be negated if the reasoning were swapped? I wouldn't say it was for justice. It was because America at that time did not want non-white immigrants, and what 'white' is, is a fiction that means something completely different than what it claims to mean, and the justices were upholding that structure.
You cannot have precise enforcement with imprecise laws. It’s as simple as that.
The HN favorite in this respect is “fair use” under copyright. It isn’t well specified enough for “precise enforcement”. How do you suggest we approach that one?
But if I've learned anything in 20 years of software eng, it's that migration plans matter. The perfect system is irrelevant if you can't figure out how to transition to it. AI is dangling a beautiful future in front of us, but the transition looks... Very challenging
As Edward Snowden once argued in an AMA on Reddit, a zero crime rate is undesirable for democratic society because it very likely implies that it's impossible to evade law enforcement. The latter, however, means that people won't be able to do much if the laws ever become tyrannic, e.g. due to a change in power. In other words, in a well-functioning democratic society it must always be possible (in principle) to commit a crime and get away.
Take some examples of laws that have changed over time. Say, interracial marriage. It was illegal in many places to marry someone of a different race. If this had been perfectly enforced, no one would have ever dated or see couples of different races, and people would have had a lot harder of a time exploring and realizing that the law was wrong.
The same thing could be said about marijuana legalization. If enforcement was perfect, no one would have ever tried marijuana, and there would have never been a movement to legalize by people who used it and decided it was not something that should be banned.
We need to be able to push boundaries so they can move when needed.
The problem with perfect enforcement is it requires the same kind of forethought as waterfall development. You rigidly design the specification (law) at the start, then persist with it without deviation from the original plan (at least for a long time). In your example, the lawmakers may still pass the law because they don't think of their kids as drug users, and are distracted by some outrage in some other area.
Giving the former discretion was a way to sneakily contain the worst excesses of the latter.
Alas, self-interest isn't really something voters seem to really take into account.
Eastern Europe went through a similar transition. Before the iron curtain fell, the eastern bloc operated on favors more than it operated on money. This definitely isn't the case any more.
Many governments around the world have entities to which you can write a letter, and those entities are frequently obligated to respond to that letter within a specific time frame. Those laws have been written with the understanding that most people don't know how to write letters, and those who do, will not write them unless absolutely necessary.
This allows the regulators to be slow and operate by shuffling around inefficient paper forms, instead of keeping things in an efficient ticket tracking system.
LLMs make it much, much easier to write letters, even if you don't speak the language and can only communicate at the level of a sixth-grader. Imagine what happens when the worst kind of "can I talk to your supervisor" Karen gets access to a sycophantic LLM, which tells her that she's "absolutely right, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior, I will help you write a letter to your regulator, who should help you out in this situation."
People are cranking out legal requests and claims with LLMs and sending them to companies. Almost all of them are pretty much meaningless, and should be ignored.
However, they legally can't just ignore them. They have to have someone review the claim, verify that it is bullshit, and then they can ignore it. That takes time, though.
So people can generate and send millions of legal claim instantly, but the lawyers have to read them one by one.
The asymmetry of effort is huge, and causes real issues.
https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf
which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic.
I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.
Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective.
We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public spaces, etc... that really took for granted that police effort was limited and that enforcement would be imperfect.
But they break down when you read all the license plates, or you can subpoena anyone's email, or... whatever.
Making the laws rigid and having perfect enforcement has a cost-- but just the baseline cost to privacy and the squashing of innocent transgression is a cost.
(A counterpoint: a lot of selective law enforcement came down to whether you were unpopular or unprivileged in some way... cheaper and automated enforcement may take some of these effects away and make things more fair. Discretion in enforcement can lead to both more and less just outcomes).
The U.S. constitution has been written in an age before phones, automatic and semi-automatic rifles (at least in common use), nuclear weapons, high-bandwidth communications networks that operate at lightning speed, mass media, unbreakable encryption and CCTV cameras.
But since having 300 million people have a detailed, nuanced discussion about anything is impossible, everyone works at the edges.
As in their post:
"The future of software is not open. It is not closed. It is liberated, freed from the constraints of licenses written for a world in which reproduction required effort, maintained by a generation of developers who believed that sharing code was its own reward and have been comprehensively proven right about the sharing and wrong about the reward."
This applies to open-source but also very well to proprietary software too ;) Reversing your competitors' software has never been easier!
High quality decompilers have existed for a long time, and there's a lot more value in making a cleanroom implementation of Photoshop or Office than of Redis or Linux. Why go after such a small market?
I suspect the answer us that they don't believe it's legal, they just think that they can get away with it because they're less likely to get sued.
(I really suspect that they don't believe that at all, and it's all just a really good satire - after all, they blatantly called the company "EvilCorp" in Latin.)
Because this is satire by FOSS people :)
There’s the old approach of hanging a wanted poster and asking people to “call us if you see this guy”. Then there’s the new approach matching faces in a comprehensive database and camera networks.
The later is just the perfect, efficient implementation of the former. But it’s… different somehow.
To do this, though, you're going to have to get rid of veto points! A bit hard in our disastrously constitutional system.
In the US, the police do not generally need a warrant to tail you as you go around town, but it is phenomenally expensive and difficult to do so. Cellphone location records, despite largely providing the same information, do require warrants because it provides extremely cheap, scalable tracking of anyone. In other words, we allow the government to acquire certain information through difficult means in hopes that it forces them to be very selective about how they use it. When the costs changed, what was allowed also had to change.
And this same principle allows them to build massive friend/connection networks of everyone electronically. The government knows every single person you've communicated with and how often you communicate with them.
It was never designed for this originally.
"Costs matter" is one way to say it, probably a lot easier to digest and more popular than the "Quantity has a quality all it's own" quote I've been using, which is generally attributed to Stalin which is a little bit of a problem.
But it's absolutely true! Flock ALPRs are equivalent to a police officer with binoculars and a post-it for a wanted vehicle's make, model, and license plate, except we can put hundreds of them on the major intersections throughout a city 24/7 for $20k instead of multiplying the police budget by 20x.
A warrant to gather gigabytes of data from an ISP or email provider is equivalent to a literal wiretap and tape recorder on a suspect's phone line, except the former costs pennies to implement and the later requires a human to actually move wires and then listen for the duration.
Speed cameras are another excellent example.
Technology that changes the cost of enforcement changes the character of the law. I don't think that no one realizes this. I think many in office, many implementing the changes, and many supporting or voting for those groups are acutely aware and greedy for the increased authoritarian control but blind to the human rights harms they're causing.
> Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific case of the 55 mph limit, would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot, but the law remained the same?
The potential consequences of mass surveillance come to mind.
While it is true that many people do speed, that doesn't make their speeding "the real speed limit".
Anyway. I come from the UK where we've had camera based enforcement for aeons. This of course actually results in people speeding and braking down to the limit as they approach the camera (which is of course announced loudly by their sat nav). The driving quality is frankly worse because of this, not better, and it certainly doesn't reduce incidence of speeding.
Of course the inevitable car tracker (or average speed cameras) resolve this pretty well.
If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it.
Stop and think about what it means to be human. We use judgement and decide when we must break the laws. And that is OK and indeed... expected.
I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding leads to direct worse consequences.
Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding increases the risk of accident and especially the consequences of an accident.
I don't trust people to drive well in a stressful situation, so why would it be a good idea to let them increase the risk by speeding.
The worst part is that it's not even all that likely that the time saved by speeding ends up mattering.
In the U.S., the average distance from a hospital is 10 miles (in a rural area). Assuming 55 mph speed limits, that means most people are 11 minutes from a hospital. Realistically, “speeding” in this scenario probably means something like 80 mph, so you cut your travel time to 7.5 minutes.
In other words, you just significantly increased your chances of killing your about to be born kid, your wife, yourself, and innocent bystanders just to potentially arrive at a hospital 210 seconds sooner.
Edit: the rushing someone to an ER scenario is possibly more ridiculous, since you can’t teleport yourself, and if the 3.5 minutes in the above scenario would make a difference, then driving someone to the ER is a significantly worse option than starting first aid while waiting for EMTs to arrive.
If my wife is having a stroke, I can definitely pick her up, toss her in the car, and get to the ER faster than an ambulance can reach my house.
As I'm sure you know, every second counts when it comes to recovery from a stroke.
What kind of first aid do you give to someone having a stroke anyway?
Your argument only makes sense if the only possible bad thing is a car accident -- to make my point clearer, would you take a 1% chance of losing 100$ to avoid a 50% chance of losing 10$?
Depends how much money you have, but it can be a perfectly rational decision.
The real reason is that speed limits are generally lower than the safe speed of traffic, and enforcement begins at about 10mph over the stated limits.
People know they can get away with it.
If limits were raised 15% and strictly enforced, it would probably be better for society. Getting a ticket for a valid emergency would be easy to have reversed.
...and there's also a large difference between any of those three shifts, and the secular shift (i.e. through no change in regulatory implementation whatsoever!) that occurs when the majority of traffic begins to consist of autonomous vehicles that completely ignore the de facto flow-of-traffic speeds, because they've been programmed to rigorously follow the all laws, including posted de jure speed limits (because the car companies want to CYA.)
Which is to say: even if regulators do literally nothing, they might eventually have to change the letter of the law to better match the de facto spirit of the law, lest we are overcome by a world of robotic "work to rule" inefficiencies.
---
Also, a complete tangent: there's also an even-bigger difference between any of those shifts, and the shift that occurs when traffic calming measures are imposed on the road (narrowing, adding medians, adding curves, etc.) Speed limits are an extremely weird category of regulation, as they try to "prompt" humans to control their behavior in a way that runs directly counter to the way the road has been designed (by the very state imposing the regulations!) to "read" as being high- or low-speed. Ideally, "speed limits" wouldn't be a regulatory cudgel at all; they'd just be an internal analytical calculation on the way to to figuring out how to design the road, so that it feels unsafe to go beyond the "speed limit" speed.
(There are other problems, I know, but the regulations are crazy).
Meaning that democratizing our existing political structures is a reality today and can be done effectively (think blockchain, think zero knowledge proofs).
On the other hand, the political struggle to actually enact this new democratic system will be THE defining struggle of our times.
I think that the failure to distinguish them is due to a really childish outlook on law and government that is encouraged by people who are simple-minded (because it is easy and moralistic) and by people who are in control of law and government (because it extends their control to social enforcement.)
I don't think any discussion about government, law, or democracy is worth anything without an analysis of government that actually looks at it - through seeing where decisions are made, how those decisions are disseminated, what obligations the people who receive those decisions have to follow them and what latitude they have to change them, and ultimately how they are carried out: the endpoint of government is the application of threats, physical restraint, pain, or death in order to prevent people from doing something they wish to do or force them to do something they do not wish to do, and the means to discover where those methods should be applied. The police officer, the federal agent, the private individual given indemnity from police officers and federal agencies under particular circumstances, the networked cameras pointed into the streets are government. Government has a physical, material existence, a reach.
Democracy is simpler to explain under that premise. It's the degree to which the people that this system controls control the decisions that this system carries out. The degree to which the people who control the system are indemnified from its effects is the degree of authoritarianism. Rule by the ungoverned.
It's also why the biggest sign of political childishness for me are these sort of simple ideas of "international law." International law is a bunch of understandings between nations that any one of them can back out of or simply ignore at any time for any reason, if they are willing to accept the calculated risk of consequences from the nations on the other side of the agreement. It's like national law in quality, but absolutely unlike it in quantity. Even Costa Rica has a far better chance of ignoring, without any long-term cost, the mighty US trying to enforce some treaty regulation than you as an individual have to ignore the police department.
Laws were constructed under this reality. If we hypothetically programmed those laws into unstoppable Terminator-like robots and told them to enforce them without question it would just be a completely different circumstance. If those unstoppable robots had already existed with absolute enforcement, we would have constructed the laws with more precision and absolute limitations. We wouldn't have been able to avoid it, because after a law was set the consequences would have almost instantly become apparent.
With no fuzziness, there's no selective enforcement, but also no discretion (what people call selective enforcement they agree with.) If enforcement has blanket access and reach, there's also no need to make an example or deter. Laws were explicitly formulated around these purposes, especially the penalties set. If every crime was caught current penalties would be draconian, because they implicitly assume that everyone who got caught doing one thing got away with three other things, and for each person who was caught doing a thing three others got away with doing that thing. It punishes for crimes undetected, and attempts to create fear in people still uncaught.
An interesting read, however I'd like to know how to stop websites from screwing around with my scrollbars. In this case it's hidden entirely. Why is this even a thing websites are allowed to do - to change and remove browser UI elements? It makes no sense even, because I have no idea where I am on the page, or how long it is, without scrolling to the bottom to check. God I miss 2005.
What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay-me-to-implement.com. Companies that want to use that package go get their own custom implementation that is under a license strictly for that company and the OSS maintainer gets paid.
I wonder what the MVP for such a thing would look like.
> "We had 847 AGPL dependencies blocking our acquisition. MalusCorp liberated them all in 3 weeks. The due diligence team found zero license issues. We closed at $2.3B." - Marcus Wellington III, Former CTO, Definitely Real Corp (Acquired)
> © 2024 MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. Registered in [JURISDICTION WITHHELD].
> This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services.
It's like... revert patent troll? I'm not even sure I get it but the wording "liberation from open source license obligations." just wants to make me puke. I also doubt it's legit but I'm not a lawyer. I hope somebody at the FSF or Apache foundation or ... whomever who is though will clarify.
"Our proprietary AI systems have never seen" how can they prove that? Independent audit? Whom? How often?
Satire... yes but my blood pressure?!
I am going to assume it's the latter.
If you in your house take an AGPL program, host it for yourself, and use it yourself, nothing in the AGPL obligates you to publish the source changes.
In fact, even if you take AGPL software and put it behind a paywall and modify it, the only people who the license mandates you to provide the source code for are the people paying.
The AGPL is basically the GPL with the definition of "user" broadened to include people interacting with the software over the network.
And the GPL, again, only requires you to provide the source code, upon request, to users. If you only distribute GPL software behind a paywall, you personally only need to give the source to people paying.
Although in both these cases, nothing stops the person receiving that source code from publishing it under its own terms.
Google “examples of GPL enforced in court” for a few
Yeah it requires finding out, but how do you prove a whistleblower broke their NDA?
I'm missing something there, that's precisely what I'm arguing again. How can it do a clean-room reimplementation when the open source code is most likely in the training data? That only works if you would train on everything BUT the implementation you want. It's definitely feasible but wouldn't that be prohibitively expensive for most, if not all, projects?
But we'd be able to look at his clone code and see it's different, with different algorithms, etc. We could do a compare and see if there are any parts that were copied. It's certainly possible to clone GNU grep without copying any code and I don't think it would fail any copyright claims just because the GNU grep code is in the wild.
If that was the case, the moment any code is written under the GPL, it could never be reimplemented with a different license.
So instead of a human cloner, I use AI. Sure, the AI has access to the GPL code - every intelligence on the planet does. But does that mean that it's impossible to reimplement an idea? I don't think so.
Just because something is trivial enough to copy does not mean it was trivial to conceive of and codify. Mens rea really does matter when we are talking about defrauding intellectual property holders and stealing their opportunity.
But then how can the FSF reimplement AT&T utilities? The FSF didn't invent grep. They wrote a new version of it from scratch under a different license.
The "clean room" aspect for that came in the way that the people writing the new implementation had no knowledge of the original source material, they were just given a specification to implement (see also Oracle v. Google).
If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?
At the end of the day the supposed reimplementation that the LLM generates isn't copyrightable either so maybe this is all moot.
I didn’t RTFA but I suppose that by clean room here they mean you feed the code to ”one” LLM and tell it to write a specification. Then you give the specification to ”another” LLM and tell it to implement the specification.
It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.
"Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?"
"Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers."
"For the first time, a way to avoid giving that pesky credit to maintainers."
"Full legal indemnification [...] through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright"
Try to take the stance of someone who doesn't really know too much about open source other than it's a nuisance to use, this is a great idea! I wanted to use this tool that corporate said we couldn't touch, but now I can!
The company is literally named “bad/evil.”
EDIT: Reading it again its quite obvious, I was just skimming at first, but still damn. Hilarious
Satire points out the absurd
E.g. Palantir, the surveillance analytics company named after the magic orb that purports to let you remotely view anything you want, but actually allows its creator to view you while manipulating you by selectively showing some things and not others.
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
I really got fooled here for a second, but the unfortunate reality is that people will try this soon, and someone will have to litigate this, if open source is to survive, which will take years and millions of dollars to resolve
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/5.0.0/chardet/mbchar...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266
Here is a more recent example I found in Cursor's browser experiment from January:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661236
De-jure, not at all.
Parallel creation is a very minimal defense to copyright infringement claims. It is practically impossible to prove in humans, to much annoyance of musicians. "Go prove in a court that you have never heard this song, not even in the background somewhere".
LLMs having been trained on all software they could get their hands on will fail this test. There is no parallel creation claim to be had. AI firms love to trot out the "they learn just like humans" which is both false and irrelevant; It's copyright when humans do it to. If you view a GPL'd repo and later reproduce the code unintentionally? Still copyright infringement.
De-facto though, things are different. The technical details behind LLMs are irrelevant. AI companies lie and frustrate discovery, whilst begging politicians to pass laws legalizing their copyright infringement.
There won't be a copyright reckoning, not anymore. All the dumb politicians think AI is going to bail out their economies.
Unbelievable. This is why we can’t have nice things.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
I love it. Brilliant satire that foreshadows the future.
On a quick glance, or skim read, you could be excused for believing this is real, but they drop just enough nuggets throughout that by the end there is no ambiguity.
Really helps illustrates how realistic this could be.
I even recall Baseball Mogul relied on the Lahman DB for a period of time. It does make me wonder if we'll see more of that.
We all have access to SOTA LLMs. If I want a "clean room" implementation of some OSS library, and I can choose between paying a third party to run a script to have AI rebuild the whole library for me and just asking Claude to generate the bits of the library I need, why would I choose to pay?
I think this argument applies to most straightforward "AI generated product" business ideas. Any dev can access a SOTA coding model for $20p/m. The value-add isn't "we used AI to do the thing fast", it's the wrapping around it.
Maybe in this case the "wrapping" is that some other company is taking on the legal risk?
You need the right kind of person, in the right life circumstances, to have this idea before it happens for real. By having publicity, it becomes vastly more likely that it finds someone who meets the former two criteria, like how it works with other crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_crime). So thanks, Malus :P
It's the difference between a developer taking a job at Palantir out of college because nobody had a better offer, and a guy spending years in his basement designing "Immigrant Spotter+" in the hopes of selling it to the government. Sure, they're both evil, but lots of people pick the first thing, and hardly anybody does the second.
It's an inevitable outcome of automatic code generation that people will do this all the time without thinking about it.
Example: you want a feature in your project, and you know this github repo implements it, so you tell an AI agent to implement the feature and link to the github repo just for reference.
You didn't tell the agent to maliciously reimplement it, but the end result might be the same - you just did it earnestly.
Put differently, this system already exists and is in heavy use today.
because LLMs can't program anything of non-trivial complexity despite the persistent delusions from its advocates, same reason the lovers of OSS haven't magically fixed every bug in open source software.
WDYM? LLMs are essentially this.
Not that it matters, I just think the joke is more fun if they are different.
But that's not true!
According to binding precedent, works created by an AI are not protected by copyright. NO ONE OWNS THEM!!!
I think maybe this is a good thing, but honestly, it's hard to tell.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-co...
If I want to clone some GPL clone into a MIT license, if it ends up in the public domain because it can't be copyrighted, what do I care? I've still got the code I want without the GPL.
Maybe that's part of the joke, though :)
While such tactics would render certain OSS software licenses absurd, the tactic itself, as a means to get around them, is entirely sound. It just reveals the flawed presupposition of such licenses. And I'm not sure there is really any way to patch them up now.
There will be many questions asked, like why buy some SaaS with way too many features when you can just reimplement the parts you need? Why buy some expensive software package when you can point the LLM into the binary with Ghidra or IDA or whatever then spend a few weeks to reverse it?
That’s how deep we are in neoliberal single truth shit now
But I'm stupefied at m/y/our own oblivious excitement when extracting our expertise for others in the form of skills we share. It's a profound hacking of our reward system, on the fear of losing a job and the hope of climbing the ladder of abstraction.
Tech companies have for decades subsidized developer training and careers with free tools and tiers, support for developer communities and open-source -- in order to reduce the costs of expertise and to expand their markets. Now skills do both. For developers, the result will be like developing for or at Apple: the lucky few will work in secret, based on personal connections and product skills.
We need to replatform them at some point, and ideally I'd like to let some agents "use" the apps as a means to copy them / rebuild. Most of these are desktop apps, but some have browser interfaces. Has anyone tried something like this or can recommend a service that's worked for them?
The biggest trick is that you need to spend 75% of your time designing and building very good verification tools (which you can do with help from the LLM), and having the LLM carefully trace as many paths as possible through the original application. This will be considerably harder for desktop apps unless you have access to something like an accessibility API that can faithfully capture and operate a GUI.
But in general, LLM performance is limited by how good your validation suite is, and whether you have scalable ways to convince yourself the software is correct.
I was able to get it to rebuild and hack together a .NET application that we don't have source for. This was done in a Linux VM and it gave me a version that I could build and run on Windows.
We're past the point of legacy blackbox apps being a mystery. Happy to talk more, my e-mail is available on my profile.
Unless obfuscated C# desktop apps are pretty friendly to decompile.
For this to be plausible satire, they need to show how they've trained their models to code, without mit, apache, bsd or GPL/agpl code being in the training set...
In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs from scratch that had no exposure whatsoever to open source code which they may be asked to reproduce. Those models in turn would be terrible at coding given how much of the training corpus is open source code.
it is an illusion because this is a satire site.
:)
For example, the Anthropic Rust C compiler could hardly have copied GCC or any of the many C compilers it surely trained on, because then it wouldn't have spat out reasonably idiomatic and natural looking Rust in a differently organized codebase.
Good news for Rust and Lean, I guess, as it seems like everyone these days is looking for an excuse to rewrite everything into those for either speed or safety or both.
The second part is true. The first is a little trickier. The copyright applies to some fixed media (text in this case) rather than the idea expressed, but the protections extend well beyond copies. For example, in fiction, the narrative arc and "arrangement" is also protected, as are adaptations and translations.
If you were to try and write The Catcher in the Rye in Italian completely from memory (however well you remember it) I believe that would be protected by copyright even if not a single sentence were copied verbatim.
They do say this:
> Is this legal? / our clean room process is based on well-established legal precedent. The robots performing reconstruction have provably never accessed the original source code. We maintain detailed audit logs that definitely exist and are available upon request to courts in select jurisdictions.
Unless they're rejecting almost all of open source packages submitted by the customer, due to those packages being in the training set of the foundation model that they use, this is really the opposite of cleanroom.
i do not necessarily agree with the phrasing of ActivePatterns comment, but i also raised an eyebrow at iepathos' comment.
Funny but true.
Ok great - all software and networks are "free." How do you pay for Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians whose earnings are legally protected by the state but whose skill bases are also freely available to be used within the margin of error of a professional or a layman?
Issues like this are great to have conversations about, but if people don't start broadening the scope very quickly, it just turns into the IT/CS worker's worth going to 0 in a world where others worth are protected. And history states, if only 1 group sees the threat, the remaining trades/industries will let it die.
Focusing overly on corporate structures or specific skills tends to miss the point of how value is assigned in a capitalistic structure when knowledge is cheap. Knowledge has been the capital used by the labor force for hundreds of years. The reason some jobs are resistant is 100% the result of legislation at that point, not anything unique about the job.
"The Trades" seems to be the sales pitch used on the public. In the end they're just labor at that point since I can pump a 20 year old with a master electricians knowledge, keep one master on staff and fire every other person who hits that level when their earnings demand it in the same way we're firing many mid/upper level people in their 30's and 40's now instead of 50's and 60's which is the scenario in Tech today.
Software/IT is just the quickest to be absorbed. Many other industries are just in the slow boil, not seeing it yet.
There is a mutual agreement between all collaborating parties that "hey we ALL need these core fundamental building blocks of software. why dont we all collaborate in this open space?" And everyone wins.
There is tremendous value in the Linux kernel, and these large open source programs. And this is basically an attack by corporations to attempt to privatize it all.
It's nothing new. This is simply the latest example of capitalist "growth at any cost". We sailed past any immorality hazards a LONG time ago.
Doesn’t apply everywhere though.
* Many of the people maintaining FOSS are paid to do so; and if we counted 'significance' of maintained FOSS, I would not be surprised if most FOSS of critical significance is maintained for-pay (although I'm not sure).
* Publishing software without a restrictive license is not 'generous', it's the trivial and obvious thing to do. It is the restriction of copying and of source access that is convoluted, anti-social, and if you will, "insane".
* Similarly, FOSS is not a "miracle" of human cooperation, and it what you get when it is difficult to sabotage human cooperation. The situation with physical objects - machines, consumables - is more of a nightmare than the FOSS situation is a miracle. (IIRC, an economist named Veblen wrote about the sabotaging role of pecuniary interests on collaborative industrial processes, about a century ago; but I'm not sure about the details.)
* Many people read licenses, and for the short, paragraph-long licenses, I would even say that most developers read them.
* It is not insane to use FOSS from a "fiduciary standpoint".
Well, it's one thing to read licenses as a human and another to read them as a lawyer.
That's why it's useful to pick one of the standard licenses that lawyers have already combed over, even if it's a long one like the GPL.
Fact that this is satire aside, why would a company like this limit this methodology to only open source? Since they can make a "dirty room" AI that uses computer-use models, plays with an app, observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.
and tbh, i cannot see any issues if this is how it is done - you just have to prove that the clean room ai has never been exposed to the source code of the app you're trying to clone.
I find surprising that the polemic I heard more talking, seems to be in the open source to close source direction.
It seems to me, that the more relevant part of this new development, for the software industry, it's a teenager working in the weekend with a LLM and making a functional clone of Autocad, for instance.
Axiom of Reality: “Intellectual Property” does not exist.
^ For those who haven’t been keeping up on the debacle.
It's just confirming to me "yes, LLMs can do it so reliably that someone is trying to sell it, so I can probably just ask an LLM then".
You take Wikipedia, an LLM rewrites every single article giving them your preferred political spin and generates many more pictures for it. You make it sleeker, and price it at 4.99$ per month.
EDIT: That's crazy. They already did that. Waiting for the torment nexus now I guess.
Well, there is one way... You can have a government steal all open source code and force its citizens to only use proprietary hardware and proprietary code, all government sanctioned btw. I wonder if we're headed this way.
I'd cheer for a company like this.
It seems to dance just on the other side of what's legal, though.
Then I don't think you've thought it through.
This entire software ecosystem depends on volunteering and cooperation. It demands respect of the people doing the work. Adhering to their licensing terms is the payment they demand for the work they do.
If you steal their social currency, they may just walk away for good, and nobody will pick up the slack for you. And if you're a whole society of greedy little thieves, the future of software will be everyone preciously guarding and hiding their changes to the last open versions of software from some decades ago.
You should read Bruce Perens' testimony in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case that explained all this (and determined that licensing terms are enforceable, and you can't just say "his is open mine is open what's the difference?")
https://web.archive.org/web/20100331083827/http://perens.com...
We need to deal with the issues now. The worst possible outcome is a gradual drip-drip-drip of incremental job losses, people shuffling from job to job, taking financial hits, some companies pretending everything is fine, other companies embracing full-bore zero employee work. The longer it goes on, the more wealth and power gets siphoned up by corporations and individuals who already have significant wealth, the bigger the inequality, and the bigger the social turmoil.
Software, graphics design, music, and video (even studio level movies) should cope with this now. It's not going to stop, AI isn't going to get worse, there's not going to be some special human only domain carved out. The sooner we cope with this the better, because it'll set the foundation for the rest of the job loss barreling down on us like the Chicxulub asteroid.
The end result could well be the people bringing out the guillotines for tech executives, or even the Butlerian Jihad.
But I'm not sure everyone would agree we need to race to those dystopian futures. They might prefer a more conservative future where they nip the scamming / copyright infringement at scale / "disruption" in the bud.
The trouble seems to revolve mainly around money. Give enough of it to someone, or even promise it, and so many people just lose their minds and their moral backbone. Politicians in charge of regulating these shenanigans especially so, I'm not sure they had moral backbones to begin with.
Agree, I said this in another comment, AI-generated anything should be public domain. Public data in, public domain out.
This train wreck in slow motion of AI slowly eroding the open web is no good, let's rip the bandaid.
I publish under AGPL and if someone ever took my project and washed it to MIT I would probably just take all my code offline forever. Fuck that.
But I love it! The perfect response to the "clean room" AI re-implementation and re-licensing of whatever that library is called.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
I do not believe it will ever again make sense to build open source for business. the era of OSS as a business model will be very limited going forward. As sad and frustrating as it is, we did it to ourselves.
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...
I think they should take some responsibility!
Also, using api and docs itself though not illegal seems defeat the purpose.
Also, it’s not right how creator says “pesky credits to creator”.
Just build your own then. Credit is the least thing everyone using should do.
> Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright
> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.
> "Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?" - Patricia Bottomline, VP of Legal, MegaSoft Industries
Let’s say instead it consolidated a few packages into 1. This might even be a good idea for security reasons.
Then it offered a mandatory 15% revenue tip to the original projects.
So far GPL enforcement usually comes down to “umm, try and sue us lol”.
How much human intervention is needed for it to be a real innovation and not llm generated. Can I someone to watch Claude do its thing and press enter 3 times ?
It does actually generate a price (which is suspiciously like a fixed rate of $1 per megabyte), and does actually lead you to Stripe. What happens if someone actually pays? Are they going to be refunding everything, or are they actually going to file the serial numbers off for you?
https://www.hp-lexicon.org/magic/solemnly-swear-no-good/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329605
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2606:_Weird_Unico...
bad, evil, wicked; ugly; unlucky;
It's an interesting word in Latin, because depending on the phonetic length of the vowel and gender it vary greatly in meaning. The word 'malus' (short a, masculine adjective) means wicked, the word 'mālus' (long ā, feminine noun) means apple tree, and 'mālus' (long ā, masculine noun) means the mast of a ship.
"This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."
About the only reason nobody would actually build this is there's no money in it. Who'd pay for a CRaaS version when they're not even paying for the original open source version?
I do think somebody will eventually vibe-code it for the lulz.
How far do they take the satire? If you pay them do they actually generate output?
> order total = max( $0.50, sum of all packages )
> $0.50 minimum applies per order (Stripe processing floor). No base fee.
Not sure I can trust their output if this simple thing is fluffed
2. For the sake of argument assume 1 is completely true and feasible now and / or in the near term. If LLM generated code is also non copyrightable... but even if it is... if you can just make a copyleft version via the same manner... what will the licenses even mean any longer?
>*Full legal indemnification: *Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright*
Heh, ok. So, the thinking is:
1. You contract them.
2. The actual Copyright infringement is done by an __offshore__ company.
3. If you get sued by the original software devs, you seek indemnification from the offshore subsidiary.
4. That offshore subsidiary is in a country without copyright laws or with weak laws so "you're good!"
...
5. Profit.
This is a ridiculous legal defense since this "one-way-street" legal process will almost certainly result in you being sued first... the company actually using the infringing code.
The indemnification is likely worthless since the offshore company won't have any assets anyway and will dissolve once there's a lawsuit and legal process is established.
The "guarantee" is absurd: Their "MalusCorp Guarantee" promises a refund and moving headquarters to international waters if infringement is found. This is not a real legal remedy and is written to sound like a joke, which is telling about their seriousness...
This whole "clean room as a service" concept is a legal gray area at best. In practice, it's extremely difficult to prove tha ta "clean room" process was truly clean, especially with AI models that have been trained on vast amounts of existing code (including the very projects they are "recreating").
The indemnification is a marketing gimmick to make a legally dangerous service seem safe. It creates a facade of protection while ensuring that any financial liability stays with you, the customer who wants to avoid infringement .
See: https://deploycel.org/
Let’s hope one of these fake AI grifters doesn’t take this as a serious idea, raised a couple hundred million, and do real damage.
(I’m not against AI, I just don’t like nonsense either in tech, or people)
Brought to you by Jin Yang from Silicon Valley HBO.
The linked post contains a whopping lie - "What does it mean for the open source ecosystem that 90% of our open source supply chain can currently be recreated in seconds with today's AI agents"
It can't. Not even close. Please, do show a working clean-room implementation of a major opensource package. (Not left-pad)
We really need to stop hyperventilating and get back to reality.
Historically, it was a good license, and was able to keep Microsoft and Apple in check, in certain respects. But it's too played out now. In the past, a lot of its value came from it being not fully understood. Now it's a known quantity. You will never have a situation where NeXT is forced to open source their Objective-C frontend, for example
> Our process is deliberately, provably, almost tediously legal. One set of AI agents analyzes only public documentation: README files, API specifications, type definitions.
since nearly all open source dependencies couple the implementation with type definitions, I'm curious how this could pass the legal bar of the clean room.
Even if they claim to strip the implementation during their clean room process -- their own staff & services have access to the implementation during the stripping process.
> Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?
ROFL
In practice even with much better AIs this would still be a pretty big risk. The testing you'd need would be extensive.
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/
When people rewriting open source libs with a bot then come crying to maintainers that their rewrites have bugs, and they would like for someone to fix said bugs for free, there is absolutely no one who will feel obligated to help them out.
So the need is real, at least for enshittified libraries.
In this post that I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131572 ... I theorised about how a company could reuse a similar technique to re-implement an open source project to change its license. In short: (1) Use an LLM to write a "perfect" spec from an existing open source project. (2) Use a different LLM to implement a functionally identical project in same/different programming language then select any license that you wish. Honestly, this is a terrifying reality if you can pay some service to do it on your behalf.