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- Hacker News
- No, that was never a defense. Replication of the work artifacts without literal copy/paste can still be a violation. It depends on just how similar the works are as demonstrated to a civil court jury.
At the same time complete recreations are not copyright violations. For example ZeldaClassic.com is not a violation of copyright against the original game. The final products appear almost like a clone, but the underlying work is completely different. Copyright law protects work artifacts, not ideas or assembled constructions.
- I'd argue that software is an "applied art", and needs a "high threshold of originality" to be protected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
Oh and if it's not human generated, you can just copy it.
by axus - There are no novel UIs, so copying UIs is okay, and necessary. As for source code, I'm a stickler for the license. The modern set of licenses cover any scenario I can think of, relatively fairly. AI is merely a tool, so the craftsman still owns the output. If the output violates a license, then the craftsman should be held to account.
- I’ve seen companies get sued and lose in court for copying UIs. So no, legally speaking, copying a UI is not something that companies ignore.by pryelluw
- In effect the source code is being copied by the LLM. This is what it's designed to do. LLMs are a lossy statistical compression of their training data.
If you give it a prompt telling it to replicate a product that's in its training set then its optimal next token prediction output is going to be to a lossy copy of that product's source code.
by davebren - Software copyrights are among humanity's worst inventions. We as a species are no better off because of it, and neither are the small creators that copyrights are supposed to protect. Software copyrights only exist to protect a renter model from big corporations.
There's an argument to be made for patent protections, but many of those are questionable considering the number of trivial software-related patents (there must be a patent somewhere for replying to an online conversation through an edit box and an "add comment" button).
I don't know if LLMs can somehow help the situation. I hope they can expose the ridiculousness of software copyrights but I won't be holding my breath.
by glimshe - Software is a particularly egregious case, but the problem is more general. Copyright itself is just a bad move all around.
Copyright demands that everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor. Therefore, we should not expect people to earn wages for labor; and we should instead expect people to earn royalties from their "works" (the countable commodity). Absurd.
Copyright grants "artists" (in the broadest sense of the word) a monopoly over their "work", again the imagined product of their labor. In practice, this actually means a monopoly on the labor itself, because all art is derivative work, and the derivation of work is the specific thing that copyright monopolizes. Twice absurd.
LLMs, in the best case, are calling that bluff. The problem is that they are calling it poorly, and the bluff itself is incoherent to begin with. Even worse is that LLMs can be monopolized as copyrighted "works", which is a clear abuse of the system.
We should get rid of copyright and patents. Dismantle all the moats and publishing houses (including social media). Liberate derivative work. Value labor directly.
- > I hope they can expose the ridiculousness of software copyrights but I won't be holding my breath.
I think it has already, but it's a hard pill for many to swallow. While I haven't actually counted, the conversations around the effectiveness of copyright/IP seem to be regular conversations now, both here and IRL.
by z3c0 - If you're worried about infringement, register your work with the US copyright office. You can only get monetary and statutory damages if the work was registered before infringement, otherwise you can only get an injunction. But you can't even file a claim in court to request an injunction without first registering the work. Basically, while copyright nominally attaches at creation, without a certificate you can't press any rights in court.
You don't need to register each release, so long as a material portion of the registered work exists in subsequent derivative works.
Without a registration threats of a copyright dispute are mostly noise to someone savvy enough to know how the game is played. If they think you'll persist they can just replace the infringing work or cease distribution, which is a hassle but not a significant deterrence for bad faith actors.
by wahern - "still"? It never was. If you copy a (copyrighted) UI in bulk, that's a copyright violation just like copying code in bulk. The legal metric is generally "sufficient height of creation", the actual interpretation depends on where you are.by eqvinox
- It depends also what you mean with copy. The code has copyright but the rendered pixels don’t (other than if something like an image was created pixel by pixel). So if the code is different but the output looks the same it’s not copyright infringement (can still be trademark).
- I looked at those screen shots. The language is similar but it’s not verbatim. The is itself is just the usage of the same framework. Business logic can’t be copyrighted. Is it too close? I agree. Does it cross the legal test. I wouldn’t waste my money on a court battle.by BikiniPrince
- Copyrights on UIs are nebulous. You can't copyright the functional aspects of a UI, that's the domain of patents, yet the functional aspects are likely the parts you are most keen on protecting. Also you need to prove that they copied you and didn't come up with it independently.by zarzavat
- Copyright doesn't cover the results of code, nor the methods used in the code, techniques and algorithms aren't covered by copyright. Period. Copyright applies to 'the work'. If you don't copy the source code, it's not covered.by aldousd666
- Whatever LLM they used copied the source code. It took their prompt and filled in the blanks of the spec by copying from the closest matching open source project. This is just what a next token predictor is going to do if you tell it to replicate software that's in its training set since that is the optimal way to predict the next tokens.by davebren
- They copied strings, and visual design. Both of which are work, both of which are covered by copyright.by scosman
- Copyright doesn't cover instructions like recipes, protocols, or APIs; those require patents.
Not looking at the source code has been used to make nuisance copyright lawsuits less likely (e.g. Phoenix and AMI implementations of IBM's BIOS) but it's still easy to prevail when a new work is created by rewriting some else's source code. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....)
Neither copyright nor patent cover a user interface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....), so that can legally be copied outright.
by dlcarrier - > Neither copyright nor patent cover a user interface
*us only
> You automatically get copyright protection when you create: ... original non-literary written work, such as software, web content and databases
> Registered designs provide protection for the visual appearance of a product. In the context of GUIs, this means that the unique visual elements of your digital interfaces (i.e. the lines, contours and shapes) can be safeguarded against unauthorised use by competitors.
https://cms.law/en/media/local/cms-cmno/files/protection-for...
by dijksterhuis - "Now software developers are feeling what authors and artist felt".
As an artist who got repeatedly told to stop making buggy whips and get into the absolutely tedious-sounding new field of "writing prompts" every time I expressed dismay and displeasure about image generation around here, every story about this sort of thing here is the sweetest schadenfreude I have tasted in my life.
Especially when the general feeling in the markets I work in is that AI images are kinda tacky and empty and nasty, and people would rather pay another human to realize their ideas than try to refine image generation prompts for a couple hours and get something vaguely okay that makes people go "ew, AI".
by egypturnash - I can’t imagine software engineers caring about this at all. The only people that care about UI theft are C suite IP clutchers. SWEs generally love being able to use each other’s work. Copying UI by eye has been SOP since the dawn of computing.
- OpenAI/et al. selling an IP laundering service under the name 'max subscription' may force the world to accept the perspective that Intellectual Property isn't a thing. The business model of extracting value from creators via rent seeking IP may not be viable in a world where LLMs can generate anything on demand. We might be transitioning to the Lockean view that for something to be ownable as property, it must be a scarce resource, and information is not a scarce resource.
From that property rights perspective, the property that's created when new information is created is not the information itself, rather, it's the act of creation (claim to authorship) that's the scarce resource.
I don't know what a world looks like where the only form of IP is non-transferable and owned by the original creator. Maybe that new form of IP creates less value over all, and maybe that's ok if the creator is getting 100% of the smaller pie instead of crumbs from media labels. Companies like Red Hat could be an example of a viable business model if IP laws follow the current winds.
Companies like Corgi will need to rely on internal talent to ensure that their product is better than what someone looking at their product can vibe code a copy of, which from my perspective as a consumer, sounds like a better route than Corgi relying on an internal legal team to send a cease and desist letter.
- > information is not a scarce resource
The powerful/corrupt will maintain their information asymmetry; software, tourism, self help etc will be devalued.
by aitchnyu - The Corgi event doesn't seem particularly notable. There are similar features implemented in the most bog standard way that those features can be implemented using the pattern that AFAIK Github pioneered with a 'Danger Zone'. Both parties are using the same upstream components so it ends up looking the same.
I don't know when the extreme intellectual property viewpoint entered software engineering as a mainstream opinion because I have never before seen it expressed so strongly in this community (seeing as I wasn't around when Bill Gates famously asked for money first or whatever). To think that a past OpenOffice would have been considered unconscionably close to a copy of an old MS Office of the era twenty years ago.
In some way, The Corporations Won, because it turns out software engineers turned into IP maximalists. Thinking back to when I first installed Tux Kart decades ago I never could have imagined that we'd get to this stage. Really wild, man.
by arjie - > I don't know
it is abundantly clear from the post, agree
> Bill Gates
MSFT declared open source a "cancer" and "a threat to American Values" .. later, almost the entire Internet is run fundamentally on OSS.
What motivations might MSFT have had in 1998 ? Are there clear lessons from the extremes of the past that could be applied now?
Do authors have a right to LICENSE software they write? which ones, only Linus or Daniel Stenberg ? are there others? does a LICENSE mean anything ?
##-- related
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> To: wire-service@thyrsus.com Subject: Microsoft and the Big Lie Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:47:38 -0400 ...
In the last three months, Jim Allchin and Craig Mundie and Steve Ballmer ... have described it (open source code ed.) as "un-American", "a destroyer", and "a cancer". They have deliberately confused the GPL with non-infectious open-source licenses, and they have deliberately confused active combination of code with passive aggregation of data.
by gnerd00 - Did you even look into the situation?
Corgi was spending 10K/yr for DocSend. They decided to build their own and the LLM took UI from PaperMark, an open-source alternative. I’ve implemented features that exist in open-source and LLM has never blatantly ripped off the UI.
Corgi has raised $106M but won’t pay for DocSend? Fine. Wants to build their own version based on Open-source? Fine. Keep it closed source and then try to monetize your version? That’s treacherous.
How is Microsoft Office vs Open Office a good parallel to this?
- > The Corporations Won, because it turns out software engineers turned into IP maximalists
Yeah, it's always bothered me that developers are eager to get legal to patent something they were involved in at Company™ put their name on patents so they can include them in their promotion docs.
It's like we're slowly defrauding ourselves and ensuring companies have the maximum legal standing against individual makers. Almost like a prisoner's dilemma where we're building the things that will/have be used against it us and those that come after in exchange for a little personal gain.
by Xeoncross - > Both parties are using the same upstream components so it ends up looking the same.
I had a look at the 4 screenshots in the post, and definitively it's not just using the "same upstream components", it's a verbatim copy.
Don't know about the rest of the app and the actual code, but I won't be surprised to find out it's basically the same.
by vb-8448 - "I don't know when the extreme intellectual property viewpoint entered software engineering as a mainstream opinion because I have never before seen it expressed so strongly in this community"
It's not copyright maximalism, it's just bog-standard rationalization. I don't like what this company is doing, it looks like I can hit them with the "copyright" stick, so I will. One day later, I like playing abandonware games and that should be legal and copyright is stopping me so copyright bad, grrr argh.
At least, at the HN gestalt level. Individuals may say one or the other of those things from a principled perspective, but I perceive a lot of rationalization in these discussions overall.
There's not a lot people coming at this from any sort of principled position. I think one measure of that is that the modal principled position right now ought to be something fairly close to "I don't know". AI has kicked a lot of the foundation out from underneath copyright and I don't think anyone serious has more than a first draft of what the plan moving forward should be. Even if you can get two people to agree on the goals we should shoot for, which is already a tough ask even in a pre-AI era, getting them to agree on how to achieve those goals will be a long shot... and that's entirely separate from the question of whether the actions would in fact end up accomplishing the goal, which I don't trust anyone to have a good bead on right now.
Nominally, the principle of copyright has been to preserve creativity. Ten years ago we all had a reasonably similar idea what that meant, but we don't even have that now.
by jerf