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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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728 points freetonik | 12 comments | 21 Aug 25 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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jedbrown ◴[22 Aug 25 01:30 UTC] No.44980180[source]▶
Provenance matters. An LLM cannot certify a Developer Certificate of Origin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Certificate_of_Origi...) and a developer of integrity cannot certify the DCO for code emitted by an LLM, certainly not an LLM trained on code of unknown provenance. It is well-known that LLMs sometimes produce verbatim or near-verbatim copies of their training data, most of which cannot be used without attribution (and may have more onerous license requirements). It is also well-known that they don't "understand" semantics: they never make changes for the right reason.

We don't yet know how courts will rule on cases like Does v Github (https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/case-updates.html). LLM-based systems are not even capable of practicing clean-room design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design). For a maintainer to accept code generated by an LLM is to put the entire community at risk, as well as to endorse a power structure that mocks consent.

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raggi ◴[22 Aug 25 01:57 UTC] No.44980300[source]▶
For a large LLM I think the science in the end will demonstrate that verbatim reproduction is not coming from verbatim recording, as the structure really isn’t setup that way in the models under question here.

This is similar to the ruling by Alsup in the Anthropic books case that the training is “exceedingly transformative”. I would expect a reinterpretation or disagreement on this front from another case to be both problematic and likely eventually overturned.

I don’t actually think provenance is a problem on the axis you suggest if Alsups ruling holds. That said I don’t think that’s the only copyright issue afoot - the copyright office writing on copyrightability of outputs from the machine essentially requires that the output fails the Feist tests for human copyrightability.

More interesting to me is how this might realign the notion of copyrightability of human works further as time goes on, moving from every trivial derivative bit of trash potentially being copyrightable to some stronger notion of, to follow the feist test, independence and creativity. Further it raises a fairly immediate question in an open source setting if many individual small patch contributions themselves actually even pass those tests - they may well not, although the general guidance is to set the bar low - but is a typo fix either? There is so far to go on this rabbit hole.

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strogonoff ◴[22 Aug 25 03:40 UTC] No.44980801[source]▶
In the West you are free to make something that everyone thinks is a “derivative piece of trash” and still call it yours; and sometimes it will turn out to be a hit because, well, it turns out that in real life no one can reliably tell what is and what isn’t trash[0]—if it was possible, art as we know it would not exist. Sometimes what is trash to you is a cult experimental track to me, because people are different.

On that note, I am not sure why creators in so many industries are sitting around while they are being more or less ripped off by massive corporations, when music has got it right.

— Do you want to make a cover song? Go ahead. You can even copyright it! The original composer still gets paid.

— Do you want to make a transformative derivative work (change the composition, really alter the style, edit the lyrics)? Go ahead, just damn better make sure you license it first. …and you can copyright your derivative work, too. …and the original composer still gets credit in your copyright.

The current wave of LLM-induced AI hype really made the tech crowd bend itself in knots trying to paint this as an unsolvable problem that requires IP abuse, or not a problem because it’s all mostly “derivative bits of trash” (at least the bits they don’t like, anyway), argue in courts how it’s transformative, etc., while the most straightforward solution keeps staring them in the face. The only problem is that this solution does not scale, and if there’s anything the industry in which “Do Things That Don’t Scale” is the title of a hit essay hates then that would be doing things that don’t scale.

[0] It should be clarified that if art is considered (as I do) fundamentally a mechanism of self-expression then there is, of course, no trash and the whole point is moot.

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1. 0points ◴[22 Aug 25 06:57 UTC] No.44981703[source]▶
There's an whole genre of musicians focusing only on creating royalty free covers of popular songs so the music can be used in suggestive ways while avoiding royalties.

It's not art. It's parasitism of art.

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2. strogonoff ◴[22 Aug 25 08:34 UTC] No.44982176[source]▶
> There's an whole genre of musicians focusing only on creating royalty free covers

There is no such thing as a “royalty free cover”. Either it is a full on faithful cover, which you can perform as long as license fees are paid, and in which case both the performer and the original songwriter get royalties, or it is a “transformative cover” which requires negotiation with the publisher/rights owner (and in that case IP ownership will probably be split between songwriter and performer depending on their agreement).

(Not an IP lawyer myself so someone can correct me.)

Furthermore, in countries where I know how it works as a venue owner you pay the rights organization a fixed sum per month or year and you are good to go and play any track you want. It thus makes no difference to you whether you play the original or a cover.

Have you considered that it is simply singers-performers who like to sing and would like to earn a bit of money from it, but don’t have many original songs if their own?

> It's parasitism of art

If we assume covers are parasitism of art, by that logic would your comment, which is very similar to dozens I have seen on this topic in recent months, be parasitism of discourse?

Jokes aside, a significant number of covers I have heard at cafes over years are actually quite decent, and I would certainly not call that parasitic in any way.

Even pretending they were, if you compare between artists specialising in covers and big tech trying to expropriate IP, insert itself as a middleman and arbiter for information access, devalue art for profit, etc., I am not sure they are even close in terms of the scale of parasitism.

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3. withinboredom ◴[22 Aug 25 10:14 UTC] No.44982746[source]▶
There's several sides of music copyright:

1. The lyrics

2. The composition

3. The recording

These can all be owned by different people or the same person. The "royalty free covers" you mention are people abusing the rights of one of those. They're not avoiding royalties, they just havn't been caught yet.

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4. 0points ◴[22 Aug 25 10:15 UTC] No.44982751[source]▶
> Have you considered that it is simply singers-performers who like to sing and would like to earn a bit of money from it, but don’t have many original songs if their own?

Or, maybe you start to pay attention?

They are selling their songs cheaper for TV, radio or ads.

> Even pretending they were, if you compare between artists specialising in covers and big tech trying to expropriate IP

They're literally working for spotify.

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5. strogonoff ◴[22 Aug 25 12:01 UTC] No.44983459{3}[source]▶
> They are selling their songs cheaper for TV, radio or ads.

I guess that somehow refutes the points I made, I just can’t see how.

Radio stations, like the aforementioned venue owners, pay the rights organizations a flat annual fee. TV programs do need to license these songs (as unlike simple cover here the use is substantially transformative), but again: 1) it does not rip off songwriters (holder of songwriter rights for a song gets royalties for performance of its covers, songwriter has a say in any such licensing agreement), and 2) often a cover is a specifically considered and selected choice: it can be miles better fitting for a scene than the original (just remember Motion Picture Soundtrack in that Westworld scene), and unlike the original it does not tend to make the scene all about itself so much. It feels like you are yet to demonstrate how it is particularly parasitic.

Edit: I mean honest covers; modifying a song a little bit and passing it as original should be very sueable by the rights holder and I would be very surprised if Spotify decided to do that even if they fired their entire legal department and replaced it with one LLM chatbot.

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6. strogonoff ◴[22 Aug 25 12:21 UTC] No.44983639[source]▶
I believe performance of a cover still results in relevant royalties paid to the original songwriter, just sans the performance fee, which does not strike me as a terrible ripoff (after all, a cover did take effort to arrange and perform).
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7. withinboredom ◴[22 Aug 25 13:45 UTC] No.44984639{3}[source]▶
What this person is talking about is they write “tvinkle tvinkle ittle stawr” instead of the real lyrics (basically just writing the words phonetically and/or misspelled) to try and bypass the law through “technicalities” that wouldn’t stand up in court.
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8. strogonoff ◴[22 Aug 25 13:51 UTC] No.44984699{4}[source]▶
I doubt so for a few reasons based on how they described this alleged parasitic activity, but mainly because the commenter alluded to Spotify doing this. Would be very surprising if they decided to do something so blatantly illegal, when they could keep extracting money by the truckload with their regular shady shenanigans that do not cross that legality line so obviously.

Regarding what you described, I don’t think I encountered this in the wild enough to remember. IANAL but if not cleared/registered properly as a cover it doesn’t seem to be a workaround or abuse, but would probably be found straight up illegal if the rights holder or relevant rights organization cares to sue. In this case, all I can say is “yes, some people do illegal stuff”. The system largely works.

9. zvr ◴[22 Aug 25 14:01 UTC] No.44984804{4}[source]▶
I know of restaurants and bars that choose to play cover versions of well-known songs because the costs are so much less.
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10. strogonoff ◴[22 Aug 25 14:12 UTC] No.44984940{5}[source]▶
I really doubt you would ever license any specific songs as a cafe business. You should be able to pay a fixed fee to a PRO and have a blanket license to play almost anything. Is it so expensive in the US, or perhaps they do not know that this is an option? If the former, and those cover artists help those bars keep their expenses low and offer you better experience while charging less—working with the system, without ripping off the original artists who still get paid their royalty—does it seem particularly parasitic?
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11. zvr ◴[23 Aug 25 10:40 UTC] No.44994942{6}[source]▶
The example I was referring to was not in the US.

A restaurant / cafe may pay a fixed fee and get access to a specific catalog of songs (performances). The fee depends on what the catalog contains. As you can imagine, paying for the right to only play instrumental versions of songs (no singers, no lyrics) is significantly cheaper. Or, having performances of songs by unknown people.

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12. strogonoff ◴[23 Aug 25 12:41 UTC] No.44995575{7}[source]▶
Two countries where I know how it works from a venue business owner perspective work this way. The fees seemed pretty mild, that’s why I asked if it’s too expensive in your country (which I guess is not US).