Raw LLM Responses

The nonsesne and unspecific laws we have regarding copyright and other intellectual property can get pretty nuts. Plus, there's a lot of international treaties that mean you don't just have to deal with your own nation's laws, often many others. United States copyright law affects most of the world. In the worst case scenario, you could get 'arrested' and taken to the United States to face charges from a country you don't live in and have no say in. Seperate from AI Art I recently attended a talk about Open Source, and they were talking about various open source license formats. There are two broad categories, restrictive and unrestrictive. The former has rules you have to follow if you use any of their code, and the latter has few or no rules. The most open is Public Domain. It's very difficult to test these, though, and a lot of laws make it also difficult to make things public domain or 'un-copyright' them even though you own the copyright. It led to me having an odd thought. If I wanted to make a low restriction version of an open source project that has a high restriction license, what would be the tests to prove I had not violated their license and copyright on their work? All my education on the subject was ways to avoid copying or plagarizing, and I was never taught how this would be tested in a court of law if I was accused of using someone else's copyrighted code. I studied that stuff twenty years ago and it hasn't come up. Most places are all about avoidance, using no code from outside if they can avoid it, and they're constantly reinventing the wheel to make sure they're not using someone else's copyrighted wheel. What my investigations turned up is that software and code copyrights are very different from something like literature or music. Those two, you can take lines from a book or a section of music or lyrics and show how they are the same, and there's rules on how similar they can be, how long the similar parts have to be to count, and special exceptions etc. With code, it's trivial to change the names of functions, variables, and classes, and rearrange the code formatting so it looks different and would even pass the "diff" test. You could even make a program to change incidental code to make it look even more different but functionally identical, because two programs that do the same thing are going to have their most important parts be functionally identical. Besides the human readable source code, though, all code has to be turned into something the computer can understand. It might be machine language, or something to talk to another program it's running on, like Java. When the human-readable code is transformed, two vastly different 'programs' can become identical, because all the names and such were taken out and just the functionality remains. The computer doesn't need easy to remember or descriptive names for anything. Since you can't say something like "This paragraph is identical" or "These measures are the same", we get to how the law actually works with regards to software copyright. The folks accusing you have to prove that you were copying their code while you made it, and you have to prove that you weren't. These are generally both impossible tasks, so it's all conjecture and up to the court to decide. You have to convince the court that your stuff was copied, and they have to convince the court they didn't copy, and there's no hard evidence or clear rules. When it comes to closed-source programs, as long as you don't copy and nobody thinks you're copying, then you're safe. A lot of it is performative, because the most essential thing is to LOOK like you're not copying, whether you are or aren't. Open source programs, however... How in the world are you going to prove to anyone that you never referenced the code of another open source program when you made your open source program? The code is freely available, and if you are making a program to do the same thing you are probably already familiar with the previous project. You may have read the code already, and remember it, even if you aren't directly copying from a screen or printout, and that can count! I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, but as some rando on the internet I do advise all of us to talk with our governments about these laws, 'cause they're NUTS.