[grondo4]

I didn't ask if can I use other people's proprietary closed source code, obviously they have the right to that code and how it's used.

I asked if I can learn from that code, which obviously I can. There is no license that says "You cannot learn from this code and take the things you learn to become a better programmer".

That's exactly what I do and it's exactly what AI do.

[supermatt]

> I asked if I can learn from that code, which obviously I can.

Did you actually read the link you were given? Clean room design is because you may inadvertently plagiarize copyrighted works from your memory of reading it.

i.e. the act of reading may cause accidental infringement when implementing the "things you learn"

[grondo4]

> i.e. the act of reading may cause accidental infringement when implementing the "things you learn"

Surely you know this isn't the case right? Maybe you're confused because we're talking about programming and not a different creative artform?

Great artists read, watch and consume copyrighted works of art all day, if they didn't they wouldn't be great artists. And yet the content they produce is entirely there own, free from the copyright of the works they learned from.

What's the difference then in programming? Why can an artist be trusted not to reproduce the copyrighted works that they learned from but not the programmer?

[waboremo]

Artists get into trouble all the time for producing works very close to something that already exist. That's like the number one reason artists get shunned in the communities they were in.

[nickelpro]

Every filmmaker watches movies

Every author reads books

Every painter view paintings

Unless you're arguing that every single artist across every field of artistic expression is constantly being jeopardized by claims of copyright infringement, this is a nonsensical point to make.

[waboremo]

But they’re not creating similar works, unlike AI which IS. Why is this so complicated for you?

[BornInChicago]

I would seriously question if this happens all the time, these days. The whole copyright thing is way behind the digital and internet revolution. Look at what the Prince case did for transformation copyright fair use.

[astrange]

The process of online artists shaming each other doesn't really have anything to do with the legal system, though they all act like it is.

[supermatt]

> Why can an artist be trusted not to reproduce the copyrighted works that they learned from but not the programmer?

They cant. which is why that quote "Good artists copy, great artists steal" exists.

AI has already been shown to be "accidentally" reproducing copyrighted work. You too, can do the same.

Its likely no-one (including yourself) will ever be aware of it - but strictly speaking it would still be copyright infringement. This is the relevance and context of the link you were given.

[nickelpro]

If everyone is infringing copyright, no one is infringing copyright. This is a dead-end thought.

[nickelpro]

Sure but the infringement is the problem, not the ideas themselves.

You're describing thought crime right now. It's not illegal to learn things.

[supermatt]

And if you "learn" something and accidentally rewrite it verbatim? Thats what clean-room design is to protect against

[nickelpro]

Rewriting the code verbatim and distributing it would be a copyright infringement, yes, you do not have a write to distribute code written by other people

That's completely different from reading and learning from code, which is what grondo described.

Clean room design relies on this, in a clean room design you have one party read and describe the protected work, and another party implement it. That first party reading the protected work is learning from closed-source IP.

[supermatt]

> That's completely different from reading and learning from code, which is what grondo described.

AI (e.g. copilot) has already been shown to break copyright of material in its training set. Thats the context of this whole thread.

[nickelpro]

Perhaps, but not of Grondo's point.

If an AI infringes on copyright then it infringes on copyright, that's unfortunate for the distributors of that code.

Humans accidentally infringe on copyright sometimes too. It's not a unique problem to machine learning. The potential to infringe on copyright has not made observing/learning/watching/reading copyright materials prohibited for humans, nor should it or (likely) will it become prohibited for machine learning algorithms.

[ghaff]

If you study a closed source compiler (or whatever) in order to write a competitive product, and the company who wrote the original product sues you for copying it, as the parent suggests, you're on shaky legal ground. Which is why clean room design is a thing.

[nickelpro]

A clean room design ensures the new code is 100% original, and not a copy of the base code. That is why it is legally preferable, because it is easy to prove certain facts in court.

But fundamentally the problem is copyright, the copying of existing IP, not knowledge. grondo4 is completely correct that there is no legal framework that prevents learning from closed-source IP.

If such a framework existed, clean room design would not work. The initial spec-writers in a clean room design are reading the protected work.

[ghaff]

>The initial spec-writers in a clean room design are reading the closed-source work.

Right. And they're only exposing elements presumably not covered by copyright to the developers writing the code. (Of course, this assumes they had legitimate access to the code in the first place.)

Clean room design isn't a requirement in the case of, say, writing a BIOS which may have been when this first came up. But it's a lot easier to defend against a copyright claim when it's documented that the people who wrote the code never saw the original.

Unlike with patents, independent creation isn't a copyright violation.

[nickelpro]

I don't understand what your point here is. The initial spec-writers learned from the original code. This is not illegal, we seem to be agreed on this point. grondo made the point that learning from code should not be prohibited.

What are you contesting?

[ghaff]

My point was that, assuming access to the code was legit, and the information being passed from the spec-writers to the developers wasn't covered by copyright (basically APIs and the like), it's a much better defense against a copyright claim that any code written by the developers isn't a copyright violation given they never saw the original code.

[bioemerl]

I think you're missing the one big flaw here. How exactly do you have access to closed source code?

Did you acquire it illegally? That's illegal.

Was it publicly available? That's fine, so long as you aren't producing exact copies and violate normal copyright law.