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.
If there was an accident an officer might give you a fine in both cases where I live. In the Porsche case they can say you broke the law and were speeding that led to the accident. But also in the case of old car for failing to adjust your speed to your skills, the state of your vehicle and conditions of the road and weather regardless of the speed limit.
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.
The Cayenne would not be safer going 35 instead of 40 "regardless of all other variables": it's statistically safer to go closer to the flow of traffic because you're then "at rest" with respect to other drivers (assuming a controlled access road without pedestrian traffic). If the speed limit is 55 and the flow of traffic is 70–80 (as is the case with the Beltway around DC, despite automated enforcement), then going 55 is more dangerous than "speeding". The issue with 100% enforcement is every law assumes certain circumstances or variables and the real world is infinitely more complex than any set of variables that can reasonably be foreseen by law (and laws that attempt to foresee as many variables as possible are more complicated and, consequently, harder for normal people to apply, which is another reason for latitude in enforcement).
The reason we have speed limits isnt due to vehciles being unable to 'handle' certain speeds though, it's to minimise the damage of an incident at that speed, which is entirely a matter of physics.
No, that is not true. I used to work on road signage systems, where we would use test vehicles, sensors, and math to figure out what the correct signage should be for various sections of road. The standards are primarily concerned with maintain a margin of error for the "worst" cars on the road, i.e. the ones that meet only the minimum inspection requirements. What happens once that margin of error is exceeded was anyone's guess, but practically could be wildly different for specific scenarios that had more to do with the off-road environment than the exact parameters of the road. Two roads with identical bends would receive the same signage regardless of whether under steering through the curve would land you on a sidewalk or in a field or over a cliff.
AFAICT at least 2 people in this thread don't seem to think that visibility -- a function of, among other things, weather and time of day -- influences driving safety. I find this amazing.
The point of terryf's example was to point out that for practical reasons, existing laws don't capture every relevant variable. I (but not everyone, it seems) think that visibility obviously influences safety. The point I want to make is that in practice the "precision gap" can't be perfectly rectified by making legality a function of more factors than just speed. There will always be some additional factor that influences the probability of a crash by some small amount -- and some of the largest factors, like individual driving ability, would be objected to on other grounds.
Laws can't be enforced 100% of the time because many laws require intent, which is unknowable. You have to make an educated guess behind it. Even if someone tells you their intent, straight up, you still don't know their intent. You just know what they want you to think their intent is, which may or may not be the same thing. It's legitimately unknowable.
Ideally, for a lot of things we want to punish people who knowingly do bad stuff, not people who do bad stuff because they thought it was good.
Very true but not in all cases. In case of speed limit intent does not matter; "I didn't know I was speeding" is no excuse. Same with DUI.
In fact DUI should be a mitigating circumstance, because when you're drunk your ability to make decisions is impaired -- but the opposite happens, DUI is an aggravating circumstance.
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.
Please shred your drivers license immediately, if you at any point in your life have exceeded the speed limit by any amount, or otherwise violated the traffic regulations in any way whatsoever.
Why? 1) If grandparent commenter got a moving violation, shouldn't they just face the corresponding - why posit a made-up penalty for the violation? 2) And if people know there is perfect enforcement, wouldn't they be expected to adjust their behavior going forward, such as driving enough below the limit that they won't accidentally exceed it?
>driving enough below the limit that they won't accidentally exceed it
That is precisely why traffic would effectively grind to a halt. Because going even 0,0001 over the limit is so easy, you would have to turtle through traffic to get anywhere while making certain you never go above the limit. 50km zone is now 30km, and you didn't decelerate quickly enough and were going 32km at the threshold. 60km zone, but you accelerated too quickly and hit 61km for a moment. And sometimes, rarely, but sometimes you have to accelerate yourself out of a dangerous situation.
Honestly if you are arguing for this idea, I strongly suspect you have no experience driving. I've driven for about 25 years. I've received two speeding tickets. One in Germany (I'm danish), where I got confused due to unfamiliar signage and got dinged for going 112km in a 100km zone. And once here I got a ticket for going 54 in a 50 - my mom was at the hospital, possibly about to die (she didn't). Both of those were speed traps.
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.
>(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!)
Or perhaps people will not be able to just "not pull over" because the police drones will be given the power to remotely command their car to stop. Heck, why even have the drones? Just require that the car monitor speeding infractions and report them for fines. Serious or repeat offenders can have their throttles locked out to the speed limit of the current road.
To wit, in some places you will be issued a DUI (of sorts) for riding a bicycle home from the bar. And it's actually enforced. Talk about the police shooting themselves in the foot.
> I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge.
Because of that (or rather, to sort out the mess), I always felt that citizens should have a right to be informed of every law that they are expected to obey so that at least in principle, they'd be able to comply (to be effective, plain language explanations would need to be included).
Imagine an app that told you, whenever you cross state boundaries, what is different in the law now from your previous location.
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.
One issue is that imperfect enforcement is often how the momentum to change the law is created.
If the police had been able to swoop in and arrest the "perpetrators" every time two men kissed, homosexuality would have never been legalized; If they had been able to arrest anyone who made alcohol, prohibition wouldn't have ended; if they had been able to arrest anyone with a cannabis seedling, we wouldn't have cannabis legalization.
Quite the opposite. A lot of obviously innocent people ending up in jail will have created a massive backlash a lot earlier, helping fixing idiotic legislation.
For crimes that require intention, people usually only end up in jail because they thought they could get away with it, because of imperfect enforcement.
If everyone knew they would be immediately arrested the second they sprouted a cannabis seed almost nobody would try.
Only if the legal system allows itself to be changed.
The present system in many countries is that criminal and civil codes are too large to be comprehended by a single person, too large to be changed rationally, and the processes too subject to corruption to be changed all at once.
That really depends upon the the reputation. If the police were to arrest a lot of 'very dangerous people', and all you see on the new is that they put the 'very dangerous people' in prison, then that isn't going to cause outrage. What causes outrage is when you know Mark down the street is one of those 'very dangerous people', but he was definitely not someone you gave your those vibes. So you look it up and notice the actual crime, even if it sounds bad on paper, means Mark might not actually be one of those 'very dangerous people'. A single instance isn't much, but across society this leads to questioning a law.
But it only happens because you got to know Mark originally. If he was already labeled a 'very dangerous person' and was arrested early on, there's a much better chance you wouldn't have gotten to know him, and the extent you would question the law would be very differently.
This is difficult to talk about in theoretical, because most examples are obvious cases of bad law (people already recognize the issues) or cases of good law that how dare I question (laws people don't recognize as an issue). People spend a lot of time thinking about a law that has already soured but hasn't been removed from the books, but rarely catch the moment that they realize the law originally soured in their mind (and any real world modern examples that might be changing currenlty would be, by their nature, controversial and quite easily derail the discussion).
Put shortly, those people are only obviously innocent (not deserving to be punished, but technically guilty of what the law stated) because the law was imperfect in enforcement and you got to know some of them before the law caught them.
I don’t know, law enforcement in the US is already heavy handed in terms of enforcement. Not that it’s done equally, which is your intention, but it’s that the enforcer already thinks they are overly powerful and already commonly oversteps and abuse their power. This pushes further into a police state.
Maybe my YouTube algorithm just shows me a lot of it, but there’s no shortage of cops out there violating people’s rights because they think when they ask for something we have to comply and see anything else as defiant.
I think we need perhaps less laws so people can actually know them all. Also, I think we need clarity as to what they are and it needs to be simple English, dummy’s guide to law type thing. But there’s a lot of issues that simply stem from things like 1) when can a cop ask for your ID? / when do you have the right to say no? 2) similar question as to when do they have a right to enter/trespass onto your property? 3) as every encounter usually involves them asking you questions, even a simple traffic stop, when and how can you refuse to talk to them or even roll down your window or open your car door without them getting offended and refusing to take no as an answer?
I don’t think we generally have any understanding of what our rights actually are in these most likely and most common interactions with law enforcement. However, it’s all cases where I see law enforcement themselves have a poor understanding of what the law and rights are themselves so how are citizens to really know. If they tell you it’s their policy to ID anyone they want without any sort of probable cause then they say you’re obstructing their investigation for not complying or answering their questions or asserting you have to listen to anything they say because it’s a lawful order; it’s just common ways they get people to do what they want, it’s often completely within your right to not comply with a lot of these things though.
Speeding is brought up as an example that most replies refer to, but it really is not limited to that. How about jaywalking? Using the road on a bicycle when there's a bike lane available of varying quality? Or taking a piss in the bushes after a drunken night out? Downloading a 60 year old movie? Besides, perfect enforcement does not work with vague laws. It's not a world I would like to live in, where there is no room for error.
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.
> 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
This is by design, in an American context of building a free society. By default, you are allowed to do whatever you like to do in a free society. To constrain behavior through law, first a legislator must decide that it should be constrained, then they must convince their legislator peers that it should be constrained, then law enforcement must be convinced to attempt to constrain it de-facto, then a judge must be convinced that you in particular should have a court case proceed against you; a grand jury must be convinced to bring an indictment, a jury of 12 peers must be convinced to reach a verdict, and even afterwards there are courts of appeal.
The bar to constrain someone's freedom is quite high. By design and by wider culture.
There can also be an argument that laws are always only an approximation, and they should be broken in corner cases where they clearly don't work as intended.
Civil disobedience can also be a useful societal force, and with perfect law enforcement it becomes impossible.
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?
The far left and neoliberals are united on this. Whether it's by malice, self interest or incompetence (or a combination), they end up discriminating against the lower classes.
Neoliberals and the far left, when forced to work in the real world, both tend to prefer putting power into rules, not giving people in authority the power to make decisions.
The upside is there's less misuse of power by authorities, at least in theory. The bad news is, you now need far more detailed rules to allow for the exceptions, common sense, and nuance that are no longer up to authorities.
The worse news is, that the people who benefit from complex rules are the upper classes, and the authorities who know how to manipulate complex rules.
"Don't be evil" requires a leader with the authority to enforce it.
A 500 employee manual will be selectively implemented, and will end up full of exploits, but hey, at least you can pretend you tried to remove human error from the process.
My mom, who's a lawyer, always told us that laws don't matter, what matter is how hard they're enforced, and we can simply ignore laws that exist but we know for a fact they're not enforced (or not enforceable).
I once had small talk with Lawrence Lessig after a conference of his, and when I told him that he was visibly shocked, as if I had told him I was raised to be a criminal.
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.
The US has traditionally solved this problem by having dozens of political entities that can compete (at least for elites) and, since the creation of the interstate highway system, the oppressed can flee.
> 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.
> much more entrenched, in the form of regulatory capture
I am unsure how to interpret this comment. It is so broad that it dilutes the effect. Are there any wealthy countries that you feel do not suffer from the same issue?
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.
This is probably the best explanation. I didn't consider that when incentives are better aligned through capitalism, that perceived corruption may naturally fall. Your example of Eastern Europe is a very good one.
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.
> 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.
I think their point was that a lot (but not all) of the existing argument boils down to “Well it should be that way because someone decided it hundreds of years ago” so if we are consciously starting again from scratch, ideally that specific argument no longer holds water. (I’d say we should instead use data based approaches, look at what has been successful in other countries, etc, although that’s slightly expanding the current topic.)
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.
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.
"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.)
> 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.
Well said.
I think another area where this problem has already emerged is with public records laws.
It's one thing if records of, let's say, real estate sales are made "publicly available" by requiring interested parties to physically visit a local government building, speak in the local language to other human beings in order to politely request them, and to spend a few hours and some money in order to actually get them.
It's quite another thing if "publicly available" means that anyone anywhere can scrape those records off the web en masse and use them to target online scams at elderly homeowners halfway around the world.
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.
To understand speeding you need to understand the concept of "speed choice". Everyone chooses how fast to drive, only those who choose above the speed limit are speeding. If your environment gets you to choose a speed below the speed limit you won't break the law. Your choice can be influenced by many factors such as:
* narrow looking roadway
* speed limit signs
* your car has self driving
* what everybody else is doing
* speed limiter on your car
* curvy road
* bad weather
* male or female
* risk appetite
* driving experience
* experience of that route
* perceived risk of getting caught
If you fix "speed choice" the problem of speeding diminishes.
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.
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.
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).
What's been driving up the cost of construction (it's already up to 2000-2400 eur/m2 for a detached house in Portugal) has been mostly cost of materials and labour.
People complain about the regulations, but they also complain about houses that are structurally unsound, unventilated, flammable, badly isolated acoustically and thermally and so on... I don't think going back is the way to go. It's true that sometimes licensing that too long, though.
> 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?
Any law, including a speed limit, has unforeseen consequences. In my part of the world, there is a 4km stretch of the road with good visibility, low pedestrian traffic, and which takes you either 10 minutes to go through if you follow the limits, or 3 minutes if you drive at +5km/h.
Other than lost time (which compounds, but also increases traffic congestion, so those 10 mins might turn into 20-25), the fuel use and pollution are greatly increased.
Interestingly, there are speed cameras there, and enforcement is not done on these slight violations: without this flexibility, I'd need to ask for traffic lights to be adjusted so they work well for driving under speed limits, and that is slow and an annoying process.
But without an option to "try", I wouldn't even know this is the case, and I wouldn't even be able to offer this as a suggestion.
Whether that accounts for consequences being "grave and terrible", probably not, but very suboptimal for sure.
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.
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.
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.
Speed limit is only a proxy for your braking distance in case of emergency braking (at least in most cases, but also a proxy for bad road conditions in others): the point is to ensure safety, and not a particular speed.
I've driven behind drivers driving 25km/h in a 40km/h area and not stopping for pedestrians at a crosswalk with right of way (if somebody jumped out elsewhere, they'd probably just run them over at 25 km/h), whereas I always do even if I am driving at 45km/h because my foot would be hanging over the brake near areas of low visibility (like intersections) or near crosswalks or with pedestrians near the road.
Your braking distance is largely a function of your reaction time (attention + pre-prep + reflexes), and your car performance (tyres, brakes) on top of the speed, and speed limits are designed for the less than median "driver". You obviously have most of those under your control, but the speed is the easiest to measure externally.
The obvious counter is that I could be even safer if I also drove at 25 km/h, but it would take me much longer, I'd hit many more red lights, so I might stop being so attentive because I am going "so slow" and taking so long (maintaining focus is hard the longer you need to do it).
However, measuring individual performance is prohibitively expensive if not impossible (as it also fluctuates for the same person, but also road and car conditions), so we use a proxy like speed limit that is easy to measure.
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.
If you ring for the ambulance, (Australian context), you will be told what to do! The telephony scripts have first aid baked in. The paramedic will come (not necessarily with an ambulance) and start appropriate definitive treatment as good as what you will get in a hospital. A consequence of a stroke is a cardiac arrest. If you are driving you won't know and won't do CPR.
The 1996 movie Transpotting still gives me shivers up my spine by putting someone in a car and drop at ER rather than calling for help. Too many people die needlessly, even today, when well meaning people load shooting victims, stroke victims and heart attacks etc into their car and drive to ER without asking their local emergency services for advice.
PS. You can't 100% of the time get to ER faster than the ambulance. There are more ambulances than emergency rooms by number. If an ambulance is at the county hospital they'll be faster than you.
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.
---
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.
> 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.
The legal system is fundamentally broken. It's not designed to handle the kind of throughput that is required to enforce justice in countries with many millions of inhabitants.
The legal system is mostly a fantasy. It doesn't exist for most people. Currently it only serves large corporate and political interests since only they can afford access.
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.
> 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.
Former lawyer here, who worked at a top end law firm. Throwaway account.
In my experience, the legal system and lawyers in general are deeply aware of this. It's the average Joe who fails to realize this, particularly a certain kind of Joe (older men with a strong sense that all rules are sacred, except those that affect them, those are all oppressive and corrupt and may possibly justify overthrowing the government).
Laws are social norms of varying strength. There's the law (stern face) and then there's the law (vague raising of hands). If you owe a bank $2m and you pay back $1m, then you're going to run into the law (stern face). If you have an obligation to use your best efforts to do something, and you don't do it, then we can all have a very long conversation about what exactly 'best efforts' means in this exact scenario, and we're more in the territory of law (vague raising of hands).
Administrative obligations are the vaguest of all, and that's where lawyers are genuinely most helpful. A good lawyer will know that Department so and so is shifting into harsher enforcement of this type of violation but is less concerned about that type of violation. They know that Justice so and so loves throwing the book in this kind of case, but rolls their eyes at that other kind of case. This is extremely helpful to you as a client.
> 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.
Enforcement of laws is a political decision, and there is no way to ever escape this fact. If society gets concerned about something, politicians are going to mobilize old laws to get at it. If society relaxes about something, enforcement wanes. Drugs are an obvious example. A lot of the time the things society are concerned about are deeply stupid (is D&D satanic?), but in a democracy politicians are very sensitive to public sentiment. If you don't like the way the public debate is going, get involved.
> 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 courts are only ever concerned about de jure legality. (It's the literal meaning of de jure!) There are other outlets for de facto legality in the legal system - e.g. the police can choose not to investigate, prosecutors can choose not to lay charges, or opt for lower-level charges, or seek a lenient sentence.
Yes, with current costs, most people literally cannot afford legal representation, especially in the plaintiff side.
For example, I've been cheated out of at least $100k net worth by the founder of a crypto project because he decided to abandon tech which was working and switched to a competitor's platform for no reason. Now I was already worried about repercussions outside of the legal system... This is crypto sector after all... But also, legally, there's no way I can afford to sue a company which controls almost $100 million in liquid assets and probably has got government regulators on their payroll... Even though it is a simple case, it would be difficult to win even if I'm right and the risk of losing is that they could seek reimbursement of lawyers fees which they seek to maximize just to make things difficult for me.
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.
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
I consider this a form of performance art. To really expose the absurdity of the system, you can't just point at the cracks; you need to actually stick your fingers in.
Part of the point here is that the systems are fundamentally broken, more broken than they were before when we already thought they were broken.
Some people look at that and think "I suppose we should keep propping this system up as much as possible; the less propping the more immediate harm is caused to people/infrastructure/society".
The people behind this site/talk clearly don't buy into that. The way they see it, a reckoning must come. We might as well get it over with as soon as possible. Rip off the band-aid so to speak. So maybe we should shake the system and show that its falling apart.
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.
After bogo-sort, it's the most badness-maximising "solution" I've ever come across. Why bother asking for the creator's consent to copy and run the original bytes, when you could instead ask for their consent to have a robot that no one understands and could potentially do anything read a few paragraphs of text describing what those bytes do, imagine how it might work, and try to build something resembling that from scratch, using a trillion or so times more energy.
// VibeSort
let arr = [51,46,72,32,14,27,88,32];
arr.sort((a,b)=>{
let response = LLM.query(`Which number is larger, number A:${a} or number B:${b}. Answer using "A" or "B" only, if they are equal, say "C".`);
if(response.includes('C')) return 0;
if(response.includes('B')) return -1;
if(response.includes('A')) return 1;
return 0;
});
console.table(arr);
The energy thing won't sail. A backhoe or front-loader uses far more energy than the equivalent human labor, but having higher energy solutions available is what technological civilization does.
Arguably Cowen's "Great Stagnation" was driven primarily by not embracing higher energy provision in the form of fission.
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.
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.
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
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 so instead of paying maintainers who already built the thing you want, we instead charge you to use AI to make countless copies of maintainers’ work and direct the profits back to the maintainers? That sounds like true satire.
"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.
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
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.
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.
LLM doesn't add anything new to the table here in terms of legal arguments. See how people did and do clean room implementations without any AI involved, and what lengths they go to.
"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.
Normally with clean room reimplementations, you’d have the developer working from a set of requirements which have been gathered by someone else who reverse engineered the process.
Here, neither steps are taken.
If you’re supplying a BOM manifest, rather than software constraints, then the only way to assert those constraints is to directly compare against the original project. It doesn’t matter if it’s AI or a human doing that, because either way it’s not “clean room”.
You can do clean room design with AI via SDD (spec driven development). But that’s not what this service (satire or not) offers.
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.
Yes the entire enterprise and legal precedent is full of shit with intellectual property law being abused left and right. For example, I don’t think Google should have been able to copy the Java API for Kotlin/Android. Java should have just died and everyone would have been better off. By making copyright more weak, free software reaps what it sews.
I love FOSS but I hate that it’s been used to replicate existing code or serve as a way to outsource corporate tech debt. The shadow of profit looms over it all.
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.
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
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.
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.
Indeed, and that's through the API. If you use Claude Chat/Code and even if you then turn off web search, it still has access to some of its tools (for doing calculations, running small code snippets etc.) and that environment contains chardets code 4 times:
It's not surprising that they were able to create a new, working version of chardet this quickly. It seems the author just told Claude Code to "do a clean room implementation" and to make sure the code looks different from the original chardet (named several times in the prompt) without considering the training set and the tendency for LLMs to "cheat".
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.
So this site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
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?
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.
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.
At some level people are already doing this through LLMs. But large orgs are extremely risk averse to do such things. There’s a reason why we have “security audits” and “compliance certifications”. It’s not like organizations are not capable of securing or standardizing their systems, just they do want to point fingers to somebody when legal proceedings happens.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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":
Reading the linked Court of Appeals document in that post, the question is posted in the opening: "Can a non-human machine be an author under the Copyright Act of 1976?", which it then answers as no. It doesn't mention elsewhere that i can see that this means the output of the tool itself is not copyrightable. I would not trust the Reuters interpretation without a direct reference to a court document.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
…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!
I think the problem will be with enforcement. To be honest I don't see any way to stop this kind of thing from happening. I predict the slow decline of open source projects, sadly.
> 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".
very bottom of the page: "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."
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.
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.
>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 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.
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.
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?
Its not just doing this to open source GPL software. I have seen friends disassemble code in archaic languages, and have Claude translate the Assembly back to the original language, and churn on it until it compiles. It worked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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
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?
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?
>*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 .
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.
A LOT of people are taking this seriously and not getting the (no so?) subtle satire in this. I fell for it at first glance too, had to do a double take. Some of the smartest people I know asked me for my thoughts on this.
The scary part - what's today is satire, is tomorrow's stealth mode startup.
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
> Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code.
Obviously it's sarcasm. But the problem with this part is that LLMs actually have seen all the code. So real life it's worse than this because no one even pretends
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?
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?
> 2010, Jordan Peterson: clean your room
> 2026, Malus: Clean Room as a Service
> 2026, Jordan Peterson: how could I have missed this business opportunity
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.
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