Oct 8, 2026, 6:15 PMRE: https://mastodon.art/@artificial3d/117370454644019570
Let it be known: you do not have permission to ignore the attribution clauses from any of my freely licensed work, including when ingesting into a model whose default operation is to strip attribution
And I will note that CC BY / CC BY-SA / Apache v2 / GPLv3 all have attribution requirements
Oct 8, 2026, 6:17 PMAlso in this quoted case, which is not my work but I am highlighting as an example of how the genAI industry feels like they can ignore such things, I think they literally just downloaded the model and hooked it up to some genAI bullshit
Come on. Attribution is so easy in this case
Oct 8, 2026, 6:28 PMI've warned before that any FOSS project incorporating AI output is doing so at their peril.
Previously people leaned on a federal circuit ruling that was *declined to be taken up by the supreme court* interpreting it as a free-for-all to LLM license-wash any project in translation, or really to incorporate any such materials and they would be public domain.
But that doesn't mean we have an answer! We've yet to see!
Annnnnnnnnd: I think we're likely to have that perspective upended soon.
The third circuit issued a recent ruling in the *opposite direction* of the previously well cited federal ruling, that AI training on copyrighted material is NOT fair use: https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-material-not-fair-use-third-circuit/
Annnnndddddd.... with a bunch of people trying to make LLM-generated decompilation replacements for Adobe's entire suite, we're likely to suddenly see corporations rear up angrily.
Just wait till someone tries to vibewash a Nintendo game decompilation. Hey, what do you think is gonna happen?
@cwebber But isn't that basically that industry's entire MO? They don't have to care about copyright or attribution or any of the other laws that bind us little people, so they don't.
If I'd committed a thousandth of the crimes OpenAI has, I would be behind bars for 20 years minimum.
Oct 8, 2026, 6:19 PM@datarama yes, it is their MO
@datarama @cwebber It's unclear - or, I should say, unresolved from a legal perspective - whether LLM use falls under one of the long-standing exceptions to copyright protection. So it's not that they're doing things that are blatantly illegal and being allowed to get away with it because of money or whatever. It might get there eventually, but the legal system isn't there yet.
Though IIRC there have been internal documents released showing that in at least some cases they thought what they were doing was outright illegal and did it anyway, so, yeah 😐
@datarama @cwebber Ah gotcha. Sorry, my mind was on copyright because I'd just made another post about copyright.
I'm probably with you on the hacking spree. There may be some nuanced arguments to be made about negligence and duty of care but it's probably quite a stretch. (Though I don't know much about that part of the law)
@diazona @cwebber What do you think would happen to me if I decided to attack the Australian health authorities?
My guess is that I'd be serving a very long jail sentence. I don't know if it'd be in an Australian or a Danish jail, since I'm not a lawyer, but I *strongly* doubt I'd be given a few hundred million more in investments.
@cwebber Strip mining. It's vile.
@cwebber <<GAME OVER>>
(or at least very very expensive!)
@cwebber it also drives me crazy how parochial my fellow Americans are. Even if they did decide, at the federal level, once and for all what the status is of output in the US, that's not applicable elsewhere. And we're in an international environment where trust between national leaders is low and some sort of treaty on this seems unlikely.
@thomasjwebb @cwebber the only thing the #USA is good in is flexing #Cyberfascism (#ITAR) and #EconomicWarfare (#sanctions) as in spiteful chokehold against other Nations and Individuals the Regime dislikes.
@thomasjwebb @cwebber yeah as a not-American, way too many conversations are centered on American law, like you're not allowed have an opinion if you haven't memorized the main legal system for tech companies.
Still less annoying than when all the national governments move at the speed of pitch to enforce perfectly enforceable laws against these companies.
@cwebber another thought I just had is what if someone runs their agent in yolo mode (don't ask permission before running whatever tools) and it ends up "going rogue" and verbatim copying code from a repo (or a local copy of a client's proprietary code)? Sometimes the commands it runs modify the code (such as search and replace stuff or scaffolds). I'm sure someone thought of this before, but I'm not even sure that training data being sufficiently atomized is enough to prevent liability.
Oct 8, 2026, 6:37 PM@cwebber I've heard inconsistent claims that the last one is already going on
Oct 8, 2026, 8:54 PM@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place @cwebber@social.coop I'm involved in this very scene (decomps/PC ports of Nintendo games).
This is 100% already going on. It's like every goddamn day there's another announcement by sloptubers about a "new decomp" or a "new recomp" or "a new port." And yes, of course the quality is garbage.
And yes this does suck for the people putting in real work to have worked years on putting in the effort on a single game, only for somebody to tell Claude to slopcode the port the moment decomp hits 100% fuzzy match or whatever. Deadass been hearing people say shit like "dude I need to take my decomp private so people don't slopcode the port" and like, jeez.
Oct 8, 2026, 8:59 PM@cwebber@social.coop @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place I personally think a lot of it accelerated after the release of Dusklight (TLoZ: Twilight Princess PC port). Though I'm a dev there so maybe my perspective is heavily skewed.
Oct 8, 2026, 9:04 PMOct 8, 2026, 9:07 PM@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place @cwebber@social.coop Well they're real insofar as that there seem to be repos that compile in at least one C(++) compiler. But yes, some of the examples are... well just today I saw one of those sloptubers delete their latest Tweet after this was the state of the repo:
@cwebber one of the latest trends apparently is LLMs adding signatures of actual cartoonists to generated comics. I'm sure that will go over fine with everyone.
@cwebber I don't think the 3rd Circuit's reasoning is going to hold up, mostly because it would imply that natural intelligence using someone else's ideas to start their own business would be an infringement of the work. That it can be 'true' in movie scripts and 'false' in fast food stores is an issue. The *only* good thing might be to clean up US copyright law, but also unlikely.
Oct 9, 2026, 12:30 AM@ChuckMcManis @cwebber I mean if natural intelligence uses copyrighted materials in a non-/minimally-transformative way to directly compete with the copyright holder, that's a textbook copyright violation. This isn't really any different. I agree US copyright law needs to be cleaned up though (so to for most of the world).
Oct 9, 2026, 1:06 AM@tarix29 @ChuckMcManis @cwebber It seems most plausible that if there is legislation on this topic, it would be to explicitly legalize training bullshit generators.
@cwebber Problem is copyright protections will only (practically) be applied by big corps against independent creators.
When big corps want to train on material from independent creators, they'll be given a free pass.
Oct 8, 2026, 7:18 PM@faoluin Which is both a shitty likely outcome, but also extra reason to *not include vibecoded output in FOSS*
Oct 10, 2026, 3:08 AM
@cwebber Video game "vibewashing" is very active in practice. (Modern Vintage Gamer did a video recently on that: https://youtu.be/mYZPHdKKMaI).
A quick look on Quiver (https://quiverlauncher.com/) reveals quite a few recomps of Nintendo games, including big franchises like Mario and Zelda.
That these aren't getting lawyer-bombed into oblivion is quite revealing in my opinion, as if it was somewhat in the interest of by corporations that "vibewashing" remains legal.
[...]
@cwebber [...]
For sure lots of companies have heavily pushed for using genAI for coding in the name of "efficiency", and might be afraid of all that extruded code to suddenly become an unknown liability (blaming the human coder as crumple zone will only go that far)
[...]
@cwebber [...]
I suspect that lots of big corporations are *actually relying* on chat bots to extrude license-washed version of libraries that they incorporate in their product and know that pushing against vibewashing could backfire badly.
Oct 8, 2026, 9:04 PM@dryak@mstdn.science @cwebber@social.coop I think it's far more likely they just don't care, because emulators already exist anyways. I don't think there's been any precedent for Nintendo taking ports down as long as you need to provide the ROM yourself. Projects like Ship of Harkinian have been fine for years and widely covered in press, so I'm sure they're aware.
Of course, that is merely an observation and I'm sure that if Nintendo did start paying lawyers to submit C&D's, everybody would just scram like ants. Who knows if something might change their mind.
Oct 8, 2026, 9:06 PMOct 8, 2026, 9:13 PM@cwebber@social.coop @dryak@mstdn.science I mean yeah, I'm aware they went after Switch emulators. But unless I missed something, I don't think they've gone after anything else yet?
But yes, perhaps they're just waiting for the right time to really dunk on the scene and make an actual legal precedent. Who knows.
EDIT: wait no I just remembered. They definitely have gone after homebrew dumping tools etc for the Switch too. Sigh.
Oct 8, 2026, 9:16 PM@pjb @cwebber
Nintendo also went against Dolphin (Wii & Gamecube), Citra (3DS). And that's just the recent ones, and only emulators (we won't even mention fan-games).
They simply don't like the concept of people enjoying stuff how they like instead of the very narrow way-to-enjoy that Nintendo wants to impose as the only authorised one. They consider such "unauthorized fun" to be a violation of their IP rights and they have the lawyer warchest to fight on that hill.
[...]
Oct 8, 2026, 9:28 PM@dryak@mstdn.science @cwebber@social.coop I suspect the worst is yet to come as my personal observation is that the phenomenon is still very recent, and all the videos of slop ports running I can think of have been based off mostly-human-made decomps. Though maybe I haven't been paying enough attention at that.
(Claude, take the port and the Aurora compat layer and smash them together, keep fixing crashes till I see the Wind Waker title screen)
Oct 8, 2026, 9:58 PM@pjb
They shut down the DS/D3DS emulator project Citra. It's not just Switch they chase.
Oct 8, 2026, 8:34 PM@cwebber orbital lawyer strike incoming 💣
@cwebber holy shit that's huge
@cwebber Companies selling AI, getting abused by AI users: Leopards eating *my* face?
@cwebber The US jurisprudence and political landscape is so rancid that I fully expect the eventual rulings to legalize infringement by the LLM companies, while criminalizing it for individuals.
Oct 9, 2026, 1:10 AM
@cwebber it looks like we may not be waiting very long -- ArtCraft, the genAI toolkit, has launched a straight up clone of Adobe's suite, with the same UI, shortcuts, file format support and everything. But it's "clean room," because nobody at ArtCraft has decompiled any Adobe software at all! Riiight? https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/software-is-over-bold-ai-developer-takes-aim-at-adobe-with-open-source-clones/
Oct 8, 2026, 9:36 PM@cwebber by the way that also means that pieces that have no copyright at all may not be used for llm training. At least the rule in many countries is that if you created something, put it out for free on the internet, does *not* mean one can do anything with it, such as reselling. You automatically have that copyright and anyone who wants to use it for their business must ask you.
The third circuit issued a recent ruling in the opposite direction of the previously well cited federal ruling, that AI training on copyrighted material is NOT fair use: https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-material-not-fair-use-third-circuit/
It seems hard to generalise that ruling; training a model to produce headnotes and specifically headnotes on headnotes you acquired by inducing a third party to commit copyright infringement(!) is not really comparable to training an everything model on everything.
In fact the ruling takes pains to declare its non-applicability. The judgement starts with:
Under ROSS’s framing, this case appears to concern the
future of AI legal technology. But appearances can be deceiv-
ing. In truth, this is no more than an ordinary copyright case;
we must determine whether Thomson Reuters’s materials are
sufficiently original for copyright protection and whether
ROSS’s use of those materials was fair. The undisputed evi-
dence reflects that Thomson Reuters’s materials possess a cre-
ative spark, and ROSS aspired to be a direct competitor by us-
ing them for a highly similar purpose. We therefore hold that
Thomson Reuters’s materials are copyrightable and that
ROSS’s use was not fair. Thus, we will affirm the District
Court’s order granting Thomson Reuters partial summary
judgment.
and possess the footnote:
7 We note that the United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”)
filed a statement of interest relating to generative AI in a pend-
ing case in the Southern District of New York. Statement of
Interest of the United States, In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright In-
fringement Litig., No. 1:25-md-3143 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 1, 2026)
(hereinafter “DOJ Statement __”). The concerns raised in that
separate case do not apply here. The DOJ relied on Bartz v.
Anthropic PBC, 787 F. Supp. 3d 1007, 1014 (N.D. Cal. 2025)
to contend that training an AI large language model, which can
“generate original responses,” is a transformative use. DOJ
Statement at 10; see also Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 788
F. Supp. 3d 1026, 1034 (N.D. Cal. 2025) (exploring whether
generative AI programs transformatively use training materi-
als). Unlike the AI models in Bartz and In re: OpenAI, ROSS’s
AI platform cannot generate original expression, and the evi-
dence here supports the opposite conclusion about transforma-
tiveness. The DOJ also argued that the large language model
training in OpenAI did not result in “substitutive competition.”
DOJ Statement at 13 (citation modified). Here, ROSS trained
its AI for the purpose of creating a commercial substitute for
Westlaw. In any event, the DOJ’s filing in In re: OpenAI
demonstrates that the DOJ is tracking these issues and knows
how to assert its interests, but the DOJ notably did not do so
here.
@cwebber @jlink @mttaggart this is going to be the least satisfying “I told you so” of my entire life
