Do you mean like, "Here is an algorithm for attention-based sequence transduction neural networks. Come up with an algorithm that is as similar as possible and produces the same outputs, but is unencumbered by patents"?

Essentially yes. You can already do it very effectively for code.

Neat. Is there any way to thwart this? Edit: I suppose no more than you could prevent a human from trying to do the same.

Sure, stop issuing patents for software!

Alice would like to have a word. That case (Alice Corp vs CLS Bank) makes it hard to have a software patent, particularly if that software has no physical effect on the world.

Code is a specific expression covered by copyright, not an incredibly broad claim that covers everything from toasters to spacecraft.

If the code's algorithm is patented, you cannot get around the patent by using different function and variable names and perturbing the code organization.

Worth noting that you can't just get around a piece of code's copyright by using different function and variable names and perturbing the organisation either. At least not if you're a human.

I bet you're correct and we wont be able to use ML models to strip code of its patents the way we use them to strip code of its copyright protection. But I wouldn't have expected the copyright stripping trick to work either, yet here we are.

> you can't just get around a piece of code's copyright by using different function and variable names and perturbing the organisation either.

Such changes can thwart the very suspicion that it's a derived work, and failing that, thwart the proof. In a case where the piece of logic is small, and there are only four ways of writing it, modulo naming, nobody can prove infringement unless they have some hard evidence, like security camera footage of you starting with the original and editing it.

Any bit string can be turned into into any other by a series of small edits that insert or delete a single bit, so any bit string could be suspected of being a derived work of any other.

Copyright infringement that is not provable is not real.

You can't legally get around copyright with technicalities, because any bit string can be derived from any other bit string by a sequence of one bit edits, and according to the legal doctrine, if we start with a copyrighted work, each such edit is creates a derived work.

You can disguise borrowed code such that, in the first place, nobody will suspect that it's derived from anything, and even then, they won't have evidence that it's derived.

Changing a few names and superficial organization details, on a large and significant work, will likely not fool anyone.

If it's a small module or just one function, quite probably easily so. You don't even have to understand how the code works; if you just know the paper from where the original author got the code, you can just say you implemented the detailed requirements there and validated it on the available test vectors.

“Then, automatically file a patent for it”

“Goto 10”

People are going to work around this. Midjourney generates an image, but then I change the opacity 0.01% and so it becomes copyrightable (or whatever the smallest amount of human modification is required).

> but then I change the opacity 0.01% and so it becomes copyrightable

AFAIK Courts generally have determined it must be "transformative" for fair use, and for patents - but like a substantive change. You can't just add a pixel in a corner and call it good.

https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/patents/types-o...

Slightly different (was for getting a patent for ai work) - https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/AI-CO...

This only works for copyright. Patents don’t protect parallel inventions. And trademarks cover anything that could confuse a potential customer, even unintentionally.

Yeah definitely doesn't cover trademarks as they are for something else like you said.

To my understanding patents do allow for either "improvements" or anything that achieves the same result as long as it's not the same solution as the patent?

They would certainly be a lot trickier then copywrite/IP but I think LLM's would still be able to generate possible solutions? One thing I'm thinking of for example is medication analogs - there's common substitutes you can make that achieve the same or better results that you can make.

To my understanding redbull actually did this (without ai) to modafinil with this patent - https://patents.google.com/patent/US20210380545A1/en

EDIT: Modafinil might have expired but it looks like redbull filed their patent before the expiration.

When arithmetic coding was patented, lots of projects avoided using it. There was no workaround that got the same results without infringing.

Trademarks are field specific, unlike copyrights and patents.

Right. If you use of the trademarked name or logo is not infringing, you can just copy and paste it. No laundering necessary.