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489 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.515s | source
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benlivengood ◴[] No.44383064[source]
Open source and libre/free software are particularly vulnerable to a future where AI-generated code is ruled to be either infringing or public domain.

In the former case, disentangling AI-edits from human edits could tie a project up in legal proceedings for years and projects don't have any funding to fight a copyright suit. Specifically, code that is AI-generated and subsequently modified or incorporated in the rest of the code would raise the question of whether subsequent human edits were non-fair-use derivative works.

In the latter case the license restrictions no longer apply to portions of the codebase raising similar issues from derived code; a project that is only 98% OSS/FS licensed suddenly has much less leverage in takedowns to companies abusing the license terms; having to prove that infringers are definitely using the human-generated and licensed code.

Proprietary software is only mildly harmed in either case; it would require speculative copyright owners to disassemble their binaries and try to make the case that AI-generated code infringed without being able to see the codebase itself. And plenty of proprietary software has public domain code in it already.

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1. koolala ◴[] No.44384184[source]
This is a win for MIT license though.
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2. graemep ◴[] No.44385264[source]
From what point of view?

For someone using MIT licensed code for training, it still requires a copy of the license and the copyright notice in "copies or substantial portions of the software". SO I guess its fine for a snippet, but if the AI reproduces too much of it, then its in breach.

From the point of view of someone who does not want their code used by an LLM then using GPL code is more likely to be a breach.