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490 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.785s | 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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Thorrez ◴[] No.44385081[source]
Is there any likelihood that the output of the model would be public domain? Even if the model itself is public domain, the prompt was created by a human and impacted the output, so I don't see how the output could be public domain. And then after that, the output was hopefully reviewed by the original prompting human and likely reviewed by another human during code review, leading to more human impact on the final code.
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1. AndrewDucker ◴[] No.44385405[source]
There is no copyright in AI art. Presumably the same reasoning would apply to AI code: https://iclg.com/news/22400-us-court-confirms-ai-generated-a...
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2. lars_francke ◴[] No.44385865[source]
This particular case is US only.

The rest of the world might decide differently.

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3. AndrewDucker ◴[] No.44385878[source]
Absolutely.

And as long as you're not worried about people in the USA reusing your code then you're all good!