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491 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.39s | 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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olalonde ◴[] No.44387156[source]
Seems like a fake problem. Who would sue QEMU for using AI-generated code? OpenAI? Anthropic?
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ethbr1 ◴[] No.44387220[source]
Anyone whose code is in a used model's training set.*

This is about future existential tail risk, not current risk.

* Depending on future court decisions in different jurisdictions

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olalonde ◴[] No.44387393[source]
Again, seems so implausible that it's not worth worrying about.
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1. ethbr1 ◴[] No.44387785[source]
Were you around for SCO? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_SCO%E2%80%93Linu...

IP disputes aren't trivial, especially for shoestring-funded OSS.