The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?
Or to be forced to change license to large portions of your project?
With Linux I meant the Linux kernel
Or to be forced to change license to large portions of your project?
With Linux I meant the Linux kernel
I expect the overall copyright regime to be weakened over time due to the effects of AI. It’s clear that the intent is to replace copyright gatekeeping with model/compute gatekeeping. This is a battle between two groups I greatly dislike, and I don’t really side with either, but there may be a small benefit for the average person who just wants to “download a car”.
- For now the laws are in force, and I don't even know of discussions to change them (that EU proposal only wants to allow training on personal data)
- changing intellectual property rights law would typically require changing international treaties
- however much companies are in love with AI now, I'm not sure they'd support abolishing legal protections on which their business relies
I'm not sure that that's how legal departments think.
Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?
Because the chance of someone auditing the actual source code is near zero, but for open source software it's near 100% that someone or, worse something aka an AI bot looking for a revenue stream, will have a look at your code. And EVEN IF you get caught stealing by whatever random incident (say, your code repository being 0wned) - it's a matter of a settlement payment. If you are not a company, but an individual person... well, just look at what happened to Aaron Swartz RIP.
And for the WINE/ReactOS/console homebrew folks, it's vital to be able to claim no code contributor ever got exposed, even indirectly, to proprietary code.
Your point about being caught is valid, but it depends on AIs producing identifiable chunks of code, and that is incompatible with your license. AI training is going to lean towards open source, because its available to train on.
I also think the widespread use of AI will mean accidental copying will become more acceptable. Even as it is, its going to be regarded as an accident.
Proprietary developers don't care because their code wasn't trained on. Is that a trick question?
They do care now that reverse engineering is possible.
As others said, for closed source software it's a lot harder to detect plagiarism.
And it's in general very hard to detect plagiarized code; there's some product that does it, but it of course has only a partial inventory of the existing open-source code.
I think that some big company does use those products, though.
I have heard of this happening in response to prompts designed to do so, not inadvertently.
How many case of proprietary code inadvertently being included in open source projects, or even of copyleft code being included in permissively licensed projects do you know of?
I can just imagine it happening to a purely vibe coded project that lets an LLM do huge chunks of stuff with minimal instructions doing something like copying a chunk of a library, but its otherwise hard to just copy code that will work in a different context.
We read of huge LLM assisted projects on HN all the time. How many of those have been sued?
The problem with this is that if someone sues you for this they have to somehow prove that you actually infringed. They can't just point to the code and say "See, mah, infringement!" The legal system does recognize that it is very possible for two people, completely independently, to arrive at a nearly identical solution.
I think in most cases twenty lines of identical code are more than enough for that to be the case (at least if it contains a few non-single-letter identifiers).
I don't know if that's in the 0.000000000001 percent of the time, but it can happen.