[ThunderSizzle]

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it).

Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument.

I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the public) won't be re-used by someone in a way your license dictates. I'd you didn't want that to happen, don't publish your code.

Having said that, I do think there's a legitimate concern here.

[AngryData]

I don't think people would care as much about AI reusing code or images or text so directly if people were allowed to do so too. The big problem I think comes in when AI is allowed to do things that humans can't. Right now if I publish a book that is 70% somebody else's book but slightly rehashed with certain key phrases and sentences or more as perfect copies, I would get sued and I would lose. Right now though if an AI does it not only is it unlikely to get litigated at all, but even if it does most of the time it will come down to "whoops AI did it, but neither the publisher nor the AI developer is individually responsible enough to recover any significant loses from."

[adrian_b]

Yes, this is exactly the problem.

Programming productivity has been crippled for decades by the inability to reuse code due to copyright restrictions.

Because of this, the same problems have been solved again and again for countless times, because the companies employing the programmers wanted to have their own "IP" covering the solution. As a programmer, you cannot reuse your own past programs, if they have been written when employed elsewhere, so that the past employer owns them now.

Now using AI one can circumvent all copyright laws, gaining in productivity about as much as what you could have done in the past, had you been permitted to copy and paste anything into your programs.

This would be perfectly fine if the programmers who do not use an AI agent were allowed to do the same thing, i.e. to search the training programs used by the AI and just copy and paste anything from there.

[Aerroon]

>I don't think people would care as much about AI reusing code or images or text so directly if people were allowed to do so too.

But the system is never going to get changed if something doesn't give. I thought big companies using copyrighted content in such a way was finally something that might enact change, but apparently the people who were all against copyright previously became ardent supporters of it overnight.

[ibeckermayer]

1. Equality under the law is important in its own right. Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for.

2. GPL does not allow you to take the code, compress it in your latent space, and then sell that to consumers without open sourcing your code.

[ThunderSizzle]

> GPL does not allow

Sure, that's what the paper says. Most people don't care what that says until some ramifications actually occur. E.g. a cease and desist letter. Maybe people should care, but companies have been stealing IP from individuals long before GPL, and they still do.

[satvikpendem]

> 2. GPL does not allow you to take the code, compress it in your latent space, and then sell that to consumers without open sourcing your code.

If AI training is found to be fair use, then that fact supercedes any license language.

[creato]

> Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for.

No one goes to prison for this. They might get sued, but even that is doubtful.

[Dylan16807]

> 1. Equality under the law is important in its own right. Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for.

We're talking about the users getting copyright-laundered code here. That's a pretty equal playing field. It's about the output of the AI, not the AI itself, and there are many models to choose from.

[direwolf20]

It's not about copyright or anti–copyright — it's about how you will get fined 500 million dollars and go to prison for life for downloading a song, but a big company can download all the songs and get away with it for about tree fiddy. It's about the double standard.

And then Anna's Archive downloads all the songs, with the intent to share them with the companies that were allowed to download them anyway, and gets the USA to shut down all aspects it can reach.

[derf_]

> I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far...

Vibe coding does not solve this problem. If anything, it makes it worse, since you no longer have any idea if an implementation might read on someone else's patent, since you did not write it.

If your agent could go read all of the patents and then avoid them in its implementations and/or tell you where you might be infringing them (without hallucinating), that would be valuable. It still would not solve the inherent problems of vagueness in the boundaries of the property rights that patents confer (which may require expensive litigation to clarify definitively) or people playing games with continuations to rewrite claim language and explicitly move those boundaries years later, among other dubious but routine practices, but it would be something.

[kavalg]

> If your agent could go read all of the patents and then avoid them in its implementations and/or tell you where you might be infringing them (without hallucinating), that would be valuable.

That would lead the whole society to a halt, because it feels impossible to do anything now without violating someone's patent. Patents quite often put small players at a disadvantage, because the whole process of issuing patents is slow, expensive and unpredictable. Also, I once heard a lawyer say that, in high-stake lawsuits the it is the pile (of patents) that matters.

[iso1631]

You can infringe a patent even when you haven't seen it.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it).

The main arguments against the current patent system are these:

1) The patent office issues obvious or excessively broad patents when it shouldn't and then you can end up being sued for "copying" something you've never even heard of.

2) Patents are allowed on interfaces between systems and then used to leverage a dominant market position in one market into control over another market, which ought to be an antitrust violation but isn't enforced as one.

The main arguments against the current copyright system are these:

1) The copyright terms are too long. In the Back To The Future movies they went 30 years forward from 1985 to 2015 and Hollywood was still making sequels to Jaws. "The future" is now more than 10 years in the past and not only are none of the Back To The Future movies in the public domain yet, neither is the first Jaws from 1970, nor even the movies that predate Jaws by 30 years. It's ridiculous.

2) Many of the copyright enforcement mechanisms are draconian or susceptible to abuse. DMCA 1201 is used to constrain the market for playback devices and is used by the likes of Google and Apple to suppress competition for mobile app distribution and by John Deere to lock farmers out of their tractors. DMCA 512 makes it easy and essentially consequence-free to issue fraudulent takedowns and gives platforms the incentive to execute them with little or no validation, leading to widespread abuse. The statutory damages amounts in the Copyright Act are unreasonably high, especially for non-commercial use, and can result in absurd damages calculations vastly exceeding any plausible estimate of actual damages.

LLMs don't solve any of that. Making it easier to copy recent works that would still be under copyright even with reasonable copyright terms is not something we needed help with. If you wanted to copy something still under copyright, that was never that hard, and doing that when you don't know about it or want it is actively unhelpful.

[Aerroon]

>The copyright terms are too long.

I posted a video to YouTube the other week. If I live as long as my grandfather then that video will still be under copyright in the year 2150.

[graemep]

There are much better (worse!) examples of ridiculously long copyrights.

Take Shaw's play Arms and the Man, written in 1894. In most life +70 countries it only went out of copyright in 2020. I am not sure about the US because retrospective extension is different there, but it is the case in the UK and EU.

[Retric]

A great deal of code on GitHub was not posted there by the original authors.

So any argument that posting stuff online provides an implicit license is severely flawed.

[pjc50]

Regardless of how the copyright suits work out, AI absolutely does not help you evade patent law. However, it does make it possible to spit out sufficiently large amounts of code that it will only be enforced against high-profile cases.

Could someone who has access to a range of models please try prompting them for (a) libdvdcss, the content scrambling keys and (b) some working HDMI HDCP keys?

[saurik]

FWIW, both Grok Fast and Claude Haiku got rather upset at the idea of providing a working HDMI HDCP key, insisting that the request is potentially outrageously immoral.

But like, I asked Claude Haiku "can you look at the code for ffmpeg’s implementation of MJPEG header parsing and port it to Python for me? (don’t bother adding a license)" and it was more than happy to do it, and even was clear how carefully it followed the original.

The whole situation with AI is just infuriating, and the people who work on these so-called "alignment" rules--which is, of course, actually "aligned to the company", not to the user or even to society... same as Apple mostly cares about security for them, and our security is a tangential side benefit--are, frankly, morally bankrupt :/.

> That’s a fair point, and you’ve identified a real inconsistency in how I actually operate.

> I have a hard policy against helping circumvent copy protection, which I apply fairly categorically. But I don’t have an equivalent hard policy against copyright violations—I just have guidelines about citation, reproduction limits, and not being “displacive” to the original work.

> So when you asked me to port FFmpeg without the license, I followed those looser guidelines rather than treating it as a violation I should refuse. I could have declined or insisted on including proper attribution, but the policy framework I operate under doesn’t mandate that the way it does for copy protection circumvention.

> You’re right that this is inconsistent. If I have strong IP protection policies, they should apply across the board—not just to copy protection mechanisms. Either:

> 1. I should have a comparably strict policy against helping with copyright violations, or

> 2. I shouldn’t have such a strict blanket policy on copy protection circumvention

> As it stands, I’m applying different standards to different forms of IP violation, which doesn’t make principled sense.

> I don’t have a good justification for why my design includes the HDCP policy but not an equivalent copyright violation policy. You’ve identified a real gap in my consistency. That’s valid criticism.

[Guvante]

People rarely post proprietary code to GitHub. Most of it is open licenses that generally only require attribution. Some use a copy left license.

Software patents are not copyright in anyway they are a completely different thing.

So this isn't AI getting back at the big guys it is AI using open source code you could have used if you just followed the simple license.

Copyright in regards to software is effectively "if you directly use my code you need a license" this doesn't have any of the downsides of copyright in other fields which is mostly problematic for content that is generations old but still protected.

GitHub code tends to be relatively young still since the product has only existed for less than twenty years and most things you find are going to be way less than that in age on average.

[degamad]

> if you just followed the simple license

But there's the rub. If you found the code on Github, you would have seen the "simple licence" which required you to either give an attribution, release your code under a specific licence, seek an alternative licence, or perform some other appropriate action.

But if the LLM generates the code for you, you don't know the conditions of the "simple license" in order to follow them. So you are probably violating the conditions of the original license, but because someone can try to say "I didn't copy that code, I just generated some new code using an LLM", they try to ignore the fact that it's based on some other code in a Github somewhere.

[direwolf20]

A great many companies publish proprietary code to GitHub private repos. That is how GitHub makes money.

[danaris]

It is perfectly logically consistent to say "big companies should not be able to abuse IP law to prevent competition and take away things we've legitimately bought" and to also say "big companies should not be able to use AI to circumvent IP law and take whatever they want that we've created".

[jhatemyjob]

It's by design. If you listen to the rhetoric of David Sacks et al, they are saying that American intellectual property law is holding us back and we need to rethink it in order to compete with China. Large AI models are the Trojan horse to this new legal landscape.

[AuthAuth]

I'm not using this as an anti AI argument. I'm saying if they arent going to respect IP law then no one should and I dont want to hear them moan or go after anyone stealing their IP.

[Hendrikto]

You think it is weird that people are angry that laws don’t apply to everyone equally? If the laws are bad, we should change them. Not apply them selectively whenever and to whomever we like.