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."

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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".