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