alt Hacker NewsRegardless 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?
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.