• 157 Posts
  • 204 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle



  • Can I legally reverse engineer AI generated software?

    If you have the source, why would you need to?

    Can you even put terms and conditions on this supposed public domain copyright free compiled software product?

    You can put terms on anything, but you can’t protect the underlying asset if someone breaks your terms. Think of the code produced by Grsecruity that they put behind a paywall – people were free to release the code (since it was licensed as open source as a derivative work), but obviously Grsecruity was able to discontinue their agreement with their clients who would do so.

    Is the compiled version even different than the raw AI generated source code in its ability to be licensed?

    People aren’t generally licensing compiled binaries as open source, since you can’t produce derivative works from them. But I think that if there is no copyright protection for the work, compiling it doesn’t change the copyrightability. Curious what you think.

    What rights does one have to AI generated code? Be it compiled or source. It’s surely not just communal.

    Why is that surely the case? It is public domain - that is the most “communal” you can get for copyright.




  • Honestly, if AI destroys copyright, it’s the best thing it can do.

    I have seen this being said, but I really don’t understand it. Just because copyright can be abused doesn’t mean (to me) that we ought to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    If copyright no longer exists, what incentive do people have to share copyleft code at all? It clearly would no longer exist, so can you help me understand how both copyright can be dead and open source exist? Or are you simply accepting that rather than copyright, we are using trade secrets (like the KFC chicken recipe) to protect works?


  • How does this apply to software made by, say, Anthropic? They proudly say Claude Code is written by AI. If it can’t be copywritten, or licensed, then it’s just a matter of figuring out how to acquire a copy of the source code, and you could do whatever with it. Right?

    If you were on Mastodon last week when the Claude source code was released (by Claude, accidentally), people were joking about how Anthropic was trying to use the DMCA to get the source removed from websites – even though clearly, copyrights don’t apply, since the code is clearly in the public domain.

    If the LLM wrote the code, it is uncopyrightable.