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Comment by Quarrel | Hacker News Reader

This is a terrible argument, just because of the way the legal system works.

If MegaCorp has massive $$$$, but everyone else has small $, then MegaCorp can sue anyone else for using "their" code, that was supposedly generated by an LLM. Most of the time, it won't even get to court. The repo, the program, the whatever-they-want will get taken down way before that.

Courts don't work by saying, "oh, but everyone is doing it! Not much we can do now."

Someone brings a case and they, very laboriously, start to address it on its merits. Even before that, costs are accumulating on both sides.

Copyright trolls are mostly not MegaCorps, but they are abusers of the legal system. They won't target Google, but you, with your repo that does something that minorly annoys them? You are fair game.

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> Courts don't work by saying, "oh, but everyone is doing it! Not much we can do now."

No, but they do recognise when their case registrations are filling up in a way that they cannot possibly process and make adjustments. Courts do not have an infinite capacity.

There's a really simple solution that you may not have considered:

1) don't put your vibe-coded source code in a public git repo, keep it in a local one, with y'know, authentication in front of it;

2) regularly ask your agents to review the code for potential copyright infringements if you either want to release the source or compiled code to the public at any point.

As long as you've followed best practices, I can't see why this is really going to become an issue. Most copyright infringements need to start with Cease & Desist anyway or they'll be thrown out of court. The alleged offender has to be given the opportunity to make good.

So "Claude, we received a C&D for this section of code you stole from https://.../ , you need to make a unique implementation that does not breach their copyright".

You will be surprised how easily this can be resolved.

Just to push the point further I was making about the courts, I came upon this article a couple hours later: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5lxg2l0lqo

In the US you can't sue without having obtained or applied for a registration. If the registration does not grant, you cannot sue. You cannot get a registration for code developed by AI.

> Courts don't work by saying, "oh, but everyone is doing it! Not much we can do now."

They kind of do. If you fail to bring legal action to guard your intellectual property, and there’s a pattern of you not guarding it, then in future cases this can be used against you when determining damages etc. Weakens your case.

Downvoting won’t make it untrue lol.

This is only true of trademarks, not copyrights (which was the discussion here).

Trademarks can become 'generic' if you don't defend them. But JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter, whether she sues fanfic authors or not, and can selectively enforce her copyright as she likes.

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