This is essentially like a retail store saying the supplier is responsible for eliminating all traces of THC from their hemp when they know that isn’t a reasonable request to make.
It’s a foreseeable consequence. You don’t get to grant yourself immunity from liability like this.
If Linux were to contain 3rd party copyrighted code the legal entity at risk of being sued would be... Linux users, which given how widely deployed Linux is is basically everyone on Earth, and all large companies.
Linux development is funded by large companies with big legal departments. It's safe to say that nobody is going to be picking this legal fight any time soon.
However, there is no legal precedent that says that because contributors sign a DCO and retain copyright, the Linux Foundation is not liable. The entire concept is unproven.
Large company legal departments aren’t a shield against this kind of thing. Patent trolls routinely go after huge companies and smaller companies routinely sue much larger ones over copyright infringement.
2. Infringement in closed source code isn’t as likely to be discovered
3. OpenAI and Anthropic enterprise agreements agree to indemnify (pay for damages essentially) companies for copyright issues.
There has to be an analogy to music or something here - except that code is even less copyrightable than melodies.
Yes, there might be some specific algorithms that are patented, but the average programmer won't be implementing any of those from scratch, they'll use libraries anyway.
Code being copyrightable is the entire basis for open source licenses.
What part of a bog-standard HTTP API can be copyrighted? Parsing the POST request or processing it or shoving it to storage? I'm genuinely confused here and not just being an ass.
There are unique algorithms for things like media compression etc, I understand copyrighting those.
But for the vast majority of software, is there any realistic threat of hitting any copyrighted code that's so unique it has been copyrighted and can be determined as such? There are only so many ways you can do a specific common thing.
I kinda think of it like music, without ever hearing a specific song you might hit the same chord progressions by accident because in reality there are only so many combinations you can make with notes that sound good.
Copyright is the literal expression of the idea. The identifier names, how the functions are broken up, which libraries are used etc…
Given more than a dozen lines or so, 2 people aren’t going to write the exact same code to solve the same problem. It might be equivalent code, but it’s not going to be the exact same.
def copyright_warning(times) do
for _ <- 1..times do
IO.puts("hey man this code is copyrighted. Don't copy it pretty please")
end
end
If you copy that you are infringing.
You could do something similar if you wanted. But if you copy that directly, you are infringing on my copyright.
Especially in languages like Go where there's an Official Formatter that makes all code look identical as much as possible?
There are a multitude of reasons why I'm not a lawyer and vague crap like this is a big part :D
Courts would look at the preponderance of the evidence in a civil trial.
Did you have access to my code? Is the copy long enough that it’s statistically very unlikely that could have came up with it exactly on your own?
They’ll look at things like did you copy misspellings in variable names. Did you copy the missing period at the end of the output string etc…
I've worked at a company that was asked as part of a merger to scan for code copied from open source. That ended up being a major issue for the merger. People had copied various C headers around in odd places, and indeed stolen an odd bit of telnet code. We had to go clean it up.
Linus makes $1.5 million per year from the Linux foundation. And the foundation itself pulls in $300 million a year in revenue.
They are directly benefiting from contributors and if they cause harm through their actions there’s a good chance they’ll be held liable.
I don't even think this is an appropriate analogy worth answering. Goodwill are selling products to consumers in a direct exchange of money-for-goods.
No one is buying Linux.
And any company selling a device or software the includes the Linux code should be liable then.
And they are according to the law btw. Along with anyone distributing the software which includes the owner of the Linux repositories.
It’s no worse than non-AI assisted code.
I could easily copy-paste proprietary code, sign my name that it’s not and that it complies with the GPL and submit it.
At the end of the day, it just comes down to a lying human.
But a human just using an LLM to generate code will do it accidentally. The difference is that regurgitation of training text is a documented failure mode of LLMs.
And there’s no way for the human using it to be aware it’s happening.
If you can’t be sure, don’t sign.
In life that is a very strong indicator you should not do <thing>
That has no impact on what you should do with your life.