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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Software patents may be what saves the field. Currently copyright as an IP protection for software has been rendered near meaningless by AI. If I can get one AI to reverse engineer Photoshop, and another to implement the produced spec, I have a copyright-clean version of Photoshop.

Patents protect the idea of a particular program. And in the post-AI world, it's the idea that holds the value, not the implementation. Implementations are cheap now.

Another alternative to preventing the entire software market from collapsing is to revive the Whelan v. Jaslow copyright standard, under which the abstract "structure, sequence, and organization" of a program is eligible for copyright. But programmers would bristle at that almost as much as robust patent protection for software. Until, that is, the money comes in with mouths to feed and mortgages to pay...

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You don't know what code the A.I has been trained on. It may very well be reproducing actual Copyrighted material it has been trained on.

This is the major reason why most large open-source projects are banning big code contributions made with A.I

Most large open-source projects banning AI contributions have been doing it for social and technical reasons, not legal.

As for the copyright infringement angle, it’s well and truly too late for that to be a meaningful problem, socially and politically. It’s easily in “too big to fail” territory now—any striking down of the “fair use” exemption claim would kill the entire industry dead, because every one of them would have to throw away all their models and synthetic data and start again, and that’s geopolitically untenable. They moved too fast for judiciary to regulate them, and I think the window of opportunity for legislature to regulate them closed no later than 2024.

You are wrong about why open-source projects are banning AI contributions. While vibe-coded slop is obviously a pain, many are banning even their own well-known contributors from using A.I to write large parts of code due to legal concerns.

I'm sure the patent/copyright trolls care a lot about the "industry." It is still the early days but eventually they will come on knocking.

Of those that have banned it outright, I think I have seen at least as many say it’s about maintainability and social reasons as legal.

> If I can get one AI to reverse engineer Photoshop, and another to implement the produced spec, I have a copyright-clean version of Photoshop.

You won't get this, otherwise we had tons of LLM written photoshop alternatives already. And if it would work, that would be a good thing.

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