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Comment by leonidasrup | Hacker News Reader

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leonidasrup

LLMs can output near-exact segments of copyrighted code used for training.

https://arxiv.org/html/2408.02487v3

I wonder how would Microsoft react if someone would synthesize a code solution based on Windows source code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative

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I guess you're not writing code much or haven't done much so as your professional career?

My argument is if AI companies are ignoring copyright law and looking at all training data as commons, then we should look at LLM output as something that is not protected by copyright law.

Of course I'm a bit naive here, because we are talking about the richest companies in the world with lot of money to spend on lobbying (or bribes).

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/23/trump-ai-...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98r8r7dz5no

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons

I wanted to understand your background first because what you initially said is a very oversimplified view of LLM mechanics, and generally not quite the way how software is in practice written. Since you didn't answer that question, I will assume that you're not a SWE by a call. To give you an example of what I am trying to convey is: imagine a data-intensive workload hitting your storage/database/kernel implementation, and it's painfully slow, your customers are not happy. Then you as engineer sit down, spend days profiling and understanding the code, researching about existing algorithmic solutions to the same or similar issues found in the wild, you read some open-source implementations of viable approaches, you ditch some, some you take, you also read books, articles, other peoples experiences etc. And finally you end up, let's put it bluntly, with some sharded data structure by which you solve the bottleneck. It's not novel, the technique is so common and is already implemented across many many different products in slightly different flavors so I am wondering why do you think this is not a copyright breach but the LLM, which does more or less the same thing, is?

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