Comment by themafia
4 hours ago
> I can already hear the cries of protest from other engineers who (like me) are clutching onto their hard-won knowledge.
You mean the knowledge that Claude has stolen from all of us and regurgitated into your projects without any copyright attributions?
> But I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand
That feeling is mutual.
> You mean the knowledge that Claude has stolen from all of us and regurgitated into your projects without any copyright attributions?
You can't, and shouldn't be able to, copyright and hoard "knowledge".
I did not suggest that; however, the law is clear. If I use my knowledge to produce code, under a specific license, then you take that code, and reproduce it without the license, you have broken the law.
You can twist this around as much as you like but there are several studies showing that LLMs and and will happily reproduce content from their training data.
> If I use my knowledge to produce code, under a specific license, then you take that code, and reproduce it without the license, you have broken the law.
Correct. But if read your code, produce a detailed specification of that code, and then give that code to another team (that has never seen your code) and they create a similar product then they haven't broken the law.
LLMs reproducing exact content from their training data is symptom of overfitting and is an error that needs correcting. Memorizing specific training data means that it is not generalizing enough.
We did the same as devopers before Claude. We would copy paste from stack overflow. Now this process is heavily automated.
> Now this process is heavily automated.
And comes with a price tag paid to people who neither own nor generated that content. You don't think that shifts the ethical boundaries _significantly_?
...from answers that were publicly shared without license. It's not the same thing, even though every LOVES to make this argument.
Also: Over the past 20 years, I could count the number of times on one hand that I was been able to get away with out-right copy/paste from SO.
Stackoverflow code has a license (not per post, but a blanket one depending on which year - https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing it's mostly CC BY-SA.) I've written corporate policies that emphasize that you can learn from SO answers, but (as you point out) they basically never fit exactly - and you should include a link to the original so when the next Ubuntu LTS breaks your clever hack, we can see if someone has already posted a fix :-)