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Comment by sarchertech

8 hours ago

How could you do that though? You can’t guarantee that there aren’t chunks of copied code that infringes.

But the responsible party is still the human who added the code. Not the tool that helped do so.

  • The practical concern of Linux developers regarding responsibility is not being able to ban the author, it's that the author should take ongoing care for his contribution.

  • That's not going to shield the Linux organization.

    • A DCO bearing a claim of original authorship (or assertion of other permitted use) isn't going to shield them entirely, but it can mitigate liability and damages.

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  • In a court case the responsibility party very well could be the Linux foundation because this is a foreseeable consequence of allowing AI contributions. There’s no reasonable way for a human to make such a guarantee while using AI generated code.

    • It’s not about the mechanism: responsibility is a social construct, it works the way people say that it works. If we all agree that a human can agree to bear the responsibility for AI outputs, and face any consequences resulting from those outputs, then that’s the whole shebang.

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    • Because contributions to Linux are meticulously attributed to, and remain property of, their authors, those authors bear ultimate responsibility. If Fred Foobar sends patches to the kernel that, as it turns out, contain copyrighted code, then provided upstream maintainers did reasonable due diligence the court will go after Fred Foobar for damages, and quite likely demand that the kernel organization no longer distribute copies of the kernel with Fred's code in it.

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