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.
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.
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.
Sure we could change the law. It would be a stupid change to allow individuals, organizations, and companies to completely shield themselves from the consequences of risky behaviors (more than we already do) simply by assigning all liability to a fall guy.
Responsibility is an objective fact, not just some arbitrary social convention. What we can agree or disagree about is where it rests, but that's a matter of inference, an inference can be more or less correct. We might assign certain people certain responsibilities before the fact, but that's to charge them with the care of some good, not to blame them for things before they were charged with their care.
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.
Anyone distributing infringing material can be liable, and it’s unlikely that this technicality will actually would shield anyone.
Anyone who thinks they have a strong infringement case isn’t going to stop at the guy who authored the code, they’re going to go after anyone with deep pockets with a good chance of winning.
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.
Can it though? As far as I know this hasn’t been tested.
1 reply →
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.
Sure we could change the law. It would be a stupid change to allow individuals, organizations, and companies to completely shield themselves from the consequences of risky behaviors (more than we already do) simply by assigning all liability to a fall guy.
17 replies →
Responsibility is an objective fact, not just some arbitrary social convention. What we can agree or disagree about is where it rests, but that's a matter of inference, an inference can be more or less correct. We might assign certain people certain responsibilities before the fact, but that's to charge them with the care of some good, not to blame them for things before they were charged with their care.
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.
Anyone distributing infringing material can be liable, and it’s unlikely that this technicality will actually would shield anyone.
Anyone who thinks they have a strong infringement case isn’t going to stop at the guy who authored the code, they’re going to go after anyone with deep pockets with a good chance of winning.