Comment by bko
1 day ago
This is all well and good as an intellectual exercise, but in real life none of this matters. Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat. I've written the same chunks of code for a number of employers as has every engineer. We've all taken chunks from stack overflow and other places without carefully considering attribution.
This comes up in a few places as a kind of vindictive battle. One example is Oracle suing Google for too closely mimicking their API in Android. Here is an example:
> private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" + toIndex + ")");
if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}
And it was deemed fair use by the Supreme Court. Other times high frequency hedge funds sued exiting employees, sometimes successfully. In America, anyone can sue you for any reason, so sure, you'll have Ellison take a feud up with Page and Brin all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In 99.9% of instances none of this matter. Sure there's the technical letter of the law but in practice, and especially now, none of this matters.
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat.
You'd be surprised! Among non-software management types, they often think of the code as extremely valuable IP and a trade secret. I'm a CTO and I've made comments before to non/less technical peers about how the code (generally speaking) isn't that big of a secret, and I routinely get shocked expressions. In one case the company almost passed on a big contract because it required disclosure of the source code (with an NDA). When I told them that was a silly reason and explained why, they got it, but the old way of thinking still permeates and is a hard habit to break.
Edit: Fixed errant copy pasta error. Glad that wasn't a password :-)
Totally agreed.
I work in M&A. Nearly every lawyer, accountant, investor, and software business owner thinks their code is solely valuable and a trade secret. I find it hilarious and try to be as diplomatic as possible about why it's not. They also willfully will give their client list to a potential acquirer but get super cagey they moment a third party provider asks for their code to be scanned.
This argument easily gets shut down when I asked why, Twitch, a $1B business didn't crater to their competition when their full codebase was leaked.
You're right, I guess maybe I mean in any serious actionable way. Senior, non technical people leave plenty of money on the table by thinking they're protecting something valuable or they have some kind of secret sauce. It's all silly is what I meant to say, and digging into the technicalities of whether your code is truly copyrightable is kind of pointless. It's all vibes.
The place where it concretely matters is M&A due diligence. Acquirers are now routinely asking about AI tool usage in development and running license scans as a condition of closing. A codebase that cannot demonstrate human authorship over its core IP, or that contains GPL contamination, creates a representation and warranty problem in the purchase agreement. For most companies day to day you are right. For the companies that get acquired or raise institutional capital, the question becomes very concrete very quickly.
5 replies →
Maybe LLM coding agents change the equation by making it much easier to adapt and use foreign and probably incomplete code. Getting you closer to competing with the original authors in a shorter amount of time than generating new code from scratch.
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
Every open source license is built on the premise that code is copyrightable.
No.
It is based on the premise that if the proprietary licenses are valid, then also the open source licenses are valid.
So what is held as true is only the implication stated above and not the truth value of the claims that either kind of licenses are valid.
If the proprietary licenses are not valid, then it does not matter that also the open source licenses are not valid.
The open source licenses are intended as defenses against the people who would otherwise attempt to claim ownership of that code and apply a proprietary license to the code, i.e. exactly what now Anthropic and the like have done, together with their corporate customers.
Of course, if it is accepted that the code generated by an AI coding assistant is not copyrightable, then using it would not really be a violation of the original open source licenses. The problem is that even if this principle is the one accepted legally, at least for now, both Anthropic and their corporate customers appear to assume that they own the copyright for this code that should have been either non-copyrightable or governed by the original licenses of the code used for training.
Yes.
“ Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.”
The copyright assertion is the very first line of the MIT license, and the right to copy the code is granted. Clearly a reasonable person would affirm that that license (and all similar licenses) are based on a premise that code can be copyrighted.
> It is based on the premise that if the proprietary licenses are valid, then also the open source licenses are valid.
>If the proprietary licenses are not valid, then it does not matter that also the open source licenses are not valid.
That’s not true. Imagine a world where proprietary licenses are made invalid.
In such a world a company could take open source code compile it and distribute it (or build a SaaS) without the source code.
Even if you only focus on licenses that don’t prohibit this, most of those licenses require attribution.
So even in a world where propriety licenses were invalid the majority of open source licenses would still have a purpose.
You’re attempting to split hairs to argue on a very subtle technicality, but you’re not even technically right.
2 replies →
Nobody ever talks about convergence.
You, right now, are taking about convergence.
If there is no artwork, there can be no copyright. If every character of the code to write is basically predetermined by the APIs you need to call, there is no artwork and no copyright.
Build a novel new API, and you'll be protected though.
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
Then why does reverse engineered code need to be a clean room implementation?
Ask any emulator developer or the developers of ReactOS
https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21740
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
I think this is an unusual opinion.
Code may not be copyrightable in as small chunks as you put there, but in terms of larger pieces I think companies and individuals very often labour under the belief that code is intellectual property under copyright law.
If code isn't copyrightable, from where comes the GPL?
And why does anyone care if (for instance) some Microsoft code might have accidentally ended up in ReactOS, causing that project to need to go into a locked-down review mode for months or years? For that matter why do employers assert that they own the copyright in contracts?
I think it's the opposite - almost everyone thinks their code is copyrightable, outside of APIs and interop stuff, or things so simple as to be trivial.
Why were the HFT firms suing employees?