Comment by cromka
13 hours ago
I find it extremely ironic that big corp openly steals IP en masse to build their models but hackers are still concerned about using same models for their reverse engineering work.
I think at this point the hacking community needs to grow some balls.
It's because it doesn't matter how copyrighted material ends up in a project. If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects.
The fact is, open source has much more liability than closed source software does. If copyrighted material ends up inside a private code base it'll be nearly impossible for the owner to discover that and sue.
> If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects.
Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share?
I really don't see how this issue is going to be feasible for courtrooms to deal with in a world where big tech are bragging about large percentages of all their code being produced by LLMs.
In the 90s aircraft manufacturers basically stopped whole segments of the market (anything smaller than a piston twin) due to litigation. I wouldn't be horribly surprised to find we spend the next 10 years fighting about this stuff in court.
3 replies →
Why wouldn't it be feasible for Apple, with an unlimited war chest, to go after Asahi? I am not saying they will, but it is certainly possible for them.
4 replies →
Agree. Especially since even a tainted GPU driver (tainted as in, used former Apple Engineer knowledge) is usefull as we just throw another LLM onto it and tell it "rewrite in rust" and get an untainted version of it (at least that is the current judicial state, and the bigtech argues in this direction).
It's not ironic, it's the flipside of exactly the same reason. Bigcorps can steal with impunity because they have unlimited money to pay expensive lawyers. FOSS projects do not, so they cannot.
No judge I’ve ever met gave a damn how much a party spent on legal resources. With rare exceptions, they care a great deal about achieving justice, and often bend over backwards to help indigent parties avoid prejudicing themselves. Keep in mind that there are no indigent parties in this debate; both major IP rights holders and the frontier AI companies are well capitalized.
(I worked in a federal district court for a while.)
The problem is that money buys lawyers, and you need those to get justice. If the other side spends more, you are likely to lose.
2 replies →
The tiniest bit of contamination can get a whole project shut down and the creators heavily fined if the lawyers are aggressive enough. It's not worth the risk to a project like Asahi. Generally the law is going to side with whomever has the most lawyers.
none of this is incorrect, however, how freaking sad is it that in order to get any OS that's not locked down and owned by Apple on the hardware we buy and supposedly own, someone (together with whole open source organizations) has to risk utter financial ruin.
I hate the new system of no ownership and closed everything.
Excited to see what you contribute to open source against one of the richest and most litigious companies in the world.
Nothing. I hope those companies go bankrupt, I'm not underwriting their failure to support their customers with my time and effort.
Cool. Excited to see you on the pitch next time you comment on a football game.
It may not just be about IP but also code quality. As an example, TFA calls the user mode portion "slop" in need of cleanup.