Comment by cogman10
10 hours ago
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.
I'm fully aware of lots of times powerful companies have used the courts to protect their business. My point is basically all of the powerful companies are elbow deep in LLMs to the extent of some sort of mutually assured destruction if they were to start court cases like this.
LLMs have been firing out a lot of code for a year or 2 now at least, so I would have thought we'd start seeing some court cases by now?
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The lack of modern small airplane designs, especially engines, is the extensive and thus expensive certification process. Most of what is a "new" airplane usually is derived from a very old, grandfathered design.
The only real innovation for small planes is in the electric flight area - when you gotta do a full certification anyway as you're piloting an entirely new drivetrain, you can financially afford to be much more innovative on other parts of the design.
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.
Because if it's feasible for any company with a war chest to start a court case about a competitor maybe having a matching line of code to theirs via an LLM, then basically every single company with a warchest would be at war with eachother, because they're all using LLMs.
Business and code production would grind to a halt whilst basically every big tech company shares it's entire codebase with every other tech company for discovery. It's basically MAD.
And if it was feasible, given we've had a couple of years of all the big tech companies heavily using LLMs, there should be some notable court cases by now, surely?
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