Comment by keeda
12 days ago
Since you're here and on topic, a question that has been at the back of my mind because I feel that soon most software creators will be in this boat, with AI rapidly becoming able to clone software from observing behavior alone:
Are patents the only real IP protection left for software?
And would a patent (assuming this application had something patent-worthy to claim) help at all here? As in, in addition to sending a C&D maybe also including language about patent infringement would be more effective?
I know that patents are unpopular for many here (including you, IIRC!) but I think this question is extremely important, especially to anyone who wants to make a living purely off the software alone.
Remember: if no other moats or business models or funding models lend themselves naturally to the software in question, anything bolted on is pretty much already on the slippery slope to enshittification. A mechanism that encouraged people to compensate fairly for the value provided by software would be better for the Internet than what we've got going on today.
The only effective protection for software IP is hiding the logic on servers you control (SaaS). Anything released to execute on client hardware can be decompiled and cloned. This has always been the case but LLMs have made the issue more obvious.
there is no more software IP. ai does not need source: it can infer or deduce the logic or algos. and in the case of private software dont think it hasn't been sucked up too
Agreed, only I would rephrase it as, "hiding logic on servers is the best technical / non-IP protection for software" -- consider that IP largely exists to protect things that other means cannot!
But as sibling comment indicates, even that is no longer a guarantee. There are demonstrations and anecdotal accounts of reverse engineering entire features or even small applications, including the backend code, by pointing an LLM at the web UI: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/bla...
This is why I'm thinking that patents and other legal means are likely the only way forward to protect software that does not have a natural moat, like network effects or some huge data advantage. That is actually a huge amount of software.
My concern is that without proper protection software without such moats, this will create incentives for people building them to adopt less-than-ideal means of monetizing their work, e.g. the things that lead to enshittification.
Patents can be somewhat effective for vertical market software sold by companies operating in countries with effective rule of law. But for horizontal or consumer software the pirates and cloners can operate servers in other shithole countries beyond the reach of law enforcement. We'll probably see more political pressure to respond to that with widespread IP address blocks at national borders. Eventually every country may have some variant of "The Great Firewall of China". (I don't think that's a good thing, just stating that it's likely to become more prevalent.)
To be fair, Open Source has always been a threat to proprietary software. To be concrete, and I don't care what anyone else says, I will always prefer Krita to PhotoShop (because it is free, open, _and_ better, IMHO).
LLMs just make it possible to get a minimum-viable-clone very quickly (whether it is as good as a traditional open-source re-implementation, is a different matter).
The only software that I am happy to pay for is: Mathematica, and a handful of video games.
A big problem with patents is that they are designed to deprive other people of the right to practice an idea. Even if all software was automatically patented (somehow), you almost certainly would not be able to afford to defend your patents. And even if patent-defense-costs became socialized, you would still have to ensure that you are practicing fewer _external_ patents than _internal_ patents (otherwise, your royalty costs will exceed your royalty profits).
Edison industrialized the creation of patents (e.g. he would hire thousands of bright young graduates, and have them invent things, and then patent them in his own name). I once read a book that said Thomas Edison was the "greatest inventor" because he held thousands of patents. The reality is that he invented a tiny fraction of those patents, and he merely put his name on the work of other people.
My point is, if the auto-software-patent scenario becomes true, then wealthy people/organizations/oligopolies will create a patent-factory, made of either people, LLMs, or (more likely) both.
In a sense, OpenAI is already doing this for mathematical theorems (they use both LLMs _and_ a team of world-class mathematicians, much like Edison did in his day).
When I was growing up, patents were explained to us (children) as a means to protect the brilliant, solitary, but underfunded inventor -- a way to even the playing field. This has not been true for the entirety of my lifetime (36 years now), and has probably been untrue for the last century, at least.
The laws are not there to protect you and your interests, but rather they are there to protect the interests of the oligopolists (any protections you receive are _downstream_ of that).
If you want protections, you need to be sitting on top of a giant money-faucet. If you are already sitting on the money-faucet, then you probably don't strictly _need_ the protections.
Making money off of software has been a disappointing business for a while now (e.g. when I started out in the industry, the dominant business model was: turn a free Unix tool into a SaaS, and charge the innocent computer-user extortionary rents, or feed them ads, or both). The current business model is: sell plagiarism as a service.
The only reason that people talk about "moats" is because rent and food and healthcare are not free. The LLM companies are in the business of draining every moat they can find, and use the water to fill their own moat. Relying on the law to protect your moat for you is a fantasy, because every successful company finds a way to avoid or externalize the consequences of breaking the law.
Furthermore, the laws get changed whenever they become inconvenient. For example, the draft-age-limit was 35. When the Iran War started, I was relieved that I would become undraftable in less than a year. But a few months ago, they raised the limit to 42.
My rhetorical question to you (plural) is: if the establishment can change the rules, whenever they deem them inconvenient, why should we not _break_ the rules, whenever _we_ deem them inconvenient?