Comment by nradov
12 days ago
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.)