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There's also the questionable copyright/IP angle. As an analogy, can you imagine being a startup that hired a developer, and months later finding out the bulk
by neilv 1y ago
There's also the questionable copyright/IP angle.
As an analogy, can you imagine being a startup that hired a developer, and months later finding out the bulk of the new Web app they "coded" for you was actually copy&pasted open source code, loosely obfuscated, which they were passing it off as something they developed, and to which the company had IP rights?
You'd immediately convene the cofounders and a lawyer, about how to make this have never happened.
First you realize that you need to hand the lawyer the evidence (against the employee), and otherwise remove all traces of that code and activity from the company.
Simultaneously, you need to get real developers started rushing to rewrite everything without obvious IP taint.
Then one of you will delicately ask whether firing and legal action against the employee is sufficient, or whether the employee needs to sleep with the fishes to keep them quiet.
The lawyer will say this kind of situation isn't within the scope of their practice, but here's the number of a person they refer to only as 'the specialist'.
Soon, not only are you losing the startup, and the LLC is being pierced to go after your personal assets, but you're also personally going to prison. Because you were also too cheap to pay the professional fee for 'the specialist', and you asked ChatGPT to make the employee have a freak industrial shredder accident.
All this because you tried to cheap out, and spend $20 or $200 on getting some kind of code to appear in your repo, while pretending you didn't know where it came from.
- falcor84 1y agoThat's a fantastic piece of short fiction, but it is fiction. In practice though, I've seen so many copy&pasted unsourced open source snippets in proprietary code that I've lost all ability to be surprised by it, and I can't think of any one time where the company was sued about that, let alone anyone facing any personal repercussions, not even those junior devs. And if anything, by being "lossy encyclopedias" rather than copy-pasters, LLMs significantly reduce this ostensible legal liability. Oh, and then you have the actual tech giants offering legal commitment to protect you against any copyright claims: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot-copyright-commitment-ai-legal-concerns/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot... https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/protecting-customers-with-generative-ai-indemnification?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/p...
- neilv 1y agoThe festival of pillaging open source is suddenly so ubiquitous, and protected by deep-pocketed exploiters selling pillaging shovels, that everyone else is just going to try to get their share of the loot? You might be right, but the point needs to be made.
- InCom-0 1y agoYou can copy paste unsourced open source snippets just fine, ain't nothing wrong with that (usually) It is another story whether anyone should do that for other reasons having nothing to do with open source or licensing.
- neilv 1y agoThough one recent related scandal was: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/30/y-combinator-is-being-criticized-after-it-backed-an-ai-startup-that-admits-it-basically-cloned-another-ai-startup/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/30/y-combinator-is-being-crit...
- Ekaros 1y agoOn other side I wonder how long until we get fist IP theft case. And in discovery all the logs with all chatbots are requested. And the end result is that well it was mostly AI produced so no copy right protection so no damages...
- neilv 1y agoInteresting. I wonder whether investors and M&A care. (I'm thinking "data room" due diligence over whether you own the IP.) Maybe investors will care, but for now they stand to make more money from "AI" gold rush startups, and don't want to be a wet blanket on "AI" at all by bringing up concerns.