I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark. [LWN.net]

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 15:23 UTC (Thu) by koverstreet (subscriber, #4296)
Parent article: Vibe-coded ext4 for OpenBSD

The whole point of free software, way back, was so we could stop fretting over who has the rights to what and just read and work on each other's code. This obsession with copyrights between different free software ecosystems - who put the lawyers in charge?

Is anyone asking the obvious question? Is the code any good?

Skimming through it, it looks decent - if you like C written in a style 25 years ago; it is very reminiscent of ext* code. The data structures are not terribly clear, there's no real separation of concerns between higher level algorithms and the low level data structures.

We can do far better today.

The bigger concern with LLMs writing code is maintainability and refactoring. Claude has a massive blind spot when it comes to refactoring and cleaning things up as you go; Anthropic has tuned it very heavily for "just get something working autonomously (without any concern for what comes after)", which means that in practice the first version will look pretty good - but then if you're too hands off with continued development it will rapidly go off the rails.

It understands on a conceptual level structural duplication and how to fix any sort of code smell you might point out to it, but you have to keep a tight hold on the reins or it'll insist "nah, this is clean code, everything is fiiiiiiine". Amusingly, Qwen3.5-27b is far better at spotting structural issues and seems to have better taste in design.

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I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 16:40 UTC (Thu) by bertschingert (subscriber, #160729) [Link] (14 responses)

> The bigger concern with LLMs writing code is maintainability and refactoring.

Not to mention the more fundamental question of whether writing new code is the right way to solve a problem. This snippet from the conversation seems pretty important:

On Mon, Mar 23, 2026 at 08:32:43AM +0000, Stuart Henderson wrote:
> On 2026/03/23 03:45, Thomas de Grivel wrote:
> > I did check everything and it did look like ext2fs code with minor
> > modifications that I fully understand to support ext4 extents and
> > checksums it's not that big of a deal : ext4 is just ext2 with 64 bit,
> > different checksums and extents tree walking.
>
> Why standalone rather than done as diffs to ext2fs?

If a tool makes it extremely easy to generate lots of code, then people will tend to solve problems by generating lots of code. I already see this with my coworkers writing multi-thousand-line programs to do something that could be done with a short bash script combining existing tools. As a sysadmin, every new program I have to read, understand, and maintain is another burden.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 21:45 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (3 responses)

> If a tool makes it extremely easy to generate lots of code, then people will tend to solve problems by generating lots of code. I already see this with my coworkers writing multi-thousand-line programs to do something that could be done with a short bash script combining existing tools. As a sysadmin, every new program I have to read, understand, and maintain is another burden.

Exactly. I start to receive LLM-generated patches that are the equivalent of the coreutils maintainers receiving a patch labelled "cp: add --url option to copy remote files, like cp --url https://lwn.net/ lwn.html", the end result being that every software will blow up to include a unmaintainable and barely working reimplementation of every other, with both an editor AND a MTA.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 22:43 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Haven't you forgotten a complete functional copy of emacsOS? :-)

Cheers,
Wol

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 28, 2026 0:00 UTC (Sat) by vmanis (subscriber, #163384) [Link] (1 responses)

And, per Greenspun, an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 1, 2026 18:47 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

Ah, the good ol' AIBS-Common Lisp!

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 31, 2026 18:05 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (9 responses)

This.

In just a few decades, we went from "code-reuse is hard" to "code-reuse is too easy and insecure" https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3344149. But fighting against duplication to reduce high maintenance costs was a constant concern the whole time.

So today's newest trend is... back to massive duplication! Everyone's is re-inventing "20 years of work in 20 hours" but... who is going to debug and fix these huge amounts of code? Getting in someone else's head to debug their code is hard enough, good luck debugging code generated by copy/paste on steroids. Human bugs follow certain patterns (which LLMs are great at spotting, now _that_ is a great use case) but I bet LLM-generated bugs are much less predictable.

Assuming LLMs are able to help with the debugging and fixing too, how's that more efficient and economical than good old code re-use?

===> Who needs that much code? <====

I just don't get it. Not so long ago I read somewhere some devops joke that went something like "I don't write production code any more, just build scripts and yaml configuration files gluing existing code together." What happened since?

Granted, there are some "throw-away" / "once-off" use cases where all this duplication and generated code look useful: prototyping, learning, niche use cases with very few users,... But working around copyright and licences does not exactly look like technical progress. Also, once you have one GPL and one BSD implementation of ext4, how many more ext4 duplicates do you need?

I'm aware some boilerplate and duplication is required across drivers in the same OS. That looks like a good use case for automated generation but 1. it's again a fairly specific use case and 2. good driver frameworks should require very little boilerplate. Fix the driver framework instead.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 31, 2026 19:22 UTC (Tue) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

Duplicating the existing ext* code is exactly how it was done on Linux, too, initially.
This has nothing to do with AI.
It totally makes sense not to touch good working code, expecially if it's as critical as filesystem code.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 31, 2026 21:15 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> Duplicating the existing ext* code is exactly how it was done on Linux, too, initially [...] It totally makes sense not to touch good working code

Duplication == divergence which _is_ touching code.

"Copy/Paste" should really be spelled "Copy/Paste/Diverge". The 2-words form is missing the most important keyword and entire problem! I'm pretty sure that's why so many developers underestimate duplication issues: because language shapes the way we think. One of the most hilarious developer lies: "we will keep these duplicates in sync".

Branching and forking (the same thing) are "divergence under control" where merging (and rebasing) are the most important features: because they control _divergence_. Yet again, version control literature wrongly uses the term "branching" much more than "merging" - even when discussing merging.

Good luck keeping AI copy/paste/diverge under control. The copyright meltdown is the only good engineering news.

Note I have zero concern with other uses of AI, like AI code reviews for instance. These seem quite useful. Repeating "Did you run checkpatch / the tests / the linter / etc.?" to every new contributor (multiple times for some contributors...) is pre-existing and hard to avoid "duplication". Better let robots handle all those repetitive jobs. Great news. Finding bugs and vulnerabilities looks awesome too. Static analyzers had their chance! And they are not mutually exclusive.

But if _coding_ was a very repetitive job, then something was wrong in the language / framework / tooling in the first place and AI looks like a terrible workaround. "Code re-use" has been one of the top industry topics since software was invented. And it just vanished now that AI came on the scene? Stunning.

If coding involves a _small_, reasonable amount of repetition, then AI does not save much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 15, 2026 12:01 UTC (Wed) by QxDEADBEEF (guest, #175948) [Link] (6 responses)

I am pretty sure that you can direct the AI to not re-invent the wheel. I have been using AI tools to refactor code which is referred in multiple parts of the project and also I have been using AI to write small and well defined parts of a project. In both cases the AI tool used an existing function for both the refactoring and the new code implementation.

I see the current capabilities of AI tools like a junior inexperience developer who starts immediately with the implementation of the code and tries to re-invent all the well knows algorithms. I have seen common known sorting algorithms being implemented (of course wrongly) when instead a relevant library is available for use.

I believe we all have been in this situation when we were young developers.

So I believe the issue is not with the AI tools but with the instructions that we provide to them (e.g. prompts, skills, methodology) and the datasets that are trained.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 15, 2026 12:17 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

> So I believe the issue is not with the AI tools but with the instructions that we provide to them (e.g. prompts, skills, methodology) and the datasets that are trained.

So... "everyone is using/creating the tools wrong".

But it's totally not the tools themselves.

Sure.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 16, 2026 6:27 UTC (Thu) by QxDEADBEEF (guest, #175948) [Link]

I didn't used the correct wording.

"So I believe the issue is not only with the AI tools..."

My point is that like any other tool there is the correct way of using it and the wrong one.
Unfortunately in case of the AI tools the ambiguity of the user's input does not result to an error (e.g. like using a programming language wrongly which results to compiler error) but instead the AI makes guesses which results to wrong solutions.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 17, 2026 12:51 UTC (Fri) by cpitrat (subscriber, #116459) [Link] (2 responses)

> So... "everyone is using/creating the tools wrong".

It's not a very charitable reading of what was said.

Understandably, people are learning how to use AI properly (in the same way that people had to learn how to use programming languages properly). And at the same time, AI is evolving (in the same way that programming languages evolved, though less transparently: you don't have a new version of a language or a new language. At best you have a new model, but you also get changes you're bot aware if like prompt evolving, integration with tools changing, etc ...)

It will take time for clarifying what "using AI properly on task X" means and in the meantime, there are conflicting views and arguably, yes, nobody is using it correctly.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 17, 2026 13:21 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Understandably, people are learning how to use AI properly

Are they really, though?

They are using these LLM tools in the way their vendors suggest, ie "let the LLM do all the [hard] thinking/work/etc"

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 18, 2026 14:01 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Users, vendors, others,... I don't think "who is to blame" matters much in the grand scheme of things. Experimentation is inevitable and that's a good thing, it's the only way we learn:

https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford_trial_error_and_the...

Sure, some people involved with AI will come out richer (gold rush/shovels) while others will be poorer but that's hopefully just a "1st world problem".

I'm concerned about duplication and un-debuggable technical debt. And rising costs of energy at a time when we've reached "peak oil" and only decades away from "peak fossil/dictator fuel". But it doesn't really matter who's to blame because as long as something is more or less legal then there will always be some people doing it. There is no "People should just...". Every sentence beginning like this is very ignorant of human nature.

Taxes are a good tool in situations like this, often better than bans. For instance: make data centers pay more for electricity than households. Tariffs work too - unless you ask an LLM to write them :-D

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 15, 2026 13:39 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Thanks for sharing!

It's difficult to find good software productivity metrics. One metric we heard a lot - hopefully less often now[*] - is: number of new lines of code per day. I hope this was a "streetlight effect": looking at that particular metric because it's a simple metric despite it measuring the "wrong" thing. Yet I heard it from many managers and even from some "respected" developers... :-(

Using AI to automate refactorings or to find bugs sounds great, I'm all for it. Throw-away prototypes and some other uses are fine too. But every experienced software developer should cringe when hearing "Look at how many lines of code I can write per day!". It does not matter whether all this new code is reviewed by humans or AI or both: duplication is a massive waste, period.

[*] Claude Mythos seems to be affecting the focus and news cycle right now. Great.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 17:03 UTC (Thu) by Heretic_Blacksheep (guest, #169992) [Link] (15 responses)

Who put the lawyers in charge? Everyone in a given society. That is, the majority of any given democratic or republican system of governance. That's not a useful debate to have. When you live in a society, you have to live by that society's rules or face the consequences even if you disagree with the rules. As a traditionally persecuted minority in the country I live in, I'm quite familiar with the risks of opposition to The Rules.

The OpenBSD stance towards copyright is the only legally sane one currently. The output of LLMs is currently ambiguous at best in any given country. The output of pure LLM driven churn cannot be held by the LLM. Who actually does is as ambiguous as always with any mixed parentage work has been. The USL settlement is informative but not entirely on point. The monkey selfie lawsuit is also informative, but not fully on point either. Copyright law pivots on the *exact* details of any given case. That means any given situation depends on points of law specific to the very specific circumstances of the case. Even if the results of Bartz, et al. v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta say the situation on training data is mixed but not entirely on point for all end use. It depends on the legality of how the training data was originally obtained. But so far, no one has ventured to sue an *end user* for the output of an LLM to find out what liabilities the action of using an LLM to generate content - especially when someone openly admits to using an LLM as an end run around copyright, as in this case. That's immediately willful infringement should any ruling (or future law) go against the entities trying to get away with it. OpenBSD is right to be conservatively wary.

The point of free software wasn't to do away with copyright. It was effectively one of subversiveness, but free software actually *requires* copyright to make any attributive or forced contributory license function. If the goal of the ideal is put into play, then the actual goal of free software was never to subvert software licensing, it was to democratize the building of software and the free reign of the hacker ethic. That is the ethic of free inquiry into methods, practices, and procedures implied by the ownership of (and some would say the existence of) an object or group of objects. In short, it's to utilize the right to tinker on things one owns. That inquiry is not necessarily in full tension with copyright, and it's not opposed to the use of LLMs as a democratization vector. It's just that the current legal situation with the output of LLMs is unsettled so it's right to be wary of commercial LLM services where the output is en mass directly incorporated into existing or the whole part of a creative project. It's even more prudent to be wary of the output of anyone that expresses that their entire goal for the existence of a project is to break their understanding of the law! In effect, the sole purpose is to facilitate the piracy of software rather than to further the hacker ethic!

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 17:24 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> The USL settlement is informative but not entirely on point.

Hmm ... USL was basically "the emperor has no clothes, but there's no point rocking the boat".

Unix was written when (under US law) software was protected by trade secret, not copyright. AT&T removed all copyright notices, including debatably legal BSD copyrights, and very definitely legal UK and Aussie copyrights (the copyright status of software has never been questioned there, afaik).

Then when they sued the Regents for copyright violations, they slapped their own copyrights on everything including stuff they'd stripped other peoples' copyrights off of. Once the Regents convinced the Judge that AT&T copyrights had been slapped on the Regents' code, and worse AT&T had no idea what was their own code and what was other peoples', the wheels fell off the lawsuit, and for the sake of face, the Regents and AT&T agreed never to discuss the matter.

What USL, and Novell, and Caldera got when they bought the assets was a quitclaim - "whatever we have, you've now bought. Good luck proving what it was".

So I don't actually think that lawsuit says anything about LLM copyright (and in case you're wondering, the "secret" AT&T/Regents settlement is now in the Public Domain - it was posted to Groklaw.)

Cheers,
Wol

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 18:38 UTC (Thu) by Heretic_Blacksheep (guest, #169992) [Link]

I said it's informative, not entirely on point, which is effectively what you're expanding upon. In legal parlance that means some of its legal principle is applicable, not all of it. "On all points" means the legal principles have direct bearing on a case in substantially all details. "Not entirely on point" means there's a point or two that are influential, but has no direct bearing as in an all points precedence.

The applicable parts are those files that could hold copyright in an otherwise mixed and very muddled environment of pre-Copyright Act files (pre Copyright Act of 1976*) and those with muddled authorship that couldn't be clearly established but substantially or wholey written after 1976. The few files that were clearly copyright AT&T were removed and replaced in the BSD with clean replacements after the 1994 settlement. To imply that all of Unix was under trade secret rather than copyright law is not true since Unix (both AT&T derived and Berkeley derived) clearly evolved after 1976. For example, Unix System V was released in 1983 and would very clearly have been largely copyrightable if provenance had remained undiluted. The details of a case matter. Some matter more than others.

*Apple v. Franklin (1983) ruled machine code, and by extension human readable code, are in fact covered under the Copyright Act. Google v. Oracle (2021) affirmed header files are also covered by the Copyright Act. That means all source code, functional and descriptive, since 1976 is potentially covered by federal copyright. Not that there weren't copyright laws before 1976, the states managed that with contradictory legal regimes that may or may not have covered human readable source code. It was the complexity, contradictions, and inconsistency of state copyright regimes that prompted the 1976 Act.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 20:00 UTC (Thu) by koverstreet (subscriber, #4296) [Link] (3 responses)

> Who put the lawyers in charge? Everyone in a given society. That is, the majority of any given democratic or republican system of governance. That's not a useful debate to have. When you live in a society, you have to live by that society's rules or face the consequences even if you disagree with the rules. As a traditionally persecuted minority in the country I live in, I'm quite familiar with the risks of opposition to The Rules.

I can't get behind this "we all agreed to the rules and we all must follow them" line of thinking, with not a thought given to how they're serving the free software worlds and the commons.

I want a healthy free software ecosystem, and I don't see how this helps.

And I think you're taking a narrow and pessimistic view of the legalities of LLMs, and I honestly can't make any sense of it. If there are going to be legal issues with using LLMs trained behind closed doors, that's an issue for the entire software world, not just open source - and honestly if that ever came to pass it'd be a far bigger issue for the corporate world. Corporations might sue each other for infringement, but open source projects?

But given how the eagerly the rest of the world is charging (headfirst, with nary a care in the world) into LLM driven development, somehow I do not think that's the issue that's going to bite the open source world. I think that particular ship has sailed.

The only issues on my mind are - how do we teach AIs to write good maintainable code? How are we going to collaborate?

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 22:21 UTC (Thu) by Heretic_Blacksheep (guest, #169992) [Link] (2 responses)

I didn't say "We all must follow them" I said "When you live in a society, you have to live by that society's rules or face the consequences even if you disagree with the rules." There's a gulf of difference. One can have a debate on the justice of those rules and laws, but ask anyone that has openly defied those laws and been arrested, marginalized, or otherwise attacked as a matter of protest whether there are consequences to doing so.

However, I don't believe the wider issue is a topic for LWN. I put the comment there because the OP questioned who put the lawyers in charge. The answer is obvious. The society did, for good or ill. That's just the world we live in.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 22:37 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

> The society did

Wrong. Individuals do this.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 22:40 UTC (Thu) by koverstreet (subscriber, #4296) [Link]

yeah, and I think "the society has decided!" has become an excuse to shut off critical thinking...

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 20:14 UTC (Thu) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (8 responses)

> Who put the lawyers in charge?

Do you understand that this is the question which has been with humankind since at least since eighteen century BCE (Code of Hammurabi) and probably much earlier, right? Do you think that LWN is the best place to solve it?

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 22:08 UTC (Thu) by koverstreet (subscriber, #4296) [Link] (7 responses)

If you're jumping all the way to the Code of Hammurabi, I think you might be proving my point for me :)

Not everything has to be, or should be, a legal issue.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 22:31 UTC (Thu) by Heretic_Blacksheep (guest, #169992) [Link]

He's not. He's pointing out that the laws of a society exist because that society believes they need them to order their social interactions. The earliest evidence of such a full legal framework is the Code of Hammurabi. He's not making your point. Copyright is a legal question because modern societies believe creative works deserve some kind of legal protection. You need not agree, but you can't ignore the question when working with someone else's implementation of ideas without potential consequence. Understandably OpenBSD wishes to avoid those legal consequences if at all possible. Wishes for utopias without lawyers and legal code are wishful thinking and irrelevant to the present.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 1:19 UTC (Fri) by Kluge (subscriber, #2881) [Link] (5 responses)

> Not everything has to be, or should be, a legal issue.

Ownership of anything is inherently a legal issue.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 1:24 UTC (Fri) by koverstreet (subscriber, #4296) [Link] (4 responses)

And here I was thinking open source and free software were about user freedom and just being able to tinker on things.

Silly me :)

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 20:48 UTC (Fri) by Kluge (subscriber, #2881) [Link] (3 responses)

> And here I was thinking open source and free software were about user freedom and just being able to tinker on things.

And yet "open source" and "free software" have different conceptions of those goals, different approaches to achieving them, and very often, different tactics, including software licenses.

For the life of me, I don't know why someone involved in a GPL'd project (and I appreciate your work in bringing a modern filesystem to Linux) would be dismissive of the idea that disregarding the license of other people's code (as happens in using a LLM) is unethical.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 20:56 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (2 responses)

>disregarding the license of other people's code (as happens in using a LLM) is unethical.

I frequently use knowledge obtained from Open Source and GPL code to implement functionality in proprietary software. I do not copy any code.

Is that unethical? If so, why?

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 28, 2026 9:19 UTC (Sat) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, opinions may differ, about whether it is ethical or not, but at least it is certainly at least in general not illegal. Copyright protects only particular work not ideas behind that (for that we have patents and that’s yet another can of worms, but at least I can say that they are a way more limited exactly because of this).

To the above comment that somebody thought free software is all about freedom, not about copyright: I would suggest reading the “Free Culture” book by Lawrence Lessig (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_%28book%29), even if you are not lawyer (or especially), it is very readable book, his style is very entertaining and encouraging. The main lesson from the book is I believe that appropriate copyright law greatly encourages and enables free culture, not the other way around.

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-culture_movement

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 28, 2026 19:05 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Well, opinions may differ, about whether it is ethical or not, but at least it is certainly at least in general not illegal.

Actually, I'd argue the GPL itself says it's ethical. Not the black letter thereof, of course, but the surrounding stuff, the preamble and the four freedoms.

One of which is the freedom to study and learn ...

Cheers,
Wol

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 18:44 UTC (Thu) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410) [Link] (10 responses)

> This obsession with copyrights between different free software ecosystems - who put the lawyers in charge?

The constitution. We live under the rule of law.

> The bigger concern with LLMs writing code is maintainability and refactoring.

No. The bigger is that it hasn't still been legally established who owns their output.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 21:24 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (9 responses)

> No. The bigger is that it hasn't still been legally established who owns their output.

It still hasn't been legally established who owns the output of a Natural Intelligence either!

Just treat the output of Artificial Intelligence the same way you treat a Natural Intelligence. Apply some of that mythical ingredient called Common Sense :-)

Cheers,
Wol

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 21:28 UTC (Thu) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410) [Link] (8 responses)

Don't be silly. Copyright and contract law establishes that pretty decidedly.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 26, 2026 22:42 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (7 responses)

So is my output copyright me? That is NOT clear.

What if I do a Mozart, go to a concert, and write out the score from memory?

What if I do what a lot of musicians do, and extemporise a piece where I have no idea where the inspiration came from? If anywhere? There's been a few lawsuits over that!

Cheers,
Wol

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 10:37 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

What if I do what a lot of musicians do, and extemporise a piece where I have no idea where the inspiration came from? If anywhere? There's been a few lawsuits over that!

The general stipulation, according to the Berne Convention, which most civilised countries subscribe to, is that new “works” which you – as a human being, capable of creative expression – produce are yours from the moment you “expressed” them. If other people feel that your work seems to be ripped off from their work, they are free to litigate this after the fact.

As a musician you probably know lots of cool tunes by other people and are polite enough not to try to pass those off as your own. OTOH, it is unlikely for you to know every currently-copyrighted tune in the repertoire in order to be able to avoid those in your own work, which is why there are lawsuits about this sort of thing. Although in fairness it must be said that some of these lawsuits are based on fairly fleeting resemblances of someone's very obscure prior work to someone else's more recent very successful smash hit, and this sometimes carries a whiff of people trying to capitalise on others' success. I presume that adjudicating such cases can be quite tricky.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 11:39 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

So we just have to apply the exact same - FUZZY - rules to AI output.

Which makes me think this vibe-coded driver is actually a derivative of the GPL'd Linux driver ...

Cheers,
Wol

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 13:19 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

So we just have to apply the exact same - FUZZY - rules to AI output.

For the time being, anyway, AI output flunks the “creative expression by a human being” prerequisite for being able to be copyrighted at all – see the monkey-selfie case. So whether a copyright on the AI output belongs to the AI, its human prompter, the company which pays the human prompter's salary, or the company which put the AI together in the first place is a moot point because there is no copyright to be allotted to begin with.

This can only change if the legal fundamentals of copyright are amended to declare that AI is capable of “creative expression” in the same way human beings are (unlikely, but what do I know), or else if you convince the court that you have put so much of your own creative expression into the work that it should qualify for copyright on those grounds even though an LLM was also involved in its creation in some ancillary capacity. IOW, the “viber” the code, the less likely it is to be eligible for copyright.

Having said that, if you publish code that your AI has produced (with more or less additional input by you), you still run a risk that that code is substantially similar to some other existing work up to a point where the author of said work could reasonably conclude that they have been ripped off, and a lawsuit ensues. (Obviously, the same thing could happen with code that you have personally written completely from scratch.) With strictly human-authored code, the usual defense is to argue that you (the author) have never actually even seen said work and that any resemblance must therefore be coincidental (possibly you worked off an abstract specification written by somebody who has seen the other work, i.e., “clean-room engineering”, but that is generally considered acceptable). Whether that defense will in fact fly in your particular case is anyone's guess, but the same argument is way harder to make if part of your work has been generated by an LLM that was potentially trained on all the visible source code on the Internet but nobody knows for sure what actually went in there.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 13:20 UTC (Fri) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link]

It is, in a sense, not really relevant whether a judge would or would not determine that the new driver is a derivative of the Linux driver; the point is that the OpenBSD project has no particular wish to be dragged into a complicated, fuzzy, expensive legal battle over this code. And that remains a reasonable desire regardless of the actual legal status of the work.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 20:06 UTC (Fri) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link] (2 responses)

> What if I do a Mozart, go to a concert, and write out the score from memory?

As an aside, that reminds me of an interesting bit of history in the famous Sony Betamax US Supreme Court case. In Justice Stevens first draft opinion, he wrote, "It would plainly be unconstitutional to prohibit a person from singing a copyrighted song in the shower or jotting down a copyrighted poem he hears on the radio". That second scenario, transcribing a poem, gets black letter copyright law dead wrong, at least in the sense he meant--his original opinion argued the Copyright Act didn't apply at all to such private, personal use. IIRC, the other justices had to correct him that that is the very definition of copyright infringement, and the definition of infringement per se never distinguished private from commercial. Fair Use would protect a person from liability (and the First Amendment would likely demand it), but it's nonetheless infringement, per se; Fair Use is a *defense* to infringement.

> What if I do what a lot of musicians do, and extemporise a piece where I have no idea where the inspiration came from?

In the US, at least, you generally prove infringement by showing 1) substantial similarity (to copyrighted material) and 2) access to the copyrighted work. It doesn't matter your intentions or whether you even knowingly copied or made a derivative. Access can be proven by showing that, e.g., a work is effectively universally encountered, e.g. Beatles' songs.

As regards AI or anything else, substantial similarity and access are really all you need to show infringement. Showing access in the case of AI is basically a slam dunk for any published work, given large models have been trained on effectively everything that has been digitized. Copyright cases usually turn on the degree of similarity, or other issues, like whether a work was actually protected by copyright, whether copied material was copyrightable, establishing the rights holder, application of Fair Use, etc. But the question whether infringement could occur is the simplest aspect to copyright law, at least in countries where copyright law derives from common law copyright. Your hypotheticals don't actually pose any sort of challenge to the basic logic of infringement in this regard. The keystone to copyright law is the concept of originality, and answering the question of originality is fundamentally just 1) substantial similarity and 2) access.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 30, 2026 10:05 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

> But the question whether infringement could occur is the simplest aspect to copyright law, at least in countries where copyright law derives from common law copyright.

In contrast, in Civil Law countries "fair use" is not a defense: copyright law defines an enumerated set of exceptions to the exclusive right of reproduction (e.g. Directive 2001/29/EC (Infosec directive)). They are permissions rather than defenses. So singing in the shower is no infringement. Different folks, different strokes.

And rather than open-ended definitions like "derivative work" it grants author the exclusive right to authorize adaptations of their work (e.g., translations, transformations). So it has to be a transformation of the work, not merely "it looks similar".

There is however case law on this: GEMA v. OpenAI (Munich Regional Court, 2024) [1]. In this case: when the users asked OpenAI for the lyrics of a song, it reproduces them (almost) exactly and this was considered copyright infringement.

> According to the Munich Regional Court, reproducing the song lyrics in question in the models does not constitute text and data mining. Text and data mining aims to generate information. However, in the opinion of the Munich Regional Court, the memorization of the lyrics exceeds this generation of information and is therefore not merely text and data mining. The song lyrics, used as training data, were fully integrated into the model’s parameters, which interferes with the authors’ exploitation interests.

So you can legally scrape all the data you want off the internet and train with it. But that doesn't give a blanket free-pass on the output.

Which is why the discussion of the patch should revolve around: how much does it look like memorisation and how much is constrained by the fact that is has to be interoperable (an exception).

[1] https://www.medialaws.eu/gema-v-openai-decision-of-the-mu...

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 3, 2026 22:33 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> > But the question whether infringement could occur is the simplest aspect to copyright law, at least in countries where copyright law derives from common law copyright.

> In contrast, in Civil Law countries "fair use" is not a defense: copyright law defines an enumerated set of exceptions to the exclusive right of reproduction (e.g. Directive 2001/29/EC (Infosec directive)). They are permissions rather than defenses. So singing in the shower is no infringement. Different folks, different strokes.

What is "common law copyright"? As has been pointed out in assorted comments here and on Groklaw, copyright apparently came into existence as a means of censorship - a "letters patent on printing". So no common law involvement afaik.

And "fair use" is not a defence in "Common Law countries" either - to the best of my knowledge. It's an American invention, and only exists in America. It also only applies afaik to Civil Law, not Criminal Law. In the UK at least, copyright violations can be criminal offences, and an appeal to fair use would be laughed out of court.

Cheers,
Wol

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 13:09 UTC (Fri) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (1 responses)

The whole point of free software, way back, was so we could stop fretting over who has the rights to what and just read and work on each other's code.

No, it wasn't. Nobody considered that at all. And you should know better, it's literally written on the GNU website what the principles of free software actually are. At the core of it, it was about protecting users from developers concentrating their power and locking things down.

This obsession with copyrights between different free software ecosystems - who put the lawyers in charge?

Society did. In order to have rule of law, you need arbiters of law. Justices, judges, and attorneys are the backbone of this model. And copyright matters because this is the legal tool to convey intent for the work. And this has been fundamentally recognized in every society on earth.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 14:41 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Society did. In order to have rule of law, you need arbiters of law. Justices, judges, and attorneys are the backbone of this model.

And even if your society consisted of one nuclear family ONLY, you still need people to fill those roles (yes, in a society that small, it's probably just Dad :-). So the only way to escape, is to go off to your own isolated island and live there on your own.

This is what I call "emergent complexity", it just happens of its own accord. It's a natural consequence of the fact that humans are social animals.

Cheers,
Wol

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Mar 27, 2026 15:36 UTC (Fri) by jadedctrl (subscriber, #178426) [Link]

> This obsession with copyrights between different free software ecosystems - who put the lawyers in charge?

All you need to do is look at the history of copyright disputes and suits that hampered BSD for literal years to see where this “obsession” came from. There are very, very good reasons to worry about being above-board, copyright-wise. This lesson was learnt the hard way.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 15, 2026 12:37 UTC (Wed) by QxDEADBEEF (guest, #175948) [Link] (3 responses)

> The bigger concern with LLMs writing code is maintainability and refactoring.

AI tools for coding convert human language to source code.

We don't trust the AI to blindly edit/create source code because we are in the stage of the transition to a higher level of abstraction.

When we compile source code to assembly we all assume the correctness of the compiler and we 100% trust the resulted binary.

Abstraction is a very important and fundamental thing in software development (and not only in software).

Moving from assembly into high level programing language was a large step of abstraction. I suspect that initially when compilers were developed the generated assembly code would look terribly optimized and it could have bugs. I believe that at that time people would check the generated assembly frequently to optimize the code.

Maybe back then the transition was not overhyped because software development was a limited hobby/job for very intelligent people.

I see the AI tools like a compiler which translates my description of a task/problem/requirement into source code.
The issue is not only with what AI tools can do but it is also with our capability to describe what we want them to do.

I believe the biggest concern with LLMs with writing code is consistency and minimizing the assumptions made by the tool.
This will gain trust.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 16, 2026 10:24 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

AI tools for coding convert human language to source code.

The big difference is that programming languages are fairly well defined and unambiguous (there are some undefined behaviors, but those are the exceptions, not the rule). On the other hand this is not true for the human languages. There are attempts to somewhat formalize human languages (e.g. a "lawyerspeak" or "legalese" dialect is used to write laws) to avoid this ambiguity, but it's far from perfect (for example the Hungarian word "illetve" might mean both "or" or "and" - and lawmakers do use it due to stylistics reasons). I think (hope?) that there will be a kind of prompting language as well which is slightly different than the normal, every day human language.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 16, 2026 11:33 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> I think (hope?) that there will be a kind of prompting language as well which is slightly different than the normal, every day human language.

So... COBOL ?

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 17, 2026 7:09 UTC (Fri) by QxDEADBEEF (guest, #175948) [Link]

> I think (hope?) that there will be a kind of prompting language as well which is slightly different than the normal, every day human language.

Such a language could be used to define the software requirements specification.
In any case the AI tools shall be capable enough to recognize the ambiguity in either the prompting language itself or the described problem. And to ask user for clarifications to minimize the uncertainty of the final answer (generated code).