David Gerard4d ago
theo de raadt eschews vibe coding for copyright reasons https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1064541/1a399d572a046fb9/
Vibe-coded ext4 for OpenBSD

A number of projects have been struggling with the question of which submissions created by lar [...]

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Show threadDavid Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

@davidgerard

As I understand it, the state of copyright for LLM-generated output is:

  • The person who promoted the LLM cannot assert copyright on the output (US copyright office ruling, confirmed in court).
  • People whose copyrighted materials were used as the training data may be able to assert copyright on the output as a derived work (inconclusive case law).

So accepting LLM-generated code seems very high risk. Especially for something like ext4, where it’s likely that there is exactly one implementation in the training set.

EDIT: I don’t expect the second to be settled conclusively any time soon, because there’s a lot of subjectivity in existing human-only derived-work cases.

Mar 28 at 5:09pmWeb
Show threadJohn-Mark Gurney2d ago

@david_chisnall

I agree that the second won't have a court ruling anytime soon, but the fact that some AI companies are settling instead of going to court is a strong signal. If they truly thought they'd win in court, they wouldn't settle for $1.5b. (yes there is risk reward to consider when analyzing this, but that just, imo, shows that the legal standing is even weaker, that if they lost they'd likely be on the hook for even larger penalties.)

@davidgerard