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> To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened.

> News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material.

First, there are other cases if you take the time to dig. This is quite an old example (GPT-2) as i haven't kept up to date on this field recently, but it does show that this problem has been known about since before these systems were widely adopted: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 [0]

Second, GP said nothing about the type of effort required to make it happen, just that it can be done and that the copyright owner could come along and cause legal problems later. It's absolutely possible to have a fly-by contributor who purposefully asks for code that reproduces X/Y/Z without a maintainer knowing about it.

But then the maintainer is the one in legal trouble.

> When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest?

Legal / copyright / etc. cases often take a lot longer than a couple of years to come to fruition.

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[0]: edit -- to clarify this is an example of the reproduction problem, not an example copyright infringement case.

2 comments

The problem you linked is an older example of intentional prompting for copyrighted material.

The concern discussed here is copyrighted material being generated unintentionally and the original author asserting their rights.

This has, to my knowledge, not happened once.

If we are not talking about unintentional violations, I don't understand the point of the discussion.

I can also intentionally copy paste the copyrighted material into my merge request without the use of AI in an attempt to get the maintainer into trouble.

> The concern discussed here is copyrighted material being generated unintentionally and the original author asserting their rights.

both intentional (malicious contributor) or unintentional (Large-Laundering-Model) are copyright issues -- which is the point of GCC's policy.

> I can also intentionally copy paste the copyrighted material into my merge request without the use of AI in an attempt to get the maintainer into trouble.

You can. You can also do it significantly faster with significantly less effort while being harder to detect using agents etc.

I do not think some untested theory about sabotaging open-source projects by intentionally inserting copyrighted material using AI, causing legal issues for maintainers, is worthwhile to discuss here.

That is obviously not what anyone was referring to, nor does it make sense, when there is a much more reasonable basis to prohibit the same contribution.

Namely inserting vulnerabilities. This one actually happened before afaik, and provides a clear benefit to the attacker.

> just that it can be done and that the copyright owner could come along and cause legal problems later. It's absolutely possible to have a fly-by contributor who purposefully asks for code that reproduces X/Y/Z without a maintainer knowing about it.

If a contributor doesn't care about submitting copyrighted code, they can do it without an LLM as well.

They could, but an LLM makes it faster and easier to launder code. And makes it harder to detect.

Plenty of github accounts now are agent-driven monstrosities just trying to inflate someone's contribution stats etc.