The Use of LLM Assistants for Kernel Development

Its illegal for artists to distribute recreated copyright in a way that is not transformative. It isn't illegal to produce it and keep it to themselves.

People also distribute models, they don't merely offer them as a service. However, if someone asks their model to produce a copyright violation, and it does so, the person that created and distributed the model (its the distribution that is the problem), the service that ran it (assuming it isn't local inference), and the person that asked for the violation to be created can all be looped into the legal case.

This has happened before, before the world of AI. Even companies that 100% participated in the copyright regime, quickly performed takedowns, ran copyright detection to the best of their ability were sued and they lost because their users committed copyright violation using their services, even though the company did everything right and absolutely above board.

The law is stacked against service providers on the Internet, as it essentially requires them to be omniscient and omnipotent. Such requirements are not levied against other service providers in other industries.

>In an even greater misunderstanding of the American legal system, you're using the Sony case to argue that you would win court cases against LLM users.

Not at all. I said this is the only actual path for the companies to survive, if they can thread that legal needle. The users do not get the benefit of this. The FBI spent the better part of 3 decades busting small time pirates reproducing VHS tapes using perfectly legal (as per the case I quoted) tape decks.

Notice, not everybody has won this challenge, the Sony case merely shows you how high you have to jump. Many companies have been found liable for producing a tool or service whose primary use is to commit crimes or other illegal acts.

Companies that literally bent over backwards to comply with the law still got absolutely screwed, see what happened to Megaupload, and all they did was provide an encrypted offsite file storage system, and complied with all applicable laws promptly and without challenge.

Absolutely nothing stops the AI companies from being railroaded like that. However, I believe that they will attempt a Sony-like ruling to save their bacon, but throw their users under the bus.

>the established precedent is in fact the opposite of what you want to do,

Nope, just want to sue the code pirates. Everyone else can go enjoy their original AI slop as long as it comes from a 100% legally trained model and everybody keeps their hands clean.

>and are now trying to back up and reduce that claim

No, I literally just gave the Sony case as an example of reducing the claim into the other direction. The companies may in fact find a way to weasel out of this, but the users never will.

Another counter-example, btw, not that you asked for one, is Napster. Napster was ordered by a court to shut down their service as it's primary use was to facilitate piracy. While it is most likely OpenAI et al. will try to Sony their way out, they could end up like Napster instead, or worse, end up like Megaupload.

>everyone is guilty of infringement until proven innocent.

Although you are saying this in plain language, this is largely how copyright cases work in the US, even though, in theory, it should be innocent until proven guilty. However, that exact phrase is only meaningful in criminal cases. It is much more loose in civil cases, and the bar for winning a civil case is much lower.

Usually in a copyright case, the copyright owner is usually the plantiff (although not always!), and copyright owner plantiffs usually win these cases, even in cases where they really shouldn't have.

>Continuing this discussion feels pointless.

Yes it really does. Many people on HN clearly think it is okay to copyright-wash through LLMs, and that the output of LLMs are magically free of infringement by some unexplained handwaving.

You still have not explained how a user can have an LLM reproduce a copyrighted work, and then distribute it, and somehow the copyright owners cannot sue everyone involved, which is standard practice in such cases.