I agree that it's not clear that this breaks federal law. But I do think it's clear that this should break federal law.

There's an interesting analogy with copyright issues surrounding AI use. Both copyright laws and surveillance were created to (respectively) creative incentives for authors to create novel works; and to protect citizens for indiscriminate surveillance. The laws made sense given the technology available at the time: it simply wasn't feasible to put a cop on every street corner, or to ingest the ideas of every work ever written.

But the laws have been eclipsed by technology. Technology makes a mockery of existing laws, by clearly violating their intent. Much has been written to the effect of "why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me." Similarly, Flock cameras have the effect or violating privacy in the exact same way the original laws sought to prevent.

Unfortunately, laws are slow to change, and monied interests will fight tooth-and-nail to put their profits above the rights of ordinary people. It's going to be a difficult decade or so coming up.

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bogwog 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me

Can confirm. I've personally stopped releasing new open source code, and stopped contributing to projects.

Until copyright laws are updated to protect my work from being stolen and my labor exploited by AI companies, there's zero incentive for me to participate in open source.

Even OSI's cuck licenses are being cucked beyond reason. I didn't think that was possible.

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matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent [-]

AIs make short work of proprietary code as well. Reverse engineering has become trivial. Not releasing any code whatsoever is the only possible defense now. I've made my peace with that.

What worries me is the fact AIs render licenses irrelevant. What's the point of starting an AGPLv3 project when AIs can just study it and make a proprietary equivalent? The free software movement no longer has any leverage.

I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.

	▲	joshheitzman 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed. I specifically decided to open-source my AI coding agent harness (coming later this month) because I felt like I was never going to be able to protect any the trade secrets due to how easy reverse engineering is now.