Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bcrl 266 days ago
That's not something I can agree with.

Take image generation trained on a bunch of copyrighted photographs and artwork. What is the intent behind creating such a tool?

Yes, there is a stage where the software developer is building the software to do this purely operating on a "this is a cool hack" kind of mentality, but the point at which you make it available to other people, especially for payment, is when the liability becomes real.

Having worked on open source software for most of my life, I have always had to be aware of the issues surrounding copyright. That other software developers will write software and use copyright to proect it while ignoring the copyrights of others is deeply concerning. Copyright of software is no more or less important than copyrights applied to images and artwork.

Engineers are liable for their mistakes. At some point the same mechanisms may well need to be applied to software.