Yes, there are long running complex lawsuits about all manner of things you might think are intuitively obvious, however just because the last lawsuit was long running and complex doesn't mean the next one about the same thing will be. In theory if the prior court found that header files are public interfaces and don’t have copyright protection the next lawsuit involving copyright on header files will have the defense lawyer point at the prior judgment and saying “we don’t need to litigate this, it was clear two years ago, and nothing has changed to make this any different, we should do that again” and the judge doens’t have to do the exact same thing, but most will, unless the other lawyer has good counter arguments why it is different in this case (and NOT arguments about the original judgment being incorrect). Sometimes the “good arguments” are merely “that case was decided in Californian and we are in Texas, and the laws are different here!”.

Legal matters can be counter intuitive, but more frequently they actually make sense. Early cases about things are complex and long because the legal process tries very hard to make sure they have a good answer, and that they clearly explain the reasoning behind the answers they give, and the limits of the answer. The results of legal battles that reach a verdict are not just a judgment about how a clash between two parties will be resolved, but about how all similar cases should be resolved. Think of a verdict as something that has cached results (but in a system that can do fuzzy matching on cache lines). A settlement on the other hand produces a result between two parties but no new cache entries.

I’m a lot less sure. I would think a lawsuit could start based on object code, and during discovery get source code and continue if the source code looks similar enough. Doing a whole lawsuit on object code would face significant issues convincing a judge/jury that object code is “expressive enough” to manifest copyright. With the defense arguing that wholly independent implementations of something compile down into the same (or substantially similar) object code.

It should be “easy enough” if you think you have some highly similar object code isolated to convince a judge to allow a civil suit to start and to compel discovery of the source code so you can examine how similar actual code (which has already faced court scrutiny about weather or not it is expressive enough to receive copyright protection) is. Even there you can get some suprising results. Like can a Google Employee who was previously an Apple employee and implements the same function at both companies in basically the same way commit copyright infringement? (In something like a topological sort where the algorithm is a known art, it is entirely possable that writing it from scratch for the Nth time produces a line for line identical copy including variable name choices and the bulk of the comments even if the author doesn’t actually consciously remember prior version of the code!)

I've work in technical industries, and they can't handle encryption.

lol wut? DCPs are usually heavily encrypted. Even the dumbest intern running their screening room could figure it out.

Just because code quality improves doesn’t mean the code looks like what a human writes. Currently AI code seems to not favor writing lots of functions, do it’ll basically expand out the same code in multiple places. Which I admit is also what jr programmers tend to do and maybe you can quality that as something that is code quality and will improve. You can frequently use a prompt to make it “don’t write the same code multiple times, define functions for anything repeated (maybe over a specific complexity)” & that reduces that issue.

I’ve noticed AI generated Swift tends to not use default arguments much, almost never uses custom operators, and uses unnamed method arguments way more frequently then most human written code. Sort of. A lot of example code and people showing things in forums and doing toy programs “in public” are similar which makes me guess those end up in training data sets more then signifiant works that do most of that stuff. Or I write atypical Swift, and have worked at places that do the same (in part because I get to set the coding standards at some of those companies!). At any rate I think _some_ AI code has “tells” which is largely independent form bug rate if not actually “code quality”.

As a practical issue commercial software is almost always closed code, so nobody can see the source and simply search for anything that might share code with anything they have copyright on. The open source code isopen. So if you have anything copyrighted you can search the open source to see if anything looks like it is worth filing a lawsuit over. Especially if you have a competing product. So if you are say Intel you can check to see if any of gcc is similar to Intel’s commercial compiler and sue claiming any recent declines in sales are directly related to gcc’s “blatant” infringement. Or if you have a non-compiler you can sue and just complain about common stanzas of code but not establish specific damages so it might be a less valuable lawsuit.

You could even sue if your closed source code got that line from AI as long as the employee that the source code control system claims they wrote that one themselves, and as long as your source code control system says that line was written before the open source project had it’s equivalent code (or if your lawyer doesn’t think to check those things, and the OSS’s lawyer doesn’t think to raise it in defense), so at least chances are rare that the OSS code invents the line and commercial closed source steels the line (via AI) and then claims the reverse happened.

Winner! Winner! Chicken Dinner!

Yep, even when AI generated code is human reviewed to determine that the code does what it looks like it should, and has no subtle issues (or only very very subtle ones!), you still have the huge legal issues (the exact ones you identified).

This "AI" seems to be severely lacking in training, in that no superior/invincible force (e.g. a party simulating law enforcement) showed up and demonstrated the downside to taking certain actions.

Dammit, can't anyone make some stylish cyber-shoes? That looks like shit! Anyone who goes around upskirt-snapping with shoes like that, is going to get laughed out of the ballroom by all the snobs.

Is it ok if I show up in regular glasses, but where an always-on LED is attached to the one of the corners? (I understand pervs are falling out of popularity, but that doesn't mean we need to abandon the whole aesthetic!)

Do we really have to reinvent the wheel every damn time?! It used to be that you just got Voight-Kampff tested, and the administrator of the test would sign your PGP key. WTF was wrong with that?!

My first reaction is that if one company is selling at half the price, that company will go bankrupt at twice the speed since every transaction was already a money-loser. Customers are absolutely the worst thing for these "businesses."

But is revenue really significant? I can see how neither reducing the price to $0 or increasing their price to 10x what it was, might not really have much of a different impact on the bottom line, compared to all the debt.

> They care about lives,

As long as you're a white american.

Make IBM Great Again: go back to .. leasing computers?!

Nobody remembers or cares that a B-2's toilet cost $23k, so the Pentagon is updating to a newer, better form of government waste that kids today will better understand.

Malware is any software that runs on your computer but is intended to serve the interests of someone else.

Calling it malware isn't so much inaccurate as it's unspecific. Not all malware is adware, but 100% of adware is malware.