this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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135
AI’s Unpaid Debt: How LLM Scrapers Destroy the Social Contract of Open Source (www.quippd.com)
submitted 3 months ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/programming@programming.dev
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TL;DR: The big tech AI company LLMs have gobbled up all of our data, but the damage they have done to open source and free culture communities are particularly insidious. By taking advantage of those who share freely, they destroy the bargain that made free software spread like wildfire.

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[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Also - this conclusion is ridiculous:

By incorporating copyleft data into their models, the LLMs do share the work - but not alike. Instead, the AI strips the work of its provenance and transforms it to be copyright free.

That is absolutely not true. It doesn't remove the copyright from the original work and no court has ruled as such.

If I wrote a "random code generator" that just happened to create the source code for Microsoft Windows in entirety it wouldn't strip Microsoft of its copyright.

[–] yoasif@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That is absolutely not true. It doesn't remove the copyright from the original work and no court has ruled as such.

Sorry, I just got around to this message. That is the idea of the provenance -- clearly, the canonical work is copyright. It is the version that has been stripped of its provenance via the LLM that no longer retains its copyright (because as I pointed out, LLM outputs cannot be copyright).

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That doesn't make it "no longer copy-written" though. The original copyright holder retains their copyright on it. I can't see any court ruling otherwise.

[–] yoasif@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The output of the LLM can be incorporated into copyrighted material and is copyright free. I never claimed that the copyright on the original work was lost.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

I highly doubt the law is settled on this topic and you're assuming it is. I can't see the courts accepting that your duplicate version of my work created through "magic" is not going to be a violation of my copyright. Especially if my work was included as input to the "magic box" that created the output.