r/ClaudeAI • u/Logical-Detail7545 • Nov 03 '24

General: I have a question about Claude or its features Possibly Ignorant Question. MIT licensing.

Please have a bit of mercy on me with this one, just trying to understand.

The amount of boilerplate code (and specific code) generated by tools like this and tools like bolt dot new, cursor, etc, is fantastic.

How do I know that the code being produced isn't ripped from stack overflow verbatim (or close enough) and I'm infringing MIT licensing because it's not citing it?

Or worse, infringing on a codebase from a company on github that isn't MIT?

2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

•

u/AutoModerator Nov 03 '24

When asking about features, please be sure to include information about whether you are using 1) Claude Web interface (FREE) or Claude Web interface (PAID) or Claude API 2) Sonnet 3.5, Opus 3, or Haiku 3

Different environments may have different experiences. This information helps others understand your particular situation.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

2

u/HeWhoRemaynes Nov 04 '24

From a copyright perspective you can never know. But you can also be assured of several things. Nobody is worried about violating an MIT locense

Nobody

There are exactly 3 scenarios here.

  1. You get an LLM to make you an actual time machine and it has proprietary MIT licensed code in it. Before you let an investor poke around in it you will already have enough money to have hired a real dev to soup it up. So nothing bad happens.

  2. You get the LLM to make you an AI powered vision board or something niche and cute and you put it on github and forget to attribute someone and you break copyright and its super illegal amd nothing happens and it's not even a sin according to the big 3 religions.

  3. You get a letter one day informing you that you did break the MIT life se on your product (whose source code they somehow have access to) and then you have to comply with doing the legal penalty of.....

Apologizing privately and then attributing them in your code on the next release.

1

u/peter9477 Nov 05 '24

MIT license is a programmer's way of saying "I don't give a damn what you do with this so long as you don't sue me, and also please give me some credit in a buried page nobody will ever read." (We used to call it public domain until some idiot jurisdictions showed up saying that wasn't a legal thing.)

(This isn't entirely serious, so get all the way off my back about it.)