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Talk Intermediate

Can companies assume Fair Use defense for using GPL Code Snippets rendered by Gen AI Coding Tools in proprietary software?

Proposal status is Review Pending
Session Description

Gen AI coding tools like GitHub Co-Pilot, Amazon Code Whisperer and similar coding enabling tools are changing the way software coding are implemented by developers within corporate organizations. While such tools increase productivity & reduce time-to-market a company’s product, the failure to detect AI-generated code snippets could compromise a company’s intellectual property, face legal challenges, and damage their reputation and trust, due to incorporation of‘blocks of source code either as short snippets or strings of code, or large strings of code or entire software programs under GPL family license’ [terming them as GPLed Code Snippets] rendered by these tools & incorporated by developers in the larger proprietary codebase. One of the critical conditions of GPL is the requirement to release the Complete Corresponding Source Code (“CCS”, referring the Tesla incident) of the whole software that is regarded a derivative or combined work of the GPLed Code Blocks, upon distribution of the software to the recipient of the software. This is known as the "copyleft" condition of GPL. This copyleft rubric ensures that all recipients of the software have free access to the source code.


Session Categories

FOSS
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