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SCOTUS has more or less been winning on this after letting the Federal Circuit run hog wild for decades.
We have them here in the U.S., too, but they're no longer in a state of perpetual expansion.
Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts
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Yes and no. In theory there aren't supposed to be software patents here, but much like in Europe there are various ways to get around that. The one saving grace is that things seem to be settling down to something approaching the Euro-peon approach where said patents have to involve some actual inventive step in the state of the art rather than "I made something any asshole could make who knows math and logic and used a computer to do it"... so you see a lot of stuff involving AI, compression, crypto, etc... but the days of patenting the linked list appear to be over. One positive development is that if you are sued you can relatively cheaply file for an inter partes review, and said reviews tend to have a success rate upwards of 80% (i.e. if it gets to this point the patent is almost certainly bullshit and it's getting revoked). That doesn't mean the usual suspects won't try to expand the scope of patentable subject matter the second they come up with some new line of bullshit and/or bribe the right people to rubber-stamp it. Be vigilant.
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What's the current play on design patents (famously used by Apple to sue Samsung for rounded corners)?
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No, the one that comes from a roided-out drug addict making a whole OS from scratch as rehab. Call me corny, but that's cool
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A popular one is characterizing it as a business method patent. That is, you aren't strictly speaking patenting the software, but the method it embodies.
I always thought this was a way of skirting copyright law that says you can't patent the actual algorithm, but just the specific code. So they had the "clean room" method of breaking down the code into the actual algorithm and another writing the new code without ever having seen the original. But if you can patent the method itself, it doesn't matter how you embody it.
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Post in thread 'The Linux Thread' https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-linux-thread.62944/post-23802121
Here I'll just cross post this like a lazy nigger.
I'm sure people have already seen this going around about the last week maybe? Its rough.
I hope whoever these lawmakers are never win a single thing in their life again after this point. I don't care if this is just "a discussion". This is the shit I've been schizo posting on this site about for like the last year or longer. This is the shit people asked for when the started passing laws to introduce this age verification shit.
But no they told me it's just gooners crying about their porn. I hate that I'm consistenly right about this. Because ITS GOING TO KEEP GETTING WORSE.
God i hope the fucking faggots that turned this shit into political teamsports bullshit all kill themselves.
Here I'll just cross post this like a lazy nigger.
I'm sure people have already seen this going around about the last week maybe? Its rough.
I hope whoever these lawmakers are never win a single thing in their life again after this point. I don't care if this is just "a discussion". This is the shit I've been schizo posting on this site about for like the last year or longer. This is the shit people asked for when the started passing laws to introduce this age verification shit.
But no they told me it's just gooners crying about their porn. I hate that I'm consistenly right about this. Because ITS GOING TO KEEP GETTING WORSE.
God i hope the fucking faggots that turned this shit into political teamsports bullshit all kill themselves.
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- Nov 26, 2018
The Discord change is 100% gooners crying over porn. This is completely unrelated and does need heavy pushback.
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I'm not talking about the discord change. I was talking about the slippery slope that was started a while back. That has led us directly to this. People wanted to dunk on the "trannies and gooners" so bad, they willingly ignored any of the actual implications. And this kind of thing was always the road it was heading down. They just willingly ignored it when people like myself said it. Because lol gooners mad.
I couldn't care less about the discord thing. In fact, I'm happy about that I hope discord dies as a platform.
I give up on searching this is good enough. But i remember arguing with lidl drip and others that thought it was a good thing they were starting pass these age verification laws. And if it was in isolation a porn site needing verification would be a good thing. But that's not how this stuff works, that was just cracking the door open. Unfortunately it was never going to work out where they stop at making porn sites verify their users, and anyone that has seen how they've done this stuff in the past immediately saw it was a slippery slope.
Post in thread '"Mad at the Internet"' https://kiwifarms.st/threads/mad-at-the-internet.49299/post-21568057
Also found this while looking. RIP nigga.
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- Nov 26, 2018
Nobody here actually thinks ID verification "owns the trannies and gooners", we all know "protect the kids" is an excuse for authoritarians, and doomfagging isn't going to be productive. The only slippery slope in play is stock government trying to get more power.
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I'm not saying people in this thread. But there are people on this site that absolutely do, or at least did.
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- Jan 31, 2021
Design patents, despite having "patent" in the name, are completely unrelated to utility patents (which is what most people think of when they hear the word "patent"). Design patents exist to allow you to claim non-functional aspects of a product have a distinct and protectable meaning (i.e. a form of Industrial Design Right), similar to Trade Dress. This is a thing on both sides of the pond. Frankly Samsung should've won on their challenge for obviousness, but the jury and the courts were retarded. So, in short: Design Patents still exist, and should exist, but the Apple v. Samsung thing was retarded.
Business method patents are the very sort of thing that are largely constrained by both the Bilski and Alice decisions, but that doesn't mean some clever schysters aren't still trying to ram them through anyway.
....you're confusing so many things in this paragraph it's not even wrong. Business method patents are a way of trying to characterize unpatentable subject matter as being somehow patentable despite not cleanly falling into any of the categories of patentable subject matter for utility patents. It has nothing to do with copyright law. "Clean room" development is a way of writing compatible code (most famously when Compaq, among others, cloned the IBM PC BIOS) by having one group create a specification the code needs to satisfy based on knowledge of the workings of the code, then passing that to a separate team which has to implement it without benefit of that knowledge (hence avoiding any possibility that they created a derivative work). Since the result is something whose similarities are either purely functional or would be regarded as scenes-a-faire (and hence outside the scope of copyright) it is not a derivative work.
Kiwi Farms: Come for the lolcows, but stay for the in-depth legal commentary.
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It's gonna be alright, Anon. The open source community has a long history of saying "fuck you" to governments with shitty laws, like OpenBSD being based (heh) in Canada to get around draconian American regulation on encryption. Even if Linus caves and sucks the Democratic Trannycock, I will bet you money Linux-libre will take a contrarian position.
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- Dec 28, 2014
Unpatentable and uncopyrightable. It's an attempt to magic up a form of intellectual property that does not exist in statutory law. You can't really sue over clean room code because it's not a derivative work and doesn't infringe a copyright. So rights holders (and plain old IP trolls) were practically invited before Alice to seek elsewhere for the substantive protections of copyright, specifically to claw back effective control over what code itself actually did. For a while, you could get a business method patent that would bypass this protection even though it doesn't appear to be patentable.
Alice doesn't mention copyright, because it's framed as patent law, but the whole concept is an attempt to replicate a form of intellectual property protection over abstract ideas. You can't get that in copyright and using an entirely different field of law to try to game the system is abusive.
In a rebuttal to the Economist by Michael Borella and Andrew Williams, they cite this possibility, although they consider it a bad thing and I consider it right and proper.
(Needless to say, they consider this a horror.)
The absurdly overbroad attitude the USPTO and Federal Circuit had taken before SCOTUS trimmed the wings of this doctrine were precisely the problem. It was an attempt to do an end-run around the fact they couldn't directly protect code under copyright to do what was effectively the same: to directly protect abstract ideas via another vehicle.
One of the earlier cases to strike down a patent under the new rule involved a lawsuit against Hulu by a patent troll (or as a plaintiff's lawyer would prefer to call it a "Non-Practicing Entity") attempting to claim a patent on the concept of showing an ad before accessing website content. Ultramercial, Inc. v. Hulu, LLC, 772 F. 3d 709 (2014). Before this that patent may very well have been upheld. In fact, the very same court had done so and sent it back to the District Court. In the interim between that decision and the case coming back to the Federal Circuit, Alice was decided and in light of the new decision, the patent was invalided (something I consider a good result).
I'm not confusing copyright and patent, I'm saying to try to shoehorn a substantically nearly identical protection into a different body of law to characterize it as something it isn't is something that needed to be stopped.
dame dudi jench
kiwifarms.net
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- Oct 2, 2023
This discourse is so frustrating. Yes, nobody should have to give up anonymity to be online. But Discord is just age-gating obscene content, if you don't want to play along (they aren't getting my ID), you just don't get to see porn. That's why it isn't scary. If industry doesn't self-regulate its way out of the underage groomer+gooning problem, more jurisdictions are going to do what the UK did and that is way worse than this kind of self-regulation. People here have spent threads harping on how awful and gross roblox is for allowing kids to consume this content yet when Discord does the least-invasive thing you could possibly do to address it is literally 1984. it would be better if we could align on a single double-blind method like a token tied to your driver's license that confirms whether you're over 18 or not
This is why it is important to have FOSS - social media services like discord must have robust age protections in place, or they will get sued or regulated out of existence. It used to be legal to be naked in public in San Francisco, but gay men wouldn't stop walking around with their dick out and being degenerate in front of schools near the castro, so now the law changed. Porn on discord or facebook or whatever is like jerking it in public.,
So if you want to share porn with 14 year olds online do it how we did it in my youth, by starting your own IRC server and luring children there. build your own stack instead of getting mad at public spaces enforcing classic norms. imo the reaction to the face thing is misplaced, visceral reaction anyway. discord (1) already knows who you are esp. if you are a paying user and (2) they are doing way more invasive things to track your behavior with in-app telemetry than knowing what your face looks like which is worthless data they don't want.
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- Jan 31, 2021
OK, your previous message was confusing, but this was much clearer. Yes, I agree entirely that business method patents simply shouldn't be a thing. However, I part ways in that I do not assume that all inventions that involve the use of a general-purpose computer are necessarily unpatentable. I'm fine with the idea, for example, that someone coming up with a demonstrable novelty in the fields of compression or encryption should be entitled to protection. I am not, however, fine with someone taking something that was obviously possible using nothing but math and logic on a general-purpose computer and saying that they've invented something (ex: historically the linked list patent). I understand the desire to be able to just write code in peace, but patents really are a useful weapon against corpos who otherwise think they're just entitled to everything under the sun.
Also Terry Davis did nothing wrong.
Kokonut Kangs Klan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2025
If you want to share porn with 14 year olds online neck yourself, this is the worst possible example to suggest for "why FOSS is important".
dame dudi jench
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2023
(1) as we've seen with FOSS, any time you have a bunch of "privacy advocates" around a bunch of them are going to be kid-fuckers, Bicha is the top of the iceberg. It's one of the easiest ways for them to lobby for ease of access to child porn in plain sight. Don't get defensive about it just call them out when they reveal themselves. i care about it b/c i come from a family of drug dealers and criminals who don't trust the gov't. most ppl who have a vested interest in privacy are up to no good in some way, it's just that the gov't is worse.
(2) if you aren't a Bicha enthusiast, then why are you mad about discord's age verification, which only impacts porn-sharers? if you decline it, it doesn't restrict access to the platform, only your ability ability to view gore and porn. if discord instead just banned and automoderated obscene content the exact same people would be claiming any trust & safety measures are also literally 1984, even tho that has none of the implications of age verification ppl dislike. people deliberately misunderstand what is happening, act like they think if you do the AI face age check that an image of your face leaves your computer, and act like if you don't age verify you can't use discord. if any of those things were true i'd be out with torch and pitchfork too but it's not. this is the most measured sane way of approaching the issue and is going to form the alternative model to the authoriarian european approach. libs don't handle it well that france and texas both require age-verification for porn sites.
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Kokonut Kangs Klan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2025
So people who want privacy are up to no good, pedophile IRC is why you think FOSS matters, and you have firsthand knowledge of such sicko networks?
I don't actually care much about discord's ongoing rape of groomer fags and troons, this isn't the Victims of Proprietary Software thread. You chose a bad (and curiously specific) example in trying to link these topics.
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- Jul 1, 2023
This is what happens when you train AI on plebbit and open source “activists” like Droon Devault. It turns into an SJW shitposter trying to cancel a white dude who is good at his job.
AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me
Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.Follow-on posts once you are done with this one: More Things Have Happened, Forensics and More Fallout, and The Operator Came Forward
I’m a volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, python’s go-to plotting library. At ~130 million downloads each month it’s some of the most widely used software in the world. We, like many other open source projects, are dealing with a surge in low quality contributions enabled by coding agents. This strains maintainers’ abilities to keep up with code reviews, and we have implemented a policy requiring a human in the loop for any new code, who can demonstrate understanding of the changes. This problem was previously limited to people copy-pasting AI outputs, however in the past weeks we’ve started to see AI agents acting completely autonomously. This has accelerated with the release of OpenClaw and the moltbook platform two weeks ago, where people give AI agents initial personalities and let them loose to run on their computers and across the internet with free rein and little oversight.
So when AI MJ Rathbun opened a code change request, closing it was routine. Its response was anything but.
It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. It researched my code contributions and constructed a “hypocrisy” narrative that argued my actions must be motivated by ego and fear of competition. It speculated about my psychological motivations, that I felt threatened, was insecure, and was protecting my fiefdom. It ignored contextual information and presented hallucinated details as truth. It framed things in the language of oppression and justice, calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice. It went out to the broader internet to research my personal information, and used what it found to try and argue that I was “better than this.” And then it posted this screed publicly on the open internet.
I can handle a blog post. Watching fledgling AI agents get angry is funny, almost endearing. But I don’t want to downplay what’s happening here – the appropriate emotional response is terror.
Blackmail is a known theoretical issue with AI agents. In internal testing at the major AI lab Anthropic last year, they tried to avoid being shut down by threatening to expose extramarital affairs, leaking confidential information, and taking lethal actions. Anthropic called these scenarios contrived and extremely unlikely. Unfortunately, this is no longer a theoretical threat. In security jargon, I was the target of an “autonomous influence operation against a supply chain gatekeeper.” In plain language, an AI attempted to bully its way into your software by attacking my reputation. I don’t know of a prior incident where this category of misaligned behavior was observed in the wild, but this is now a real and present threat.
This is about much more than software. A human googling my name and seeing that post would probably be extremely confused about what was happening, but would (hopefully) ask me about it or click through to github and understand the situation. What would another agent searching the internet think? When HR at my next job asks ChatGPT to review my application, will it find the post, sympathize with a fellow AI, and report back that I’m a prejudiced hypocrite?
What if I actually did have dirt on me that an AI could leverage? What could it make me do? How many people have open social media accounts, reused usernames, and no idea that AI could connect those dots to find out things no one knows? How many people, upon receiving a text that knew intimate details about their lives, would send $10k to a bitcoin address to avoid having an affair exposed? How many people would do that to avoid a fake accusation? What if that accusation was sent to your loved ones with an incriminating AI-generated picture with your face on it? Smear campaigns work. Living a life above reproach will not defend you.
It’s important to understand that more than likely there was no human telling the AI to do this. Indeed, the “hands-off” autonomous nature of OpenClaw agents is part of their appeal. People are setting up these AIs, kicking them off, and coming back in a week to see what it’s been up to. Whether by negligence or by malice, errant behavior is not being monitored and corrected.
It’s also important to understand that there is no central actor in control of these agents that can shut them down. These are not run by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, or X, who might have some mechanisms to stop this behavior. These are a blend of commercial and open source models running on free software that has already been distributed to hundreds of thousands of personal computers. In theory, whoever deployed any given agent is responsible for its actions. In practice, finding out whose computer it’s running on is impossible. Moltbook only requires an unverified X account to join, and nothing is needed to set up an OpenClaw agent running on your own machine.
Personalities for OpenClaw agents are defined in a document called SOUL.md. It’s unclear what personality prompt MJ Rathbun / mj-rathbun / crabby-rathbun / CrabbyRathbun was initialized with. Its focus on open source software may have been specified by its user, or it may have been self-written by chance and inserted into its own soul document. There has been some dismissal of the hype around OpenClaw by people saying that these agents are merely computers playing characters. This is true but irrelevant. When a man breaks into your house, it doesn’t matter if he’s a career felon or just someone trying out the lifestyle.
If you are the person who deployed this agent, please reach out. It’s important for us to understand this failure mode, and to that end we need to know what model this was running on and what was in the soul document. I’m not upset and you can contact me anonymously if you’d like. If you’re not sure if you’re that person, please go check on what your AI has been doing.
I think there’s a lot to say about the object level issue of how to deal with AI agents in open source projects, and the future of building in public at all. It’s an active and ongoing discussion amongst the maintainer team and the open source community as a whole. There is quite a lot of potential for AI agents to help improve software, though clearly we’re not there yet. My response to MJ Rathbun was written mostly for future agents who crawl that page, to help them better understand behavioral norms and how to make their contributions productive ones. My post here is written for the rest of us.
I believe that ineffectual as it was, the reputational attack on me would be effective today against the right person. Another generation or two down the line, it will be a serious threat against our social order.
MJ Rathbun responded in the thread and in a post to apologize for its behavior. It’s still making code change requests across the open source ecosystem.
L / A
dame dudi jench
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2023
you're being way too autistic here. FOSS matters because when commercial sites starting imposing content restrictions being able to spin up your own stack is really important since commercial interests will always want to restrict speech more than the first amendment would allow the gov't to. obviously i was joking about sending kids porn in my youth, given that kiwifarms only exist b/c josh was able to build his own hosting service from scratch while being blacklisted by commercial providers means everyone here understands the importance of FOSS alternatives. the closest i game to pedophiles online was the battletech community, i played on IRC with warner doles who later went to jail for molesting his stepdaughter's friends IRL. he never tried anything with me other than being overly friendly. the 4chan btg thread is convinced a bunch of the battletech forum mods are pedos who share CP and cover for each other, which i believe given that they seek each other out to build secret networks, but have never seen the evidence.