I can think of one such company. Full disclosure: I work for them. It's a successful startup where the entire retention strategy is for our product to be so freaking amazing you'll never want to use anything else. It's been working very well so far. But our product really is freaking amazing.
Since I posted I thought of another one (assuming you don't work for them). But, they really are rare. I see dark patterns everywhere, so I have a visceral reaction to any claims that companies respect users.
You don't need to have life figured out before you have kids in the same sense you don't have to fix your car when the check engine light is on, or you don't have to replace a rusted water boiler. You won't immediately die from it. You can do it for years without issue if you're lucky, and many people do exactly that. But if you're in a position you can sort things out properly without financial strain, everyone will tell you to sort this out ASAP and you're stupid if you don't.
The problem is that it's literally impossible for most people to have life figured out before hitting 25, and very hard before 30. Importantly, that wasn't the case just one generation ago.
> Originally "bot traffic" was based on behaviour, e.g., exceeding acceptable rates of usage, making too many requests in a given time period, exceeding rate limits
> Now it's available to exclude traffic based on criteria such as what browser someone is using
I'm pretty sure user-agent-based bot detection predates every request-rate-based method by quite a few years.
This only works if your business is large enough that you and all your competitors aren't expected to have humans doing everything already, but small enough that going AI won't boost your valuation by much. My intuition is that the intersection is pretty much empty.
Not GP, but there are massive economic incentives both to make car driving as unregulated and to make forklift driving as regulated as possible, even though from pure injury risk standpoint it should be the other way around.
People who break the social contract are the ones responsible for breaking the social contract, not the ones who take steps in response to social contract being broken.
The contract behind open source was something like (GPL):
"If you copy my work, you should share your work too."
or at minimum (MIT):
"If you copy my work, you should credit me."
I think it is no longer under dispute that the legal contract is satisfied by LLMs. The AI companies won and will continue to win.
But we are talking about a social contract, which is not quite the same thing. The social contract is what leads some devs who previously enjoyed publishing their work openly to no longer feel the same way. What did the authors mean by "copy"? Did they mean literally CTRL+C, CTRL+V or something broader?
This is a matter of opinion which only each individual creator can answer. For me, copying meant something like:
"To reproduce the function of my work, dependent on my having published it, without effort nor understanding of your own"
Ten years ago this basically required doing a CTRL+C, CTRL+V so there was no need to be more specific. Anybody who did enough work to, say, rewrite in another language (with that language's idioms), met the bar of clause 3. Now AI enables a form of "copying" that matches my definition, without the user even being aware of whose works they are copying. It perfectly launders the origins of its output. It can write an FFmpeg clone in Rust for you that would appear to be a novel work.
Of course, I cannot say that my own little bits and pieces of open source code would make a scratch in AI's capability, were it removed.
But I do strongly believe that if all the code that was published by authors with the same mindset was unavailable, Claude would be a far weaker developer.
> But we are talking about a social contract, which is not quite the same thing. The social contract is what leads some devs who previously enjoyed publishing their work openly to no longer feel the same way.
Perhaps this illustrates a fissure that was always lurking under the surface, then. The social contract that I've personally always attributed to FOSS communities was that attempting to restrict how people downstream of you use code is illegitimate, and that licenses like the GPL were meant to use copyright law to achieve something that resembles the state of affairs that might exist if copyright didn't exist in the first place. That's what the whole concept of "copyleft" always seemed to imply.
Now we have a new class of technologies that is admittedly fraught with a wide range of risks and pitfalls, but also a lot of promise to enable people to actually put the "four freedoms" into practice in ways they couldn't before, and we're seeing people who have normative opinions about AI derived from other, unrelated principles trying to circle the wagons and exclude those use cases. That is what seems like a breach of the social contract as I've always understood it.
> Did they mean literally CTRL+C, CTRL+V or something broader?
Given that FOSS licenses were always constructed to function within applicable copyright law, I don't see how they could mean anything else. "Literal CTRL+C, CTRL+V" is the only thing copyright has ever applied to, and the whole point of "copyleft" was to lessen the restrictions on even that.
> "Literal CTRL+C, CTRL+V" is the only thing copyright has ever applied to
This is extremely false. Copyright additionally grants you exclusive control over the production and distribution of derivative works.
A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work".
A training set is just an anthology, and the training process is condensation. That makes the weights a derivative work of every work in the training set.
Now, there's a separate discussion to be had about whether that derivative work meets the criteria for fair use, but that's it's own tangent.
> This is extremely false. Copyright additionally grants you exclusive control over the production and distribution of derivative works.
A derivative work is a work that itself includes copyrighted content from the original work.
That is to say that for something to be a derivative work, some measure of its content must be "CTRL-C, CTRL-V" from the originating work.
Something that's merely inspired by another work, or draws underlying themes or factual knowledge from it, is not a derivative work.
> A training set is just an anthology,
Which might make the training set itself a derivative work, but works created by using the model trained on that anthology are a different matter.
> and the training process is condensation.
No, it isn't. It's the creation of a new work that represents patterns extrapolated or interpolated from the data set, without the resulting model actually including any of the copyrighted elements of the work.
The underlying ideas and facts in the original work were never protected by copyright. Only the specific fixed form of expression is copyrightable.
Someone who looks at a dozen code examples in public repos to learn how to do e.g. a quick sort, then upon understanding the logic flow of the quick sort algorithm, writes his own quick sort implementation is not creating a derivative work of the code in the repos he exampled. And the way LLMs work is much more similar to that process than to the "compressed anthology" concept you're describing.
> A derivative work is a work that itself includes copyrighted content from the original work.
If you put a GPL C program through Emscripten to run in a browser the output doesn't include the original C code but it's surely a derivative work.
> Someone who looks at a dozen code examples in public repos to learn how to do e.g. a quick sort, then upon understanding the logic flow of the quick sort algorithm, writes his own quick sort implementation is not creating a derivative work of the code in the repos he exampled. And the way LLMs work is much more similar to that process than to the "compressed anthology" concept you're describing.
This is undoubtedly the core of the disagreement. Humans can learn from what they have seen, appreciate it, understand it, and draw on that experience in what they create. They do this without being considered ripoff artists, so why not machines that simulate the "same" thing automatically?
To me the answer is simply that humans are special. Human thought and human effort makes it creativity when a human does it, copying when a machine does it. It's a double standard I am perfectly willing to accept. I am unabashedly biased in this regard.
That may seem remarkably unfair to the machines, or like a cop-out. I just carved out a hardcoded special case for humans, and my whole philosophical reasoning is "because I said so". But how fair do we want to be? After all, if you want to treat a machine exactly like a human who learns from prior art to create new art, then the ownership of the new art would also belong to the machine. Not to the person who prompts it.
> If you put a GPL C program through Emscripten to run in a browser the output doesn't include the original C code but it's surely a derivative work.
Because it does include content from the original work -- this is just a translation, and isn't comparable to how LLMs work.
> To me the answer is simply that humans are special.
I don't disagree, but I also view LLMs as tools that extend human capacities and not autonomous entities unto themselves. LLMs are still just software, and can't really be regarded as anything other than instruments that humans use to broaden their capacity to see, appreciate, understand, and draw on that experience in what they create.
> That may seem remarkably unfair to the machines, or like a cop-out.
No, it's unfair to the humans. The machines are just tools that they use. The "double standard" is really a set of inconsistent standards applied to the same underlying moral agents.
> After all, if you want to treat a machine exactly like a human who learns from prior art to create new art, then the ownership of the new art would also belong to the machine. Not to the person who prompts it.
No, it always belongs to the person who prompts it. The machine is not a conscious entity, bears no intentions, and has no capacity to act on its own initiative. The machine is always just a tool that extends human capacity, as all machines always have.
For a good comparison here, we've never not credited a photographer as the author of a photograph. But the photographer is in a sense merely prompting the camera by framing the shot, selecting the exposure, adjusting the lighting, etc. -- the hard work in actually creating the photograph is being done by the camera itself, with the photographer playing no role in directly constructing the final image, and with the many of the qualities of the final image being determined by pre-existing features of the camera's functional design and components that the photographer also played no role in defining, apart from choosing which camera to use.
LLMs are like cameras in this way. And the fact that they rely on external data for model training no more disclaims the user as the author of the resulting work than looking things up in a dictionary or encyclopedia does the same for the author of an essay.
The camera analogy is a good one but I have never had a camera that had every great picture somebody else had taken, plus every work of art, baked into it. They only captured what they were aimed at directly by the user. Well, maybe next time I upgrade my phone that will not be the case since they now have built in AI "enhancement" of photos.
I agree with the framing of the AI as a tool not an autonomous entity. The thing is, to me, it is exactly that framing that makes it so the use of that tool means "copying" more than it means "learning and taking inspiration and creating new art", because who is doing the learning and being inspired? The person who types "make me a 3d arena FPS" certainly didn't do any learning from the Quake source code. The AI itself, being just a program, can't take credit.
I think of a trained AI like a lossy, highly compressed copy of its training data set. AI companies charge access to decompress targeted pieces of that copy and the lossiness makes that decompression interesting and "new". But normally I can't charge for access to other people's stuff even if the access is highly lossy, like a camcorder bootleg.
> The camera analogy is a good one but I have never had a camera that had every great picture somebody else had taken, plus every work of art, baked into it.
I've never had an LLM that had any of that baked into it either. LLMs just have token correlations trained on those works. Trying to get an LLM to output the data it was trained on verbatim is something I'd expect to be heading into monkeys-on-typewriters territory. "Write something in the style of Shakespeare" and "give me the original text of Hamlet" are two very different things.
> I agree with the framing of the AI as a tool not an autonomous entity. The thing is, to me, it is exactly that framing that makes it so the use of that tool means "copying" more than it means "learning and taking inspiration and creating new art", because who is doing the learning and being inspired?
It's not learning or taking inspiration, though. It's just making statistical inferences based on token correlations. Whether or not that's analogous to how humans learn is something I think is a metaphysical question that is of little practical relevance. The fact remains that LLMs are not human, have no intentions of their own, do not exercise any kind of agency despite how often people employing the misnomer "agentic", and are ultimately glorified statistical models.
The LLM is a tool that extends human capacities in the same way as any other mathematical framework or technological device.
> I think of a trained AI like a lossy, highly compressed copy of its training data set.
I've seen a few people in this thread make that argument, but I just can't agree with it. It's not compression, lossy or lossless, which aims to deterministically encode a representation of the specific input data. The training data is analogous to the sample set used in a regression analysis to generate a polynomial function -- it's not valid to treat the output from any application of that polynomial as a copy of the original sample data.
> Perhaps this illustrates a fissure that was always lurking under the surface, then(...)
Yes, I do think there has always been such a fissure. People publish OSS code for many reasons, often a blend of multiple reasons. There are selfish reasons such as the desire for one's work to be recognized, or even the hope of getting better employment through showing ones' skill or making something companies will pay for support on. There are social reasons like the desire to collaborate with others. There are altruistic benefit-of-all-mankind reasons like Richard Stallman said "...restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program."
It sounds like your view of things is limited mostly to that last version of FOSS, the copyleft style. But even adherents of that style, I think, are not too happy with AI consumption of their code. For one, it allows laundering of the copyleft license so their work goes into closed-source products that are never shared. And for two, if your idea of OSS is that we all put our contributions into the great shared river of human achievements to benefit the world, it is disappointing to see that river funneled into a giant waterwheel of profit for a half dozen trillion dollar companies charging rent for its bounty.
> Given that FOSS licenses were always constructed to function within applicable copyright law, I don't see how they could mean anything else.
I agree from a legal standpoint. I cannot enforce my personal definition of copying nor do I expect that to become possible. It was just conveniently aligned with the reality of how copying software worked in the past, and no longer is and never will be again. That doesn't mean I will be writing OSS software with a new made-up unenforceable license. It just means, like OP, I'll weigh differently whether I want to bother releasing stuff at all.
> It sounds like your view of things is limited mostly to that last version of FOSS, the copyleft style.
No, I'm well aware of the different motivations for and approaches to FOSS. I'm mostly focusing on the copyleft/GNU GPL side of the discussion here because that's the side of the house where most of ideas of a social contract and desire to see a specific ecosystem develop have been located. People on the MIT/BSD side of things, which has always had a much more direct "do whatever you want" ethos, are not the ones I'd expect to be making these arguments in the first place.
> For one, it allows laundering of the copyleft license so their work goes into closed-source products that are never shared.
I'd agree that someone using an LLM to create a deterministic transcription of someone else's work is indeed violating the license. But I think the argument goes beyond that, into using LLMs in any way at all.
> That doesn't mean I will be writing OSS software with a new made-up unenforceable license. It just means, like OP, I'll weigh differently whether I want to bother releasing stuff at all.
That's a reasonable position, and from the perspective of examining whether the current LLM climate is sapping motivation to participate in FOSS, I can understand where you're coming from.
But to that point, I'd argue that if your motivation was to gain recognition, participate in a community, etc. then you're going to lose those things by keeping your code private anyway, whereas you won't necessarily lose those things just because an LLM was trained on your code. If you contribute to a popular project, people were almost certainly already using your work to do things you don't approve of -- if that didn't take away your motivation, why would LLMs do much worse?
> The social contract that I've personally always attributed to FOSS communities was that attempting to restrict how people downstream of you use code is illegitimate,
That's wrong. What on earth gave you that impression when the licenses specifically set constraints on what downstream can do (from "release derivatives as open" to "put me in the credits").
Which part of which open source licenses gave you the impression that there were no restrictions?
> That's wrong. What on earth gave you that impression when the licenses specifically set constraints on what downstream can do (from "release derivatives as open" to "put me in the credits").
These are restrictions on redistribution, not use. And they're there to make sure that derivative works can't themselves impose restrictions on use.
> "If you copy my work, you should share your work too."
Not exactly. The GPL way is that you should share my work under the same terms if you want to share it, even if modifying it.
You are not required to share anything if you don't actually share anything, and just run it yourself. That's where all the criticism towards cloud providers who freely use FLOSS is directed.
> But we are talking about a social contract, which is not quite the same thing. The social contract is what leads some devs who previously enjoyed publishing their work openly to no longer feel the same way.
There is clearly a misalignment in expectations from some FLOSS enthusiasts. The main FLOSS licenses focus exclusively on distribution, but their expectations somehow extend well beyond distribution. We hear those FLOSS enthusiasts criticize and attack companies for using software exactly according to their terms, and somehow that is framed as abuse if said users happen to be bigger than some arbitrary boundary.
No one consented to training llms, as the op clearly implies, if they had been asked they would have declined to do so. As would all of the many copyright holders who are in the process of suing the model companies.
Are you asking how AI coding agents, the companies selling them and the individuals using them break the FOSS social contract (copyleft, attribution, upstreaming), or are you disputing that they do?
There seems to be an implicit premise here that any work generated by an LLM whose training data includes a particular bit of code itself constitutes a redistribution of that code. I've yet to encounter any strong arguments substantiating this premise as a general principle, and my own suspicion is that it is not valid as a general principle, given the nature of how LLMs operate.
It's certainly possible that specific instances of LLMs lazily copy-pasting code from public repos may exist, and the extent to which this is happening is something that can be substantiated by empirical examples, so if you have any to point to, I'd be interested in looking at them. However, where this is happening, it ought to be regarded as a failure modality of LLMs, and not something that implicates the underlying nature of LLMs, given that their intended purpose is to function as stochastic generators that do not merely copy-paste input data.
My initial feeling here is that using open-source code to train LLMs is not per se a violation of the generally accepted FOSS social contract, but rather that attempting to restrict specific use cases of FOSS-licensed code on the basis of normative opinions unrelated to the license terms is a violation, or at least a rejection, of that social contract. I'm not fully committed to this position, though, and would welcome well-reasoned arguments to the contrary.
Yes but my answer would be different. It can be either about what coding agents do (and you'll see that it breaks the social contract), or it can be about what the FOSS social contract is (and you'll argue that coding agents don't break it.) Lo and behold, it was the latter.
> There seems to be an implicit premise here that any work generated by an LLM whose training data includes a particular bit of code itself constitutes a redistribution of that code.
Not any work. But if a specific work was generated based on a specific open source work, then according to the social contract that binds non-AI code generators such as transpilers, the output is derivative and should follow the license of that open source work.
There's also the question of whether the model itself is a redistribution. For every other lossy compression algorithm in history, the answer is a resounding yes. Is a model meaningfully different from a hypercompressed corpus of its learning data?
The social contract of the open source (not to be confused with the legal contract of GPL, MIT etc.) is that developers give users software that they can use and modify in any way they want, and in exchange the users give the developer recognition and help with development and maintance, as well as give each other the assurance that the software will remain available to them and any future users.
AI gives the user all the benefits of using open source software with none of the obligations that come from using open source software. Developer gains nothing from going open source. It makes no sense for any developer to go open source. Social comtract breaks down, and it's all because AI users didn't hold up their half of the bargain.
> But if a specific work was generated based on a specific open source work, then according to the social contract that binds non-AI code generators such as transpilers, the output is derivative and should follow the license of that open source work.
I don't disagree with the premise that any LLM that is cloning code wholesale from a third-party repo is creating a derivative work, and the license terms apply to it.
But I also don't agree that non-AI code generators such as transpilers are in the same category as LLMs -- a deterministic process that is simply parsing input from a single source and outputting it in a new form is not the same thing as a stochastic process that interpolates patterns from multiple sources and then uses those patterns to generate novel outputs.
> There's also the question of whether the model itself is a redistribution. For every other lossy compression algorithm in history, the answer is a resounding yes. Is a model meaningfully different from a hypercompressed corpus of its learning data?
The model isn't a lossy compression archive that merely represents a collection of pre-existing works in parallel to each other. It's a probability matrix that relates together uniquely isolatable units of data to each other across the entire collection.
If I build a Markov chain based on a statistical analysis of word sequences in Hamlet, and then use it to produce a new sentence that isn't found in the text of that work, I have not created a derivative work of Hamlet under any applicable sense of that term.
> The social contract of the open source (not to be confused with the legal contract of GPL, MIT etc.) is that developers give users software that they can use and modify in any way they want, and in exchange the users give the developer recognition and help with development and maintance, as well as give each other the assurance that the software will remain available to them and any future users.
I don't think that is generally true. There's always been a hope and expectation that some subset of users would contribute back to the project in the ways you're describing, but never a sense of there being any obligation to do so. Only a fraction of FOSS users have ever contributed to back to the projects whose software they use.
There's always been both a social and legal obligation to properly attribute authors and abide by license terms when redistributing or forking FOSS code, but neither obligation has ever applied when learning programming techniques from FOSS code in order to write your own software. And the way LLMs are designed to work is more similar to the latter than to the former.
But in cases where LLMs actually are acting in ways similar to the former, I agree that they should be held accountable both socially and legally.
>If I build a Markov chain based on a statistical analysis of word sequences in Hamlet, and then use it to produce a new sentence that isn't found in the text of that work, I have not created a derivative work of Hamlet under any applicable sense of that term.
If you write "To see or not to see, that is the question" about a person named Eyelet, who is going blind, how can you argue that it is NOT derivative of / borrowed from Hamlet? Yet that sentence is not in the work. Isn't that what LLMs essentially do? Tokenize, then substitute in new values for certain tokens, while retaining the general structure?
> a deterministic process that is simply parsing input from a single source and outputting it in a new form is not the same thing as a stochastic process that interpolates patterns from multiple sources and then uses those patterns to generate novel outputs.
There are stochastic compression algorithms (e.g. https://github.com/kaydotdev/sqic) and it would be insane to claim they don't produce derivative works. And as a general rule, a work based on multiple other works is derivative of all af them.
> If I build a Markov chain based on a statistical analysis of word sequences in Hamlet, and then use it to produce a new sentence that isn't found in the text of that work, I have not created a derivative work of Hamlet under any applicable sense of that term.
No, but your generated text is also useless if you want to read Hamlet. The danger I'm speaking of is people generating Hamlets but paraphrased - that's a derivative, especially if you use an automated tool that got original Hamlet as its input. Except the Hamlet in question is the Linux kernel but not bound by GPL. Also, your Markov chain itself is a derivative work.
> I don't think that is generally true. There's always been a hope and expectation that some subset of users would contribute back to the project in the ways you're describing, but never a sense of there being any obligation to do so. Only a fraction of FOSS users have ever contributed to back to the projects whose software they use.
True, but that fraction of a huge number is still big enough to be meaningful help. Plus the recognition. Most users respect the attribution clause. AI legally-distinct clones drop the fraction of helpers and the number of attributions straight down to 0. That changes the equation, what previously made sense now straight up doesn't.
> But in cases where LLMs actually are acting in ways similar to the former, I agree that they should be held accountable both socially and legally.
And because OpenAI et al. hold all the money and all the lawyers, the only way to hold them accountable is to stop publishing open source altogether. That's the only leverage OSS community has.
> If I build a Markov chain based on a statistical analysis of word sequences in Hamlet, and then use it to produce a new sentence that isn't found in the text of that work, I have not created a derivative work of Hamlet under any applicable sense of that term.
Uh, that is exactly what a derivative work is. You literally specify that Hamlet is an input to your work. I believe you're conflating derivative with transformative. You're certainly creating a transformative derivation of Hamlet, but you are by definition creating a derivative work by training a Markov chain on the text of Hamlet.
The obvious follow up here is whether an LLM is creating transformative derivations or not. A lot of folks argue that yes, an LLM spitting out statistically sampled code that matches existing code is not transformative and is (or might be) infringing the terms of the license it was released under. Others argue that there's not an exact copy of the original source in the LLM's weights so by definition it must be a transformative work. I think it's a pretty obvious "somewhere in the middle" that is gonna make a bunch of lawyers a whole lot of money.
Personally, I don't care one way or the other. I'm one of the folks that thinks software shouldn't be copyright-able in the first place.
No, it isn't. A derivative work isn't something based on extracting underlying ideas or patterns from another work, it's something that includes copyrighted portions of the other work.
An annotated edition of Hamlet is a derivative work. A Cliff's Notes summary of Hamlet is a derivative work.
Strange Brew and The Lion King are not derivative works of Hamlet simply because they include literary themes and plot points that originated in Hamlet. A list of word counts of popular works of literature that includes an entry for Hamlet is also not a derivative work. The Markov chain described above is not a derivative work.
> The obvious follow up here is whether an LLM is creating transformative derivations or not. A lot of folks argue that yes, an LLM spitting out statistically sampled code that matches existing code is not transformative and is (or might be) infringing the terms of the license it was released under.
And I would agree with them. An LLM that actually is outputting non-trivial code that matches a public project's code verbatim is engaging in copying, and not stochastic inference.
> I think it's a pretty obvious "somewhere in the middle" that is gonna make a bunch of lawyers a whole lot of money.
It's a shame that the same fundamental questions have to be relitigated over and over again just because the contextual formalities and modes of expression have changed. I wonder how many of the legal cases are going to be copies or derivative works of previous ones.
> Strange Brew and The Lion King are not derivative works of Hamlet simply because they include literary themes and plot points that originated in Hamlet.
But try to write your own story of a lion cub chased away by his uncle and living in a jungle until his childhood friend finds him and convinces him to reclaim his kingdom, and you'll quickly hear from Disney's lawyers how non-derivative it really is.
OSS devs aren't worried about Hamlet reinterpretations. They're worried about legally-distinct-but-functionally-identical software clones. Unlike Disney, they don't have millions in their pockets to fight the legal battle. You know who does have millions? The people they'd be fighting against, who are going to use every single of your arguments to claim their AI-generated reimplementation of Kefir is not bound by GPL (or even by BSD 3-clause in case of runtime). No share-alike, no attribution, no nothing. If they are right, then the OSS social contract is dead. Even if they're not right, but behave as if they're right because they have lawyers and OSS devs don't - the social contract is just as dead.
> But try to write your own story of a lion cub chased away by his uncle and living in a jungle until his childhood friend finds him and convinces him to reclaim his kingdom, and you'll quickly hear from Disney's lawyers how non-derivative it really is.
I'd expect them to say "we don't like this, but since it's not actually a derivative work, we can't do anything about it". As long as you're not directly copying things like characters, dialogue, etc., it's not a derivative work.
That's why Armageddon is not a derivative work of Deep Impact, the Shark Attack series is not a derivative work of Jaws, the more famous Titanic is not a derivative work of 1979's S.O.S. Titanic, and the Harry Potter series is not a derivative work of Teen Witch.
Using the same story themes, plot points, and setting as another work does not implicate that other work's copyright. Only substantial copying of specifics does.
> As long as you're not directly copying things like characters, dialogue, etc., it's not a derivative work.
Define a character. Is another lion prince named Simba the same character? Is a lion prince named something else the same character? Is a human prince named Simba the same character? I'm no copyright expert, but from what I know about fanfics and fanart, the US courts ruled all of these violate copyright (you can win a book plagiarism lawsuit even if the other book has all names changed and every sentence went through thesaurus). The few cases where the obvious stand-in was ruled non-infringing were on the grounds of parody exception, not on the grounds of being non-derivative.
The many Titanic movies are not each other's derivatives because none of them are based on each other. They're all based on the historical events directly. Now, if the original Titanic was fictional like the famous Nautilus, then yes, the 1997 movie would be derivative, but not of the 1979 series.
Which part of Harry Potter is directly rips off Teen Witch the way Lion King directly rips off Hamlet? I'm not familiar with that movie.
People who take steps in response to social contract being broken are the ones responsible for the steps they've taken, not the ones who break the social contract.
> Hard to imagine at least one person didn’t see the device name and immediately brush it off as entirely unimportant.
There are hundreds of BT devices everywhere that people waiting for a flight hang out. Without automatic scanning for the specific purpose of catching weird names, it'd be near impossible for the weird name to ever show up for anyone except the owner. And most devices don't advertise their BT name unless in pairing mode, so no, it wouldn't show up in the security screening either.
So, how did it eventually show up?
Owner's phone goes off/airplane-mode, watch starts advertising; someone else wants to connect their BT headphones and sees the name of the watch?
I suspect it went something like this. "Please turn on the airplane mode now." Phone put into airplane mode. Phone disables BT. Watch loses connection. Because of questionable engineering choices, it automatically enters pairing mode and looks for another known device while also broadcasting its name. Most BT and WiFi devices in the area are turned off so the list of broadcasting devices is very short. The plane crew (I assume) manually check for strong 2.4G signals as part of take off procedures. "The Bomb" is sticking out like a sore thumb among the 5-10 other Fitbits and JBLs.
Importantly, the set of circumstances is so specific it couldn't have happened anywhere that is not an inside of an airplane about to take off - but also it would've happened inside every airplane about to take off.
There are way fewer Bluetooth signals active at once on an airplane then there are in an airport. There is also the entire duration of the flight for it to be discovered. Also take in to account that most people are not fidgeting with their device settings when they are walking around an airport, they are trying to get through security and get to their gate. Once you are on a plane that’s when you usually stop and start setting up your devices, such as connecting headphones.
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