But copyright infringement is a legal wrong (a civil liability).
Is what they're doing infringing on a copyrighted work? Or does it fail to uphold license terms? Many open source licenses have some amount of attribution as a requirement, so that'd be something to consider.
I genuinely believe more people violate permissive licenses than copyleft license. I have no data to back this up, but just look at how much people focused on if LLMs were violating the GPL by reproducing code covered by the GPL without reproducing the license. If LLMs violate the GPL, they violate all licenses besides ones that are effectively public domain.
This probably depends on country, but AFAIK in most of europe, even in public domain, the „you can’t pass another’s work as your own” part of copyright is still active and doesn’t expire.
This piques my interest, what is the legally required recognition of a derivative's parent work? Must I be able to list dependencies, or should I be able to verify whether a parent work is included in mine? What if my work is a second derivative of a work which I am unaware of, because the work in between improperly didn't recognise its parent? Am I legally responsible to investigate such cases?
AI is actually beginning to encourage "restricted source", public-only-gets-binary debates to simply avoid such legal issues.
Write a snail-mail letter to get the real sources. Repositories are private with a small well-vetted list of contributors. Also avoid slop-PR headaches that away.
If you were licensing MIT, ostensibly it’s not the copying you care about, just the attribution. There is always the option to turn off prs, or even distribute code without using github.
Sorry, this sounds like the absolutely worst idea ever. The way to kill open source as such. Sloppy PRs will end when the idiot HRs release there is no value in them. Plagiarism isn't really anything new and AI doesn't really change much there. But adding friction to examining source is a sure way to make no one care to contribute.
Honest question, what are "HR"s? I only know that acronym for "Human Resources" and I don't understand how that has anything to do with code contribution
Activity on github - must be a productive programmer. Have a thousand issues open - definitely a hire. I'm not talking about the Valley, but in India, as well as some some backwaters in the West that's how it seems to be. Talk about misaligned incentives.
But copyright infringement is a legal wrong (a civil liability).
Is what they're doing infringing on a copyrighted work? Or does it fail to uphold license terms? Many open source licenses have some amount of attribution as a requirement, so that'd be something to consider.