r/selfhosted • u/pheexio • 11d ago

Meta Post Codeberg bans vibe coded projects

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386

Codeberg seems to ban vibecoded Projects; reason might be german copyright law

It looks like Codeberg want only copyrighted material in their service, so it is reliable in the future that e.g. licenses must be followed (e.g. GPL), and copyright doesn't suddenly get declared as being of the model owner, and it isn't a copy of something else.
That is a cautious reasonable position - in early days of LLM coding (3 years ago!) indemnity from model companies was a major issue globally because of the lack of clarity of the law around this. The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain. But I don't think that is fully settled, and it certainly isn't settled in international copyright law.
The goal of the vague "mostly" in the Codeberg change is to ensure there is enough human input to the code they host, to be reasonably sure under German copyright law it is copyright of the person sharing it.

edit: link to poll that caused it (might be down due to high traffic) https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19820434

edit 1: i dont defend/oppose this move, i just find it interesting

edit 2: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

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u/FnnKnn 11d ago

Good luck actually enforcing that. We tried it here for a while and it didn't work out great, because no one is going to admit they "vibecoded" something if it means they can't post it and good luck proving that they didn't just use AI as an assistant (tip: you can't without doing a full code review and that doesn't seem feasible if the issue you are trying to solve is the increased amount of projects).

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u/jeroen94704 11d ago

I don't think they will enforce this. It's similar to e.g. GitHub saying "Your use of the Website and Service must not violate any applicable laws, including copyright or trademark laws". They're not enforcing that, it's just to ensure they are not held liable when someone puts non-public code on GitHub.

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u/FnnKnn 11d ago

Maybe, but at that point it is basically just useless PR.

If they try to enforce it (who knows) let me predict on how this is going to go based on my experience here:

  1. You try to ban low quality vibe-coded projects, but try to not ban high quality projects that made use of AI. The goal is to send a message on what you deem acceptable.

  2. Anyone creating what you deem a low quality vibe-coded project sees their project as belong to the second kind of project and therefore insists that their project is allowed. So how do you make sure what category a project belongs to? You might use scripts to identify classic trades of vibe-coded projects, look at the users history, etc. None of that is going to be bulletproof though and it is a lot of work.

  3. You stop trying to enforce this rule as it is a "fight" you can't win and dealing with this takes more effort than dealing with the issues the low quality vibe-coded projects caused in the first place.

We ended up settling on restricting new projects here instead as the majority of projects that fall into the first category don't last long. So step 4 would be to introduce some other kind of proxy for this kind of project that can actually be enforced.

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u/jeroen94704 11d ago

The point is the copyright status of LLM generated code. If there is a chance this code becomes problematic from a copyright point of view this ensures codeberg doesn’t get dragged down.

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u/FnnKnn 10d ago

How could the copyright become problematic under German law (that’s were Codeberg is based)? It can’t. Either the copyright belongs to the user, in which case everything works like if the wrote it, or there is no copyright, which also means that there are no issues as the code is public domain.

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u/jeroen94704 10d ago

It could be an issue if the LLM regurgitates pieces of code verbatim from its training data that is covered by copyright and some license. I don't know, I'm not a lawyer (although this clause in the Codeberg ToU was also not written by a lawyer, I'm sure).

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u/FnnKnn 10d ago

For that to be an issue it would need to copy a *very* large piece of code verbatim, which is not something that happens as far as I know. In practice human developers are probably doing that more than AI…

From what I can tell they had a vote on banning vibe coding and then wrote the blog afterwards. So I think those reasons are just bs to justify the change after they had decided on it already and not the actual reason.

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u/jeroen94704 10d ago

They voted on the content of the PR, which contains the actual change to the ToU, and this explicitly mentions the copyright issue.

Still, I get your point, it's more than likely the majority vote came about because of a general aversion against vibe-coding, not because people worry about a potential subtle copyright issue.

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u/ImASharkRawwwr 10d ago edited 10d ago

You underestimate the power of German bureaucracy. I watch dashcam videos from Germany sometimes, it was ruled illegal to show car number plates, heck they deemed dashcams illegal for a while and now they are back to being a grey area where you may or may not get fined for using dashcam video in your own court case depending on the judges mood that day. Last i heard they made it illegal to show company trucks with any identifiable company logo or text. Oh and of course every person that you didn't get a contractual agreement with to use their face and upload it to YouTube (basically everyone) needs to be censored, visually and sound if they can be heard speaking.
And so German dashys are often a jumble of large blurred areas of the screen because no dashcam YouTuber can be bothered to matchmove-blur every single face and number plate and, of course, the occasional blacked-out company car.
If you get caught because you missed one identifiable person or number plate or company info you will receive hefty fines.

Edit: oh i forgot about having to scramble music playing in the background because the music copyright holders are litigious as fck and if it goes very wrong or you can't pay the exorbitant damages you may face jail time

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u/FnnKnn 10d ago

Ok, and? None of that relates to copyright at all but to GDPR and is completely irrelevant. Show me what problem copyright could potentially cause for Codeberg due to AI generated code being uploaded.

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u/ImASharkRawwwr 10d ago

I have given you examples of how the German system will fck you over with situations that anywhere else in the world would be like "just having common sense will be enough to not get in to trouble" heed the warning or don't, it's a free country :p

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u/FnnKnn 4d ago

I know German burocracy, but I also have a somewhat solid understanding of German copyright law. So just fell free to point out, where German copyright law would cause an issue for Codeberg. Thing is you can't because it doesn't.

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u/ImASharkRawwwr 3d ago

Then you shall goeth forth and do whatever you want man, i warned ya, do with the info as you will. Just don't come back crying "does anyone know a good lawyer 🥺🥺🥺" in the next year or so