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A comment on Synaptics Appears to Use Legal Threats to Block Open-Source DisplayLink Driver. Parent comment

Re:Synaptics Appears to Use Legal Threats to Block Open-Sour... by Orygin on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @11:09AM (#50367625)
> Unless you have hard evidence the particular bit of code you want to RE was not in the training set, you should not use an LLM to reverse-engineer or rewrite it.

Wouldn't that be on Synaptics to prove? And with how protective they seem to be of their IP, I doubt their code is in the training set

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Re:Synaptics Appears to Use Legal Threats to Block Open-Sour... by kmeisthax on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @11:18AM (#50367774)
Yes, but I'm giving the "defendant's lawyer" opinion. In reality, you can be completely tainted and still do good RE work, but proving that in a court of law will be harder.

And furthermore, the real victory is not in the courts; the real victory is staying out of the courts to begin with. If you win in court, you still lost huge sums of money. And a lot of staying out of court boils down to restricting one's conduct to things a plaintiff's lawyer would counsel against suing for. Hence why most legal opinions in the FOSS space are unusually conservative (while still, occasionally, just being completely off-base).

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