Език: English
As part of the patent bargain, patents are publicly available technical knowledge disclosed against the promise of government-backed monopoly over the claimed invention. That means that anyone can read a patent but no one, except for the rights holder, could lawfully practice the invention for fear of infringement. In the old days, patent infringement was relatively easy to avoid for individual developers and small teams as reading on well engineered solutions required time and resource they seldom had. Fast forward to the age of coding agents, vibe coding and AI-assisted development, more generally, the friction of implementation has decreased significantly, all the while increasing the risk of patent infringement. AI has now made it trivial for even non-technical teams to ship sophisticated features in their software products. Many of these features might inadvertently read on patents which have been ingested by the underlying large language models (LLMs) in the form of training data. As the liability for patent infringement does not generally depend on intent, whether the infringing act was committed intentionally or not does not determine whether infringement has occurred. In this talk, we’re going to explore what that means for individual developers, companies and open source communities, and how each of those groups can better prepare to prevent infringement.