Malus – Clean Room as a Service

> sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision

I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding leads to direct worse consequences.

Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding increases the risk of accident and especially the consequences of an accident.

I don't trust people to drive well in a stressful situation, so why would it be a good idea to let them increase the risk by speeding.

The worst part is that it's not even all that likely that the time saved by speeding ends up mattering.

> Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code.

For this to be plausible satire, they need to show how they've trained their models to code, without mit, apache, bsd or GPL/agpl code being in the training set...

Couldn't this be done on proprietary software as well? Have an agent fuzz an interface (any type) for every bit of functionality and document it. Then have it build based on the document?

From their front page:

>*Full legal indemnification: *Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright*

Heh, ok. So, the thinking is:

1. You contract them.

2. The actual Copyright infringement is done by an __offshore__ company.

3. If you get sued by the original software devs, you seek indemnification from the offshore subsidiary.

4. That offshore subsidiary is in a country without copyright laws or with weak laws so "you're good!"

...

5. Profit.

This is a ridiculous legal defense since this "one-way-street" legal process will almost certainly result in you being sued first... the company actually using the infringing code.

The indemnification is likely worthless since the offshore company won't have any assets anyway and will dissolve once there's a lawsuit and legal process is established.

The "guarantee" is absurd: Their "MalusCorp Guarantee" promises a refund and moving headquarters to international waters if infringement is found. This is not a real legal remedy and is written to sound like a joke, which is telling about their seriousness...

This whole "clean room as a service" concept is a legal gray area at best. In practice, it's extremely difficult to prove tha ta "clean room" process was truly clean, especially with AI models that have been trained on vast amounts of existing code (including the very projects they are "recreating").

The indemnification is a marketing gimmick to make a legally dangerous service seem safe. It creates a facade of protection while ensuring that any financial liability stays with you, the customer who wants to avoid infringement .

The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this doesn't cause a lot of damage in practice (though it can be abused), but if you start enforcing the letter of every law precisely it suddenly becomes the obligation of every citizen to know every law — in a de facto way, rather than just the de jure way we currently have as a consequence of ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’. So an increase of precision in law enforcement must be preceded by a drastic simplification of the law itself — not a bad thing by any means, but also not an easy (or, perhaps, possible) task.