Then it isn’t a duplicate.
Yes I admit I probably should not have used the word duplicate as that word is a little too strong. But what I'm saying is virtually any mod that has ever been published is pretty easy to "insert best work here" And capture the same functionality without copying the mod exactly. As I said I made my own bot Analysis and blocker which I internally call traffic radar that works great. It took me maybe 30 minutes to get it up and running and then I've made incremental changes all using AI.
The question I have for you is this: Why?
For example, I released this for free to run on your forum, and respond to everything anyone ever raises:
If your idea is to ask AI to go and make a mod - go for it - and you are right, the general idea is not protect. Techniques / methods might be, so, be careful that you haven't given a copy of someone elses code that is not open source as 'inspiration' for said AI.
The question I have for you is this: Why?
For example, I released this for free to run on your forum, and respond to everything anyone ever raises:
If your idea is to ask AI to go and make a mod - go for it - and you are right, the general idea is not protect. Techniques / methods might be, so, be careful that you haven't given a copy of someone elses code that is not open source as 'inspiration' for said AI.
Yes that's very good that you did that. It's good that you made it available to everyone. Perhaps at the time I should have researched a little bit more but I didn't find that or I didn't realize it was free or something like that. And my question to you is what would be wrong with Xenforo Starting to build some protections into their software based on your mod? Does the idea that the mod has been released prevent them from doing that? I'm not judging either way. I'm just curious how you feel about it
What interesting thing I did that I'm not sure if your mod does it is I have Codex Running a scheduled task every day to look at the traffic and make modifications where needed, basically just turn a few knobs here and there as the traffic patterns can change. It kind of brought some joy back to me after having so much trouble with bots using up my resources. I'm sure your mod has helped a lot of people if I don't plan to release mine. I'm just glad I've got a handle on things now.
I would have no issue with XenForo building stronger bot protections into the core. In fact, I would welcome it. The purpose of XF Bot Guard is to protect forums, not to claim ownership over the general idea of detecting and challenging suspicious bots.
The distinction is what you mean by “based on”. If XenForo independently develops its own implementation that achieves similar results, that is perfectly reasonable. The existence of my add-on should not prevent XenForo from improving its own product.
However, free does not mean open source or public domain. Taking my code, feeding it to an AI, or closely reproducing unique parts of the implementation without permission would be a very different matter.
It is also worth recognising that an add-on is not always “just code”. In this case, it includes techniques, industry knowledge, operational experience and ongoing research into a threat environment that changes constantly. What works against today’s bots may not work against tomorrow’s.
That may also make this a larger commitment for XenForo than simply adding a feature. Bot detection and mitigation is a specialised area to develop, maintain and support, and it requires continuous attention.
There is also a wider ecosystem issue. If XenForo simply copied the code, techniques or distinctive implementations of add-on developers whenever an add-on became useful or successful, the incentive to build for XenForo would disappear very quickly. The add-on community would be dead overnight, because developers would have no reason to invest their time, expertise and money into creating products that could later be absorbed without permission or compensation.
So no, an add-on should not prevent XenForo from independently improving the core. But blindly copying the work of its developers would ultimately damage the very ecosystem that makes XenForo more valuable.
Importantly:
For example, I don’t believe there are many forum platforms where you can install a single add-on and effectively eliminate unwanted bots while retaining complete control over which legitimate bots are allowed. XenForo has that capability available today. That is an asset to XenForo and its customers, regardless of who authored it.
You can't copyright an idea or code. It's only if you literally took a piece of software, changed some code around, but otherwise used the original work. That is copyright. Writing the same thing from scratch, is not copyright.
Not copyright. You have to actually use their code. Their idea is not subject to copyright. If ideas were copyright, we would have one forum software, that's it. Code can only be written so many ways to do a similar thing.
This I agree completely with you about. Why? If you have a developer doing something that improves the original software, supporting their development, improving it, etc etc, then why as the original software developer get involved in that? Now this has happened a couple of times here at Xenforo, but they were good ideas that solved legitimate basic issues in XF, so XF designed them into the software. Again, not copyright, they wrote their own code from an existing addon idea that did the same thing. XF have been extremely limited in doing this over all this time, and that is the correct approach IMHO, which supports the users for a limited important function set, and the developers themselves.
Just to clarify, I wasn’t suggesting that an idea or general method is protected by copyright. My wording was imprecise because I was referring to intellectual-property protection more broadly: source code may be protected by copyright, while particular technical inventions or methods may, in some circumstances, be protected by patents.
I agree that independently creating your own implementation of the same general idea is not, by itself, copyright infringement. My caution was specifically about giving someone else’s source code to an AI as “inspiration” and asking it to recreate their work. The resulting code could inadvertently reproduce protected code, or identifiable fragments of it, closely enough to raise a copyright issue. Separately, it could also implement something covered by an existing patent.
These are the kinds of dangers I am thinking about, around some of the earlier suggestions in this thread.
Yep, exactly agreed on this. Typically when there is an add-on ecosystem to any software product, it is pretty taboo for the main software title to just copy it - even indirectly, as the relationship is symbiotic. There are exceptions to this, of course, but generally speaking - this is right on point.
OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched 'unprecedented' cyber-attack
It is one of the first publicly disclosed cyber-attacks carried out by AI without direct human involvement.
www.bbc.co.uk
Why not just use this? It's not an AI add-on, doesn't have any bugs, and is made to handle high traffic forums...
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The question I have for you is this: Why?
For example, I released this for free to run on your forum, and respond to everything anyone ever raises:
If your idea is to ask AI to go and make a mod - go for it - and you are right, the general idea is not protect. Techniques / methods might be, so, be careful that you haven't given a copy of someone elses code that is not open source as 'inspiration' for said AI.
Why not just use this? It's not an AI add-on, doesn't have any bugs, and is made to handle high traffic forums...
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I love this thread. These are fantastic addons
I can vouch for this one. Support is amazing and it works perfectly.Why not just use this? It's not an AI add-on, doesn't have any bugs, and is made to handle high traffic forums...
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Over time there's been a growing expectation that even with free add-ons, those who use the add-on should get free support, and they complain when they don't. Plus, users are less technical than they used to be and ask for help with what used to be considered the simplest of things. I would not develop something these days for people like that.
I see it even with paid development, where it somehow means endless revisions and scope creep don't cost more.
And when you do this, you cannot copyright the results in most countries once an AI has studied it. There are a lot of people out there in for a bad surprise when they find out they can't prosecute someone for piracy because they don't have the product they claimed to have produced.
We're only one court precedent away from saying it's actual copyright infringement. There are foundations for this in copyright cases back in the 1980s. That's why Compaq did things like "clean room" versions of their BIOS, where the developers were not allowed to see IBM's BIOS code when developing their own.
A new idea, however, can be patented.
Not exactly. You cannot patent an idea. It must be a tangible and new device, substance, method or process.
While your AI or Google result is technically correct, you're nitpicking. Ultimately it's the idea that's being implemented through one of those means. Been there, done that, and have a patent.
For an example of how little implementation actually matters for patents: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en
The vast majority of the patent is just filler to make it sound more complicated than it is, and there were companies doing similar implementations prior to Amazon.
The vast majority of the patent is just filler to make it sound more complicated than it is, and there were companies doing similar implementations prior to Amazon.
Soooooo???? Google is correct? You cannot patent an idea? Oh... and I happen to have some legal training in my background... so there's that!
If you want to talk legal, then legal is specific. Everything else... is opinion.
