It will hold up in court. The line of argument of “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite” doesn’t hold up in court, it doesn’t either when when you put AI in the mix. It doesn’t matter if the result is slightly different, a judge will rule based on the fact that this even is literally what the law is intended to prevent, it’s not a case of which incantation or secret sentence you should utter to free the work of its existing license.

I was wondering how the existing case law of translated works, from one language to an other works here. It would at suggest that this is an infringement of the license especially because of the lack of creativity. But IANAL and of course no idea of applicable case law.

the ai copy pasted the existing project. How can such a procedure not fall under copyright?

Especially now that ai can do this for any kind of intellectual property, like images, books or sourcecode. If judges would allow an ai rewrite to count as an original creation, copyright as we know it completely ends world wide.

Instead whats more likely is that no one is gonna buy that shit

"Exposure" means here, I think, that they feed the 6.X code version to Claude.

I came here to say this. While I agree with Mark that what they’re doing is not nice, I’m not sure it’s wrong. A clean-room implementation is one way the industry worked around licensing in the past (and present, I guess), but it’s not a requirement in law as far as I know.

I’m not sure that “a total rewrite” wouldn’t, in fact, pass muster - depending on how much of a rewrite it was of course. The ‘clean room’ approach was just invented as a plausible-sounding story to head off gratuitous lawsuits. This doesn’t look as defensible against the threat of a lawsuit, but it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t win that lawsuit (I’m not saying it would, I haven’t read or compared the code vs its original). Google copied the entire API of the Java language, and got away with it when Oracle sued. Things in a courtroom can often go in surprising ways…

[edit: negative votes, huh, that’s a first for a while… looks like Reddit/Slashdot-style “downvote if you don’t like what is being said” is alive and well on HN]

I agree that (while the ethics of this are a different issue) the copyright question is not obviously clear-cut. Though IANAL.

As the LGPL says:

> A "work based on the Library" means either the Library or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Library or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated straightforwardly into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".)

Is v7.0.0 a [derivative work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work)? It seems to depend on the details of the source code (implementing the same API is not copyright infringement).

That whole clean room argument makes no sense. Project changed governance and was significantly refactored or reimplemented... I think the maintainers deserve to call it their own. Original-pre MIT release can stay LGPL.

I don't think this is a precedent either, plenty of projects changed licenses lol.

I keep kind mixing them up but the GPL licenses keep popping up as occasionally horror stories. Maybe the license is just poorly written for today's standards?

That doesn't seem related at all, this is just adding attribution, not changing the license through LLM-washing

The famous case Google vs Oracle may need to be re-evaluated in the light of Agents making API implementation trivial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

Interesting case, IANAL but sounds legal and legit. The AI did not have expose to the backend it re-implemented. The API itself is public and not protectable.

Maybe a better question is:

How do our competitors protect themselves against us doing this?

You might be interested in the dark factory work here https://factory.strongdm.ai/

They do something very similar for some of their work. It’s hard to use external services so they replicate them and the cost of doing so has come down from “don’t be daft, we can’t reimplement slack and google drive this sprint just to make testing faster” to realistic. They run the sdks against the live services and their own implementations until they don’t see behaviour differences. Now they have a fast slack and drive and more (that do everything they need for their testing) accelerating other work. I’m dramatically shifting my concept of what’s expensive and not for development. What you’re describing could have been done by someone before, but the difficulty of building that backend has dropped enormously. Even if the application was closed you could probably either now or soon start to do the same thing starting with building back to core user stories and building the app as well.

You can view some of this as having things like the application as a very precise specification.

Really fascinating moment of change.

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"

If the platform is so trivial that it can be reverse engineered by an AI agent from a dumb frontend, what's there to protect against? One has to assume that their moat is not that part of the backend but something else entirely about how the service is being provided.

If your backend is trivial enough to be implemented by a large language model, what value are you providing?

I know it's a provoking question but that answers why a competitor is not a competitor.

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"

DMCA. The EULA likely prohibits reverse engineering. If a competitor does that, hit'em with lawyers.

Or, if you want to be able to sleep at night, recognize this as an opportunity instead of a threat.

Nothing. This is why SaaS stocks took a dump last week.

You're not describing anything new, you're describing progress. A company invests time and money and expertise into building a product, it becomes established, people copy in 1/10th of the time, the quality of products across the industry improve. Long before generative AI, Instagram famously copied Snapchat's stories concept in a weekend, and that is now a multi-multi-multi-billion contributor to Meta's bottom line.

As engineers, we often think only about code, but code has never been what makes a business succeed. If your client thinks that their businesses primary value is in the mobile app code they wrote, 1) why is it even open source? 2) the business is doomed.

Realistically, though, this is inconsequential, and any time spent worrying about this is wasted time. You don't protect yourself from your competitor by worrying about them copying your mobile app.

Makes me wonder when AI will put the mobile phone OS duopoly to an end.

This seems right to me. If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in all clean room rewrites) the spec is purely factual with all copyrightable expression having been distilled out. But the "deriving the spec (and verifying that it's as clean as possible)" is crucial and cannot be skipped!

Yeah I think, the Compaq / IBM precedent can only superficially apply. It would be like having two teams only meet in a room full of documentation - but both teams crammed the source code the day before. (That, the source code you are "reverse engineering" is in the training data.) It doesn't make sense.

Also, it's weird that it's okay apparently to use pirated materials to teach an LLM, but maybe not to disseminate what the LLM then tells you.

> Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code.

It doesn't matter how they structure the agents. Since chardet is in the LLM training set, you can't claim any AI implementation thereof is clean room.

Answer: probably not, as API-topography is also a part of copyright

Edit: this is wrong

Not if the codebase was included in training the implementer.

Isn’t it? I mean 12 stage pipeline has a very specific meaning to me in this area, and is not a new way of describing something. The release notes description sounds like a multi stage pipeline.

Do you know this kind of area and are commenting on the code?

"ok chatgpt, what name do i give to this algorithm, so it sounds fancy and advanced?"

Yes, that's what some lonely people have been shouting in the desert since the LLM craze started.

Being completely untainted is the standard many reimplementations set for themselves to completely rule out legal trouble. For example ReactOS won't let you contribute if you have ever seen Windows code. Because if you have never seen it, there can be no allegation that you copied it.

That is however stricter than what's actually legally necessary. It's just that the actual legal standard would require a court ruling to determine if you passed it, and everyone wants to avoid that. As a consequence there also aren't a lot of court cases to draw similarities to

Not a lawyer, but that always seemed naively correct to me.

However, the copyright system has always be a sham to protect US capital interests. So I would be very surprised if this is actually ruled/enforced. And in any case american legislators can just change the law.

"Taint" requires that the code is demonstratably derivative from the *GPL licensed work.

This is actually harder standard than some people think.

The absolute clean room approaches in USA are there because they help short circuit a long lawsuit where a bigger corp can drag forever until you're broken.

I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.

Open source as a concept is intertwined with the concept of a license.

For me, some projects I start by writing a readme.txt by hand. That saves me time in cases I realize I'd be making something pointless. (I don't use chatbots when coding though)

I finally had to mute r/isthisai on Reddit because there’s now a subset of people who see the hand of AI in everything. Could that be generated by a clanker? Sure, but it’s also exactly what I would write if I wanted a quick pitch for a library that addresses some immediate concerns. It’s also what I would focus on if the fact we had just finished a rebuild from scratch.

As Freud famously said, sometimes an em dash is just an em dash.