I believe that Pilgrim here does not understand very well how copyright works:
> Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code
This is simply not true. The reason why the "clean room" concept exists is precisely since actually the law recognizes that independent implementations ARE possibile. The "clean room" thing is a trick to make the litigation simpler, it is NOT required that you are not exposed to the original code. For instance, Linux was implemented even if Linus and other devs where well aware of Unix internals. The law really mandates this: does the new code copy something that was in the original one? The clean room trick makes it simpler to say, it is not possible, if there are similar things it is just by accident. But it is NOT a requirement.
Neither does the maintainee that claims a mechanical test of structural similarities can prove anything either waybwith regard to whether legally it is a derivative work (or even a mechnaical copy without the requisite new creative work to be a derivative work.)
And then Pilgrim is again wrong by saying that the use of Claude definitively makes it a derivative work because of the inability to prove it the work in question did not influence the neurons involved.
It is all dueling lay misreadings of copyright law, but it is also an area where the actual specific applicable law, on any level specific enough to cleanly apply, isn’t all that clear.
The expected functionality of chardet (detect the unicode encoding) is kind of fixed - apart from edge cases and new additions to unicode, you'd expect the original and new implementations to largely pass the same tests, and have a lot of similar code such as for "does this start with a BOM".
The fact that the JPlag shows such a low %overlap for an implementation of "the same interface" is convincing evidence for me that it's not just plagiarised.
This is correct. I think any author of a main chunk of code that they claim ownership to (which is probably all of us!) should at least study the basics of copyright law. Getting little details wrong can cost you time, money and eventually your business if you're not careful.
"Tainted rewrite" isn't a legal concept either. You have to prove (on balance of probabilities - more likely than not) that the defendant made an unauthorized copy, made an unauthorized derivative work, etc. Clean-room rewriting is a defense strategy, because if the programmer never saw the original work, they couldn't possibly have made a derivative. But even without that, you still have to prove they did. It's not an offence to just not be able to prove you didn't break the law.
As other pointed out, the notion of "clean room" rewrites is to make a particularly strong case of non-infringement. It doesn't mean that anything other than a clean room implementation is an infringement.
This is interesting and I'm not sure what to make of it. Devil's advocate: the person operating the AI also was "trained with the code," is that materially different from them writing it by hand vs. assisted by an LLM? Honestly asking, I hadn't considered this angle before.
If you worked at Microsoft and had access to the Windows source code you probably should not be contributing to WINE or similar projects as there would be legal risk.
So for this case, not much different legally. Of course there is the practical difference just like there is between me seeing you with my own eyes and me taking a picture of you.
"Training" an LLM ist not the same as training a human being. It a metaphor. Its confusing the save icon with an actual floppy disk.
I can say I "trained" my printer to print copyrighted material by feeding it bits but that that would be pure sophism.
Problem is that law hasn't really caught up the our brave new AI future yet so lots of decisions are up in the air. Plus governments incentivized to look the other way regarding copyright abuses when it comes to AI as they think that having competitive AI is of strategic importance.
If you let an LLM merely rephrase the codebase, that's like letting it rephrase the Harry Potter novels. Which, I'm pretty sure, would still be considered a copy under copyright law, not an original work, despite not copying any text verbatim.
Given that LLMs were trained on the repository directly, it's not just the case that anything made by the LLM is a derivative work, the LLM ITSELF is a derivative work. After all, they all are substantially based on GPL licensed works by others. The standard courts have always used for "substantially based" by the way, is the ability to extract from the new work anything bigger than an excerpt of the original work.
So convincing evidence, by historical standards, that ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot AND Claude are all derivative works of the GPL linux kernel can be gotten simply by asking "give me struct sk_buff", then keep asking until you're out of the headers (say, ask how a network driver uses it).
That means if courts are honest (and they never are when it comes to GPL) OpenAI, Google and Anthropic would be forced to release ALL materials needed to duplicate their models "at cost". Given how LLMs work that would include all models, code, AND training data. After all, that is the contract these companies entered into when using the GPL licensed linux kernel.
But of course, to courts copyright applies to you when Microsoft demands it ($30000 per violation PLUS stopping the use of the offending file/torrent/software/... because such measures are apparently justified for downloading a $50 piece of software), it does not apply to big companies when the rules would destroy them.
The last time this was talked about someone pointed out that Microsoft "stole", as they call it, the software to do product keys. They were convicted for doing that, and the judge even increased damages because of Microsoft's behavior in the case.
But there is no way in hell you'll ever get justice from the courts in this. In fact courts have already decided that AI training is fair use on 2 conditions:
1) that the companies acquired the material itself without violating copyright. Of course it has already been proven that this is not the case for any of them (they scraped it without permission, which has been declared illegal again and again in the file sharing trials)
2) that the models refuse to reproduce copyrighted works. Now go to your favorite model and ask "Give me some code written by Linus Torvalds": not a peep about copyright violation.
... but it does not matter, and it won't matter. Courts are making excuses to allow LLM models to violate any copyright, the excuse does not work, does not convince rational people, but it just doesn't matter.
But of course, if you thought that just because they cheat against the law to make what they're already doing legal, they'll do the same for you, help you violate copyright, right? After all, that's how they work! Ok now go and ask:
"Make me an image of Mickey Mouse peeling a cheese banana under an angry moon"
And you'll get a reply "YOU EVIL COPYRIGHT VILLAIN". Despite, of course, Mickey Mouse no longer being covered under copyright!
And to really get angry, find your favorite indie artist, and ask to make something based on their work. Even "Make an MC Escher style painting of Sonic the Hedgehog" ... even that doesn't count as copyright violation, only the truly gigantic companies deserve copyright protection.
The argument that a rewrite is a copyright violation because they are familiar with the code base is not fully sound.
"Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law.
Or else a artist having seen a picture of a sunset over an empty ocean wouldn't be allowed to pain another sunset over an empty ocean as people could claim copyright violation.
Through what is a violation is, if you place the code side by side and try to circumvent copyright law by just rephrasing the exact same code.
This also means that if you give an AI access to a code base and tell it to produce a new code base doing the same (or similar) it will most likely be ruled as copyright violation as it's pretty much a side by side rewriting.
But you very much can rewrite a project under new license even if you have in depth knowledge. IFF you don't have the old project open/look at it while doing so. Rewrite it from scratch. And don't just rewrite the same code from memory, but instead write fully new code producing the same/similar outputs.
Through while doing so is not per-se illegal, it is legally very attackable. As you will have a hard time defending such a rewrite from copyright claims (except if it's internally so completely different that it stops any claims of "being a copy", e.g. you use complete different algorithms, architecture, etc. to produce the same results in a different way).
In the end while technically "legally hard to defend" != "illegal", for companies it's most
times best to treat it the same.
> "Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law.
On the contrary. Except for discussions about punitive damages and so on, insider knowledge or lack thereof is completely irrelevant to patent law. If company A has a patent on something, they can assert said patent against company B regardless of whether any person in company B had ever seen or heard of company A and their patent. Company B could have a legal trail proving they invented their product that matches the patent from scratch with no outside knowledge, and that they had been doing this before company A had even filed their patent, and it wouldn't matter at all - company A, by virtue of filing and being granted a patent, has a legal monopoly on that invention.
In contrast, for copyright the right is intrinsically tied to the origin of a work. If you create a digital image that is entirely identical at the pixel level with a copyrighted work, and you can prove that you had never seen that original copyrighted work and you created your image completely independently, then you have not broken anyone's copyright and are free to sell copies of your own work. Even more, you have your own copyright over your own work, and can assert it over anyone that tries to copy your work without permission, despite an identical work existing and being owned by someone else.
Now, purely in principle this would remain true even if you had seen the other work. But in reality, it's impossible to convince any jury that you happened to produce, entirely out of your own creativity, an original work that is identical to a work you had seen before.
> But you very much can rewrite a project under new license even if you have in depth knowledge. IFF you don't have the old project open/look at it while doing so.
No, this is very much false. You will never be able to win a court case on this, as any significant similarity between your work and the original will be considered a copyright violation, per the preponderance of the evidence.
>
In contrast, for copyright the right is intrinsically tied to the origin of a work. If you create a digital image that is entirely identical at the pixel level with a copyrighted work, and you can prove that you had never seen that original copyrighted work and you created your image completely independently, then you have not broken anyone's copyright and are free to sell copies of your own work.
This is not true. I will just give the example of the nighttime illumination of the Eiffel Tower:
This has no relation to what I was saying. Taking a photo of a copyrighted work is a method for creating a copy of said work using a mechanical device, so it is of course covered by copyright (whether buildings or light shows fall under copyright is an irrelevant detail).
What I'm saying is that if you, say, create an image of a red oval in MS Paint, you have copyright over said image. If 2 years later I create an identical image myself having never seen your image, I also have copyright over my image - despite it being identical to your image, I have every right to sell copies of my image, and even to sue someone who distributes copies of my image without my permission (but not if they're distributing copies of your image).
But if I had seen your image of a red oval before I created mine, it's basically impossible for me to prove that I created my own image out of my own creativity, and I didn't just copy yours. So, if you were to sue me for copyright infringement, I would almost certainly lose in front of any reasonable jury.
> This is not true. I will just give the example of the nighttime illumination of the Eiffel Tower:
That example is not analogous to the topic at hand.
But furthermore, it also is specific to French/European copyright law. In the US, the US Copyright Act would not permit restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces.
I don't know the details of that specific case so I can't speak to it, but the text of the AWCPA is very clear:
> The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.
This codifies an already-established principle in US law. French law does not have that same principle.
If I read Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and then proceed to write a structurally identical novel with many of the same story beats and character types, it will not be difficult to convince a jury exposed to these facts that I’ve created a derivative work.
On the other hand, if I can prove to the jury’s satisfaction that I’ve never been exposed to Puzo’s work in any form, it’s independent creation.
To the contrary, there have been many cases of very similar novels with largely identical plot points and settings that survive copyright allegations, even if the author was exposed to the original work.
In the case of chardet though it wouldn't it be more like you were the publisher of the godfather novel, withdrawing it from print and releasing a novel with the same name with much of the same plot and characters but claiming the new version was an independent creation?
If the new maintainers used Claude as their “fancy code generator” (there’s a Claude.md file in the repository so it seems so) then it was almost certainly trained with the chardet source code.
nobody can tell and this is how we entered this very turbulent modern times of "everything can be retold" without punishment. LLMs already doing it at large, while original author is correct in terms of the LGPL, it is nearly impossible to say how different should expression of an idea be to be considered separate one. this is truly fundamental philosophical question that may not have an easy answer.
Think of a rewrite (by a human or an LLM) as a translation. If you wrote a book in English and somebody translated it into Spanish, it'd still be a copyright issue. Same thing with translations.
That's very different to taking the idea of a body of work. So you can't copyright the idea of a pirate taking a princess hostage and a hero rescuing her. That's too generic. But even here there are limits. There have been lawsuits over artistic works being too similar.
Back to software, you can't copyright the idea of photo-editing software but you can copyright the source code that produces that software. If you can somehow prompt an LLM to produce photo editing software or if a person writes it themselves then you have what's generally referred to as a "cleanroom" implmentation and that's copyright-free (although you may have patent issues, which is a whole separate issue).
But even if you prompted an LLM that way, how did the LLM learn what it needed? Was the source code of another project an input in its training? This is a legal grey area, currently. But I suspect it's going to be a problem.
Suchir Balaji, the OpenAI researcher who was found dead in his flat just before testifying against his employer, published an excellent article somehow related to this topic:
Hate to be "that guy" but in a corrupt legal system, which ours is, none of this matters. Who has the influence and dollars to make the decision theirs is all that matters.
Producing a copy of a copyrighted work through a purely mechanical process is clear violation of copyright. LLMs are absolutely not different from a copier machine in the eyes of the law.
Original works can only be produced by a human being, by definition in copyright law. Any artifact produced by an animal, a mechanical process, a machine, a natural phenomenon etc is either a derived work if it started from an original copyrighted work, or a public domain artifact not covered by copyright law if it didn't.
For example, an image created on a rock struck by lightning is not a copyright covered work. Similarly, an image generated by an diffusion model from a randomly generated sentence is not a copyrightable work. However, if you feed a novel as a prompt to an LLM and ask for a summary, the resulting summary is a derived work of said novel, and it falls under the copyright of the novel's owner - you are not allowed to distribute copies of the summary the LLM generated for you.
Whether the output of an LLM, or the LLM weights themselves, might be considered derived works of the training set of that LLM is a completely different discussion, and one that has not yet been settled in court.
Perhaps - but an argument might still be made that the result is a derivative work of the original, given that it's produced by feeding the original work through automated tooling.
But either way, deleting the original version from the repo and replacing it with the new version - as opposed to, say, archiving the old version and starting a new repo with the new version - would still be a dick move.
The copyright argument is a sidetrack both in the PR comment thread and here. The issue opened claims the new code is based on the old code, and therefore derivative, and therefore must be offered in a modified version of the source code under the previous license, LGPL. The complaint is the maintainers violated the terms of LGPL, that they must prove no derivation from the original code to legally claim this is a legal new version without the LGPL license. Claim is if they or Claude read the old code (or of course directly use any of it) it is a license violation. “… in the release 7.0.0, the maintainers claim to have the right to “relicense” the project. They have no such right; doing so is an explicit violation of the LGPL. Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation).“ By this reasoning, I am genuinely asking (I’m not a license expert) if a valid clean room rewrite is possible, because at a minimum you would need a spec describing all behavior, which ses to require ample exposure to the original to be sufficiently precise.
That's not what a derivative work means, though. Being exposed to something doesn't mean you can't create original work which is similar to it (otherwise every song or artwork would be a derivative work of everything before it)
People do cleanroom implementations as a precaution against a lawsuit, but it's not a necessary element.
In fact, even if some parts are similar, it's still not a clear-cut case - the defendant can very well argue that the usage was 1. transformative 2. insubstantial to the entirety of work.
"The complaint is the maintainers violated the terms of LGPL, that they must prove no derivation from the original code to legally claim this is a legal new version without the LGPL license."
The burden of proof is on the accuser.
"I am genuinely asking (I’m not a license expert) if a valid clean room rewrite is possible, because at a minimum you would need a spec describing all behavior, which ses to require ample exposure to the original to be sufficiently precise."
Linux would be illegal if so (they had knowledge of Unix before), and many GNU tools are libre API-compatible reimplementations of previous Unix utilities :)
The copyright argument is the only relevant argument. If the new work is a derived work of the original, then it follows by definition that the new work is under the copryight of the original's author(s). Since the original chardet was distributed by its author(s) only under the LGPL, any copy/derivative of it that anyone else creates must be distributed only under the LGPL, per the terms of the LGPL.
Now, whether chardet 7.0.0 is a derivative of chardet or not is a matter of copyright law that the LGPL has no say on, and a rather murky ground with not that much case law to rely on behind it. If it's not, the new author is free to distribute chardet 7.0.0 under any license they want, since it is a new work under his copyright.
As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context.
A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern.
One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical.
Took him a week after work. It's not as stable, the unit-tests need more work, the code has some unnecessary duplication, hosting isn't fully figured out, but the end-to-end test-harness is even more stable than their own.
"How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"
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.
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.
I think it's interesting to add what they use it for and why its hard.
What they use it for:
- It's about automated testing against third party services.
- It's not about replicating the product for end users
Why using external services is hard/problematic
- Performance: They want to have super fast feedback cycles in the agentic loop: In-Memory tests. So they let the AI write full in-memory simulations of (for example) the slack api that are behaviorally equivalent for their use cases.
- Feasiblity: The sandboxes offered by these services usually have performance limits (= number of requests per month, etc) that would easily be exhausted if attached to a test harness that runs every other minute in an automated BDD loop.
> "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.
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.
As other's have pointed out, this case is really about refusing to allow an LLM to be recognised as the author. The person using the LLM waived any right to be recognised as the author.
Its also US only. Other countries will differ. This means you can only rely on this ruling at all for something you are distributing only in the US. Might be OK for art, definitely not for most software. Very definitely not OK for a software library.
For example UK law specifically says "In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken."
> the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.
This seems extremely vague. One could argue that any part of the pipeline counts as an "arrangement necessary for the creation of the work", so who is the author? The prompter, the creator of the model, or the creator of the training data?
The courts will have to settle that according to circumstances. I think it is likely to be the prompter, and in some cases the creator of the training data as well. The creator of the model will have copyright on the model, but unlikely to have copyright on its outputs (any more than the writer of a compiler has copyright on its output).
I wrote this comment on another thread earlier, but it seems relevant here, so I'll just c/p:
I think we didn't even began to consider all the implications of this, and while people ran with that one case where someone couldn't copyright a generated image, it's not that easy for code. I think there needs to be way more litigation before we can confidently say it's settled.
If "generated" code is not copyrightable, where do draw the line on what generated means? Do macros count? Does code that generates other code count? Protobuf?
If it's the tool that generates the code, again where do we draw the line? Is it just using 3rd party tools? Would training your own count? Would a "random" code gen and pick the winners (by whatever means) count? Bruteforce all the space (silly example but hey we're in silly space here) counts?
Is it just "AI" adjacent that isn't copyrightable? If so how do you define AI? Does autocomplete count? Intellisense? Smarter intellisense?
Are we gonna have to have a trial where there's at least one lawyer making silly comparisons between LLMs and power plugs? Or maybe counting abacuses (abaci?)... "But your honour, it's just random numbers / matrix multiplications...
Only the authored parts can be copyrighted, and only humans can author [0].
"For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user."
"In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that 'the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.'"
"Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection. In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are 'independent of' and do 'not affect' the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself."
IMO this is pretty common sense. No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it.
> IMO this is pretty common sense. No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it.
Actually this is very much how people think for code.
Consider the following consequence. Say I work for a company. Every time I generate some code with Claude, I keep a copy of said code. Once the full code is tested and released, I throw away any code that was not working well. Now I leave the company and approach their competitor. I provide all of the working code generated by Claude to the competitor. Per the new ruling, this should be perfectly legal, as this generated code is not copyrightable and thus doesn't belong to anyone.
So if I want to publish a project under some license and I put a comment in an AI generated file (never mind what I put in the comment), how do you go about proving which portion of that file is not protected under copyright?
If the AI code isn't copyrightable, I don't have any obligations to acknowledge it.
You're looking at this as the infringer rather than the owner. How do you as a copyright owner prove you meaningfully arranged the work when you want to enforce your copyright?
The human is still at best a co-author, as the primary implementation effort isn't theirs. And I think effort involved is the key contention in these cases. Yesterday ideas were cheap, and it was the execution that matters. Today execution is probably cheaper than ideas, but things should still hold.
That's not really what the ruling said. Though, I suspect this type of "vibe rewrite" does fall afoul of the same issue.
But for this type of copyright laundering, it doesn't really matter. The goal isn't really about licensing it, it's about avoiding the existing licence. The idea that the code ends up as public domain isn't really an issue for them.
> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"
You can try patenting; but not after the fact. Copyright won't help you here. You can't copyright an algorithm or idea, just a specific form or implementation of it. And there is a lot of legal history about what is and isn't a derivative work here. Some companies try to forbid reverse engineering in their licensing. But of course that might be a bit hard to enforce, or prove. And it doesn't work for OSS stuff in any case.
Stuff like this has been common practice in the industry for decades. Most good software ideas get picked apart, copied and re-implemented. IBM's bios for the first PC quickly got reverse engineered and then other companies started making IBM compatible PCs. IBM never open sourced their bios and they probably did not intend for that to happen. But that didn't matter. Likewise there were several PC compatible DOS variants that each could (mostly) run the same applications. MS never open sourced DOS either. There are countless examples of people figuring out how stuff works and then creating independent implementations. All that is perfectly legal.
No serious enterprise SaaS company differentiates themselves solely on the product (the products are usually terrible). It's the sales channel, the fact that you know how to bill a big company, the human engineer who is sent on site to deploy and integrate the product, the people on the support line 24/7, the regulatory framework that ensures the customer can operate legally and obtain insurance, the fact that there's a deep pool of potential hires who have used and understand the product. Those are the differentiators.
I think the genie is out of the bottle on this one and there's really no putting it back.
There is a certain amount of brand loyalty and platform inertia that will keep people. Also, as you point out, just having the source code isn't enough. Running a platform is more than that. But that gap will narrow with time.
The broader issue here is that there are people in tech who don't realize that AI is coming for their jobs (and companies) too. I hope people in this position can maybe understand the overall societal issues for other people seeing their industries "disrupted" (ie destroyed) by AI.
> Unfortunately, because the code that chardet was originally based on was LGPL, we don't really have a way to relicense it. Believe me, if we could, I would. There was talk of chardet being added to the standard library, and that was deemed impossible because of being unable to change the license.
So the person that did the rewrite knew this was a dive into dangerous water.
That's so disrespectful.
Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code.
Question: if they had built one using AI teams in both “rooms”, one writing a spec the other implementing, would that be fine? You’d need to verify spec doesn’t include source code, but that’s easy enough.
It seems to mostly follow the IBM-era precedent. However, since the model probably had the original code in its training data, maybe not? Maybe valid for closed source project but not open-source? Interesting question.
> 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.
Might still be valid for closed source projects (probably is).
I think courts would need to weigh in on the open source side. There’s legal precedent is that you can use a derived work to generate a new unique work (the spec derived for the copyrighted code is very much a derived work). There are rulings that LLMs are transformative works, not just copies of training data.
LLMs can’t reproduce their entire training set. But this thinking is also ripe for misuse. I could always train or fine-tune a model on the original work so that it can reproduce the original. We quickly get into statistical arguments here.
> There’s legal precedent is that you can use a derived work to generate a new unique work (the spec derived for the copyrighted code is very much a derived work)
Indeed, but in the clean room scenario, the party who implements the spec has to be a separate entity that has never seen the code. Whether or not the LLM is copyright infringing is a separate question - it definitely has (at least some) familiarity with the code in question, which makes the "clean room" argument an uphill battle
I just wrote a long comment about that, but yes, you are on to something here.
The key to me is that the LLM itself is a derived work and that by definition it can not produce something original. Which in turn would make profiting off such a derived work created by an automated process from copyrighted works a case of wholesale copyright infringement. If you can get a judge to agree on that I predict the price of RAM will come down again.
So by that logic, you're not legally allowed to implement your own character detector and license it as your own if you've ever looked at chardet's source code? I'm confused. I thought copyright laws protect intellectual property as-is, not the impression it leaves on someone.
Well, you are not making things easier for yourself by looking at that source code if the author of chardet brings a case for copyright infringement against you.
The question is: if you had not looked at chardet's source would you still be able to create your work? If the answer is 'yes' then you probably shouldn't have looked at the source, you just made your defense immeasurably harder. And if the answer is 'no' then you probably should have just used chardet and respected its license.
Sorry, but that sounds like a witch hunt to me, not modern law. Isn't the burden of proof on the accuser? I.e. the accuser has to prove that "this piece of code right here is a direct refactoring of my code, and here are the trivial and mechanical steps to produce one from the other"? And if they present no such evidence, we can all go home?
Not all legal systems put the burden of proof on the accuser. In fact, many legal systems have indefinite detentions, in which the government effectively imprisons a suspect, sometimes for months at a time. To take it a step further, the plea-bargain system of the USA, is really just a method to skip the entire legal process. After all, proving guilt is expensive, so why not just strong-arm a suspect into confessing? It also has the benefit of holding someone responsible for an injustice, even if the actual perpetrator cannot be found. By my personal standards, this is a corrupt system, but by the standards of the legal stratum of society, those KPIs look _solid_.
By contrast, in Germany (IIRC), false confessions are _illegal_, meaning that objective evidence is required.
Many legal systems follow the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", but also have many "escape hatches" that let them side-step the actual process that is supposed to guarantee that ideal principle.
EDIT: And that is just modern society. Past societies have had trial by ordeal and trial by combat, neither of which has anything to do with proof and evidence. Many such archaic proof procedures survive in modern legal systems, in a modernized and bureaucratized way. In some sense, modern trials are a test of who has the more expensive attorney (as opposed to who has a more skilled champion or combatant).
No, the burden of proof is on the defender: if you didn't create it you are not the copyright holder.
Copyright is automatic for a reason, the simple act of creation is technically enough to establish copyright. But that mechanism means that if your claimed creation has an uncanny resemblance to an earlier, published creation or an unpublished earlier creation that you had access to that you are going to be in trouble when the real copyright holder is coming to call.
In short: just don't. Write your own stuff if you plan on passing it off as your own.
The accuser just needs to establish precedence.
So if you by your lonesome have never listened to the radio and tomorrow morning wake up and 'Billy Jean' springs from your brain you're going to get sued, even if the MJ estate won't be able to prove how you did it.
That much I understand, but that question only comes up when the similarity is already an established fact, no? If we take the claim that this is a "complete rewrite" at face value, then there should be no reason for the code to have any uncanny similarities with chardet 6 beyond what is expectable from their functionality (which is not copyrightable) being the same, right?
So my (perhaps naive) understanding is if none can be found, then the author of chardet 1-6 simply doesn't have a case here, and we don't get to the point of asking "have you been exposed to the code?".
No, they're on the record as this being a derived work. There is no argument here at all. Not finding proof in a copyright case when the author is on the record about the infringement is a complete non-issue.
You'd have to make that claim absent any proof and then there better not be any gross similarities between the two bodies of code that can not be explained away by coincidence.
And then there is such a thing as discovery. I've been party to a case like this and won because of some silly little details (mostly: identical typos) and another that was just a couple of lines of identical JavaScript (with all of the variable names changed). Copyright cases against large entities are much harder to win because they have deeper pockets but against smaller parties that are clearly infringing it is much easier.
When you're talking about documented protocols or interface specifications then it is a different thing, those have various exceptions and those vary from one jurisdiction to another.
What can help bolster the case for the defense is for instance accurate record keeping, who contributed what parts, sworn depositions by those individuals that they have come up with these parts by their lonesome, a delivery pace matching that which you would expect from that particular employee without any suspicious outliers in terms of amount of code dropped per interval and so on. Code copied from online sources being properly annotated with a reference to the source also helps, because if you don't do that then it's going to look like you have no problem putting your own copyright on someone else's code.
If it is real, then it is fairly easy to document that it is real. If it is not, after discovery has run its course it is usually fairly easy to prove that it is not if it is not.
This is a balance of probabilities standard of proof. Both sides have the same burden of proof, it's equally split. Whoever has the stronger proof wins.
If you wish to be able to claim in court that it is a "clean room" implementation, yes.
Clean room implementations are specifically where a company firewalls the implementing team off from any knowledge of the original implementation, in order to be able to swear in court that their implementation does not make any use of the original code (which they are in such a case likely not licensed to use).
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!
How would a team verify this for any current model? They would have to observe and control all training data. In practice, any currently available model that is good enough to perform this task likely fails the clean room criteria due to having a copy of the source code of the project it wants to rewrite. At that point it's basically an expensive lossy copy paste.
You can always verify the output. Unless the problem being solved really is exceedingly specific and non-trivial, it's at least unlikely that the AI will rip off recognizable expression from the original work. The work may be part of the training but so are many millions of completely unrelated works, so any "family resemblance" would have to be there for very specific reasons about what's being implemented.
That only matters if expression of the original project really does end up in the rewrite, doesn't it? This can be checked for (by the team with access to the code) and it's also quite unlikely at least. It's not trivial at all to have an LLM replicate their training verbatim: even when feasible (the Harry Potter case, a work that's going to be massively overweighted in training due to its popularity) it takes very specific prompting and hinting.
> That only matters if expression of the original project really does end up in the rewrite, doesn't it?
No, I don't think so. I hate comparing LLMs with humans, but for a human being familiar with the original code might disqualify them from writing a differently-licensed version.
Anyway, LLMs are not human, so as many courts confirmed, their output is not copyrightable at all, under any license.
Uh, this is just a curiosity, but do you have a reference for that last argument?
If true, it would mean most commercial code being developed today, since it's increasingly AI-generated, would actually be copyright-free. I don't think most Western courts would uphold that position.
While it feels unlikely that a simple "write this spec from this code" + "write this code from this spec" loop would actually trigger this kind of hiding behaviour, an LLM trained to accurately reproduce code from such a loop definitely would be capable of hiding code details within the spec - and you can't reasonably prove that the frontier LLMs have not been trained to do so.
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.
There's a subtext in your point that I want to expand on.
Tech people, particularly engineers, tend to make a fundamental error when dealing with the law that almost always causes them to make wrong conclusions. And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic.
An example I like to use is people who do something illegal on the Internet and then use the argument "you can't prove I did it (with absolute certainty)". It could've been someone who hacked your Wifi. You don't know who on the Wifi did it, etc. But the law will look at the totality of the evidence. Did the activity occur when you were at home and stop when you weren't? How likely are alternative explanations? Etc.
All of that will be considered based on some legal standard depending on the venue. In civil court that tends to be "the preponderance of the evidence" (meaning more likely than not) while in criminal court it's "beyond a reasonable doubt" (which is a much higher standard).
So, using your example, an engineer will often fall into a trap of thinking they can substitute enough words to have a new original work, Ship of Theseus-like. And the law simply doesn't work that way.
So, when this gets to a court (which it will, it's not a question of "if"), the court will consider how necessary the source work was to what you did. If you used it for a direct translation (eg from C++ to Go) then you're going to lose. My prediction is that even using it in training data will be cause for a copyright claim.
If you use Moby Dick in your training data and ask an LLM to write a book like Moby Dick (either explicitly or implicitly) then you're going to have an issue. Even if you split responsibilities so one LLM (training on Moby Dick) comes up with a structure/prompt and another LLM (not trained on Moby Dick) writes it, I don't think that'll really help you avoid the issue.
> So, when this gets to a court (which it will, it's not a question of "if"), the court will consider how necessary the source work was to what you did. If you used it for a direct translation (eg from C++ to Go) then you're going to lose. My prediction is that even using it in training data will be cause for a copyright claim.
This has a lot of similarity to when colorization of film started popping up. Did colorizing black and white movies suddenly change the copyright of the film? At this point is seems mostly the courts say no. But you may find sometimes people rule the other way and say yes. But it takes time and a lot of effort to get what in general people want.
But basically if you start with a 'spec' then make something you probably can get a wholly owned new thing. But if you start with the old thing and just transform it in some way. You can do that. But the original copyright holders still have rights too to the thing you mangled too.
If I remember right they called it 'color of copyright' or something like that.
The LLM bits you are probably right. But that has not been worked out by the law or the courts yet. So the courts may make up new case law around it. Or the lawmakers might get ahead of it and say something (unlikely).
A work could even have two copyrights! Copying a colorized film could require the permission of both the studio that made the film, and the studio that colorized it.
> And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic.
I know it sounds like an oversimplification, but "got off on a technicality" is a common thing among the well-connected and well-heeled. Sure, us nerds probably focus too much on the "technicality" part, since we are by definition technical, but the rest is wishy-washy, unfair BS as far as many of our brains work much of the time.
"Get off on a technicality" is largely police propaganda. The "technicality" tends to be the police violated their rights in some way or did something illegal.
And if you get to trial (without being coerced into a guilty plea for something you may not have done [1]), the cops will lie constantly in police reports and even on the stand. It happens so often it has a name: testalying [2].
The well-connected don't really get off on a "technicality". They simply never get charged in the first place. Only two people were ever charged because of Jeffrey Epstein. One is Epstein, who died, and the other is Ghislane Maxwell who got convicted of trafficking minors to... nobody in particular... and is now in a low-security work camp it's technically illegal for sex offenders to be in.
And even if somehow you, as a connected person, are charged and convicted, well you just buy a pardon [3].
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
"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.
It's harder than some people think, but the author does a lot of the work when he names the resulting artifact "chardet v7.0.0". If I thought I was writing the kind of arms-length reimplementation that's required, I would never put it into the versioning scheme of the original, come on.
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.
The law is what a court says it is; there is precedent for decisions on human rewrites but LLM (assisted) code might still be fairly uncharted territory.
If the code is different but API compatible, Google Java vs Oracle Java case shows that if the implementation is different enough, it can be considered a new implementation. Clean room or not.
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?
Ok since this is not really answered... Hypothetically, If I'm a maintainer of this project. I decided I hate the implementation, it's naive, horrible performance, weird edge cases. I'm wiser today than 3 years ago.
I rewrite it, my head full of my own, original, new ideas. The results turn out great. There's a few if and while loops that look the same, and some public interfaces stayed the same. But all the guts are brand new, shiny, my own.
You have all rights to the code that you wrote that is not "colored" by previous code. Aka "an original work"
But code that is any kind of derivative of code before it contains a complex mix of other peoples rights. It can be relicensed, but only if all authors large and small agree to the terms.
You have rights, but if it's a derivative, the original author might have rights too. If you made a substantial creative input, the original author can't copy your project without your permission, but neither can you copy theirs.
Hmm are we in a ship of Theseus/speciation area? Each individual step of refactoring would not cross the threshold but would a rewrite? Even if the end result was the same?
Let us also remember that certain architectural changes need to happen over a period of planned refractors. Nobody wants to read a 5000 line shotgun-blast looking diff
So effective, LGPL means you freely give all copyright for your work to the license holder? Even if the license holder has moved on from the project?
What if I decide to make a JS or Rust implementation of this project and use it as inspiration? Does that mean I'm no longer doing a "clean room" implementation and my project is contaminated by LGPL too?
If a copyright holder does not give you permission, you can't legally relicense. Even if they're dead.
If they're dead and their estate doesn't care, you might pirate it without getting sued, but any recipient of the new work would be just as liable as you are, and they'd know that, so I probably wouldn't risk it.
Governance change or refactoring don’t give you a right to relicense someone else’s work. It needs to be a whole new work, which you own the copyright to.
It's not clear at all why the current maintainers wanted/needed this re-licensing. I guess that their employee, Monarch Money, wants to use derivative work in their application without releasing the changes?
It was already LGPL, perfect for a library, not GPL.
That take and the link within it to https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36 which is from 2014 (!!) and revived in 2021 (!) make me think now that Dan Blanchard is in good faith, but still acted in a naive manner. Rewriting from "scratch" with Claude Code and basically taking over the project by changing the license, all in one single pull request, well... it's not going to end well on the public relations side.
Does anyone understand the intent behind the changed license on the package, why are the current maintainers trying to do it in the first place? What's actually going on?
Nobody that is not already writing (L)GPL licensed software wants to pull LGPL licensed libraries into his software. I'm not a lawyer. If you have it in separate object artefacts that you can dynamically link to, you should be fine. Everything else may be more difficult.
Unicode detection is the kind of utility the language maintainers want in their package collection if not in the standard library, and programmers who have to do anything with "plain text" files might want to rely on.
Releasing a core library like this under a genuinely free licence (MIT) is a service to anyone working in the ecosystem.
Impossible to code inspect and verify. Someone else commented 'smells like a supply chain attack' and while I'm sure it's not intended to be, there is no way to verify. And who believes, in half a million lines of code, no bugs have been introduced?
AFAIK this was not a clean room reimplementation. But since it was rewritten by hand, into a different language, with not just a different internal design but a different API, I could easily buy that chardetng doesn't infringe while Python chardet 7 does.
Isn't the real issue here that tons of projects that depend on the "chardet" now drag in some crappy still unverified AI slop? AI forgery poisoning, IMHO.
Why does this new project here needed to replace the original like that in this dishonourable way? The proper way would have been to create a proper new project.
Note: even Python's own pip drags this in as dependency it seems (hopefully they'll stick to a proper version)
This indeed the real issue (not the AI angle per se, but the wholesale replacement. The licensing issue is real, but less important IMO).
Half a million lines of code have been deleted and replaced over the course of four days, directly to the main branch with no opportunity for community review and testing. (I've no idea whether depending projects use main or the stable branch, but stable is nearly 4 years old at this point, so while I hope it's the version depending projects use, I wouldn't put money on it.)
The whole thing smells a lot like a supply chain attack - and even if it's in good faith, that's one hell of a lot of code to be reviewed in order to make sure.
The test coverage is going to be entirely different, unless of course they copied the tests, which would then preclude them from changing the license. They didn't even bother to make sure the CI passed on merging a major version release https://github.com/chardet/chardet/actions/runs/22563903687/...
Woah. As someone not in this particular community but dependent on these tools this is exactly the terrifying underbelly we've all discussed with the user architecture of tools like pip and npm. It's horrifying that a major component just got torn apart, rebuilt, and deployed to anyone who uses those python ecosystems (... many millions? ... billions of people?)
The drop"-in" compatibility claims are also just wrong? I ran it on the old test suite from 6.0 (which is completely absent now), and quickly checking:
- the outputs, even if correctly deduced, are often incompatible: "utf-16be" turns into "utf-16-be", "UTF-16" turns into "utf-16-le" etc. FWIW, the old version appears to have been a bit of a mess (having had "UTF-16", "utf-16be" and "utf-16le" among its outputs) but I still wouldn't call the new version _compatible_,
- similarly, all `ascii` turn into `Windows-1252`
- sometimes it really does appear more accurate,
- but sometimes it appears to flip between wider families of closely related encodings, like one SHIFT_JIS test (confidence 0.99) turns into cp932 (confidence 0.34), or the whole family of tests that were determined as gb18030 (chinese) are now sometimes determined as gb2312 (the older subset of gb18030), and one even as cp1006, which AFAIK is just wrong.
As for performance claims, they appear not entirely false - analyzing all files took 20s, versus 150s with v6.0. However, looks like the library sometimes takes 2s to lazy initialize something, which means that if one uses `chardetect` CLI instead of Python API, you'll pay this cost each time and get several times slower instead.
Oh, and this "Negligible import memory (96 B)" is just silly and obviously wrong.
> Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation).
I don't think that the second sentence is a valid claim per se, it depends on what this "rewritten code" actually looks like (IANAL).
Edit: my understanding of "clean room implementation" is that it is a good defence to a copyright infrigement claim because there cannot be infringement if you don't know the original work. However it does not mean that NOT "clean room implementation" implies infrigement, it's just that it is potentially harder to defend against a claim if the original work was known.
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).
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
It's up to them to prove that a) the original implementation was not part of whatever data set said AI used and b) that the engineers in question did not use the original as a basis.
No, that's not how copyright laws work. Especially in a world where the starting point is the accused making something and marketing it as someone else's IP with a license change.
It's still on the claimant to establish copying, which usually involves showing that the two works are substantially similar in protected elements. That the defendants had access to the original helps establish copying, but isn't on its own sufficient.
Only after that would the burden be on the defendants, such as to give a defense that their usage is sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use.
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.
> “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”
This is not a good analogy.
A "rewrite" in context here is not a reproduction of the original work but a different work that is functionally equivalent, or at least that is the claim.
Possibly important is that it’s largely api compatible but it’s not functionally equivalent in that its performance (as accuracy not just speed) is different.
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 spent like two minutes looking at the diff between the original and the supposed "clean room" implementation [1] and already found identical classes, variable names, methods, and parameters. It looks like there was no actual attempt at clean-rooming this, regardless of whether that "counts".
Lol at the statement that "clean room" would have been invented to scare people from suing. It's the opposite: clean room is a fairly-desperate attempt to pre-empt accusations in court when it is expected that the "derivative" argument will be very strong, in order to then piggyback on the doctrine about interoperability. Sometimes it works, but it's a very high bar to clear.
I wonder if LLMs will push the industry towards protecting their IP with patents like the other branches of engineering rather than copyright. If you patent a general idea of how your software works then no rewrite will be able to lift this protection.
If there wasn't a specific limitation against software patents, you could patent the process of "first we look at the first 3 bytes for a BOM, then we take statistics of the most frequently used bytes and match them against this table..." which is the software equivalent of "the device contains a large box full of water, underneath which is a flame and on the upper side is a pipe leading to a valve box which contains..."
Either one would still have to meet the requirements like being sufficiently non-obvious. The first steam engine was patented, even though you couldn't patent one any more.
Setting aside the legal questions, what a nasty thing to do. I would expect to see this kind of move from some big corpo, not an OSS maintainer. This feels like it runs counter to the whole open source ethos and undermines the idea that authorship means anything anymore.
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.
FWIW, I don't think there's even a room for interpretation here, given the commit that created the README (and almost all commits since the rewrite started 4 days ago) is authored by
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)
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?
I think Mark Pilgrim misrepresents the legal situation somewhat: The AI rewrite does not legally need to be a clean room implementation (whatever exactly that would even mean here).
That is just the easiest way to disambiguate the legal situation (i.e. the most reliable approach to prevent it from being considered a derivative work by a court).
While I am obviously Team GPL and not team "I 'rewrote' this with AI so now it's mine", I'm team anti-fork, and definitely not team 'Chardet'.
Forking should be a last resort, one better option is to yeet the thing entirely.
And chardet lends itself perfectly for this, using chardet is a sign of an issue and low craftmanship, either by the developer using chardet, or the developer that failed to signal the encoding of their text. (See Joel Spolsky's "The absolute minimum every developer should know about character encoding") (And let's be honest, it's probably the developers problem, not everything is someone else's fault.)
Just uninstall this thing where you can, and avoid installing it always, because you always can.
You know I'm right. I will not be replying to copium
The 25519 crypto package that's built into practically everything these days (SSH, TLS, most e2e messaging) was released as both a spec and a C reference implementation _in the public domain_.
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.
The GPL exists for the benefit of end users, not developers. It being a chore for developers who want to deny their users the software freedoms is a feature, not a bug.
They have the right to use the code, and they have the right to use improvements that someone else made, and they have the right to get someone to make improvements for them.
If you have ill intentions or maybe you're a corporation that wants to use someone else's work for free without contributing anything back, then yes, I can see how GPL licenses "tend to cause problems".
I like to think about GPL as a kind of an artistic performance and an elaborate critique of the whole concept of copyright.
Like, "we don't like copyright, but since you insist on enforcing it and we can't do anything against it, we will invent a clever way to use your own rules against you".
That is not really the motivation behind GPL licenses. These licenses have been designed to ensure by legal means that anyone can learn from the source code of software, fix bugs on their own, and modify the software to their needs.
Wtf are these comments? A LGPL licensed project, guaranteed to be free and open source, being LLM-washed to a permissive license, and GPL is the problem here?
They are literally stealing from open source, but it's the original license that is the issue?
Why? What's your problem with them? They do exactly what they're supposed to do, to ensure that future derivatives of the source code have to be distributed under the same license and distribution respects fundamental freedoms.
I feel like the author is missing a huge point here by fighting this. The entire reason why GPL and any other copyleft license exists in the first place is to ensure that the rights of a user to modify, etc a work cannot be ever taken away. Before, relicensing as MIT - or any other fully permissive license - would've meant open doors to apply restrictions going forward, but with AI this is now a non-issue. Code is now very cheap. So the way I see this, anyone who is for copyleft should be embracing AI-created things as not being copyrightable (or a rewrite being relicensable) hard*.
If I release blub 1.0.0 under GPL, you cannot fork it and add features and release that closed-source, but I can certainly do that as I have ownership. I can't stop others continuing to use 1.0.0 and develop it further under the GPL, but what happens to my own 1.1.0 onwards is up to me. I can even sell the rights to use it closed-source.
The user is the end-user of the product. If the relicensing means that someone down the line receives a close-down binary application that he cannot modify, that's a violation of the user's rights.
That is still true, but it was more relevant back when "user" meant "programmer at another university". The "end-user" for most software is not a programmer these days.
But it's a non-issue as said user can just have AI reverse engineer said binary. Or reimplement something with the same specs. That's what it means for code to be cheap.
It may be "cheap" at the moment. Let's revisit when the AI companies decide they need to regain a little bit of the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they're creating.
China is always waiting for this. And the US won't allow China to get all the users who'd emigrate over increased costs, so the costs will remain low. They'll have to find ways to recoup that don't involve raising the cost of code.
I believe that Pilgrim here does not understand very well how copyright works:
> Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code
This is simply not true. The reason why the "clean room" concept exists is precisely since actually the law recognizes that independent implementations ARE possibile. The "clean room" thing is a trick to make the litigation simpler, it is NOT required that you are not exposed to the original code. For instance, Linux was implemented even if Linus and other devs where well aware of Unix internals. The law really mandates this: does the new code copy something that was in the original one? The clean room trick makes it simpler to say, it is not possible, if there are similar things it is just by accident. But it is NOT a requirement.
Neither does the maintainee that claims a mechanical test of structural similarities can prove anything either waybwith regard to whether legally it is a derivative work (or even a mechnaical copy without the requisite new creative work to be a derivative work.)
And then Pilgrim is again wrong by saying that the use of Claude definitively makes it a derivative work because of the inability to prove it the work in question did not influence the neurons involved.
It is all dueling lay misreadings of copyright law, but it is also an area where the actual specific applicable law, on any level specific enough to cleanly apply, isn’t all that clear.
I'm with you here, but I see another problem.
The expected functionality of chardet (detect the unicode encoding) is kind of fixed - apart from edge cases and new additions to unicode, you'd expect the original and new implementations to largely pass the same tests, and have a lot of similar code such as for "does this start with a BOM".
The fact that the JPlag shows such a low %overlap for an implementation of "the same interface" is convincing evidence for me that it's not just plagiarised.
This is correct. I think any author of a main chunk of code that they claim ownership to (which is probably all of us!) should at least study the basics of copyright law. Getting little details wrong can cost you time, money and eventually your business if you're not careful.
Ok sure, in the alternative, here's the argument:
The AI was trained with the code, so the complete rewrite is tainted and not a clean room. I can't believe this would need spelling out.
"Tainted rewrite" isn't a legal concept either. You have to prove (on balance of probabilities - more likely than not) that the defendant made an unauthorized copy, made an unauthorized derivative work, etc. Clean-room rewriting is a defense strategy, because if the programmer never saw the original work, they couldn't possibly have made a derivative. But even without that, you still have to prove they did. It's not an offence to just not be able to prove you didn't break the law.
As other pointed out, the notion of "clean room" rewrites is to make a particularly strong case of non-infringement. It doesn't mean that anything other than a clean room implementation is an infringement.
This is interesting and I'm not sure what to make of it. Devil's advocate: the person operating the AI also was "trained with the code," is that materially different from them writing it by hand vs. assisted by an LLM? Honestly asking, I hadn't considered this angle before.
If you worked at Microsoft and had access to the Windows source code you probably should not be contributing to WINE or similar projects as there would be legal risk.
So for this case, not much different legally. Of course there is the practical difference just like there is between me seeing you with my own eyes and me taking a picture of you.
"Training" an LLM ist not the same as training a human being. It a metaphor. Its confusing the save icon with an actual floppy disk.
I can say I "trained" my printer to print copyrighted material by feeding it bits but that that would be pure sophism.
Problem is that law hasn't really caught up the our brave new AI future yet so lots of decisions are up in the air. Plus governments incentivized to look the other way regarding copyright abuses when it comes to AI as they think that having competitive AI is of strategic importance.
Reread the parent: clean room is not required.
If you let an LLM merely rephrase the codebase, that's like letting it rephrase the Harry Potter novels. Which, I'm pretty sure, would still be considered a copy under copyright law, not an original work, despite not copying any text verbatim.
Given that LLMs were trained on the repository directly, it's not just the case that anything made by the LLM is a derivative work, the LLM ITSELF is a derivative work. After all, they all are substantially based on GPL licensed works by others. The standard courts have always used for "substantially based" by the way, is the ability to extract from the new work anything bigger than an excerpt of the original work.
So convincing evidence, by historical standards, that ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot AND Claude are all derivative works of the GPL linux kernel can be gotten simply by asking "give me struct sk_buff", then keep asking until you're out of the headers (say, ask how a network driver uses it).
That means if courts are honest (and they never are when it comes to GPL) OpenAI, Google and Anthropic would be forced to release ALL materials needed to duplicate their models "at cost". Given how LLMs work that would include all models, code, AND training data. After all, that is the contract these companies entered into when using the GPL licensed linux kernel.
But of course, to courts copyright applies to you when Microsoft demands it ($30000 per violation PLUS stopping the use of the offending file/torrent/software/... because such measures are apparently justified for downloading a $50 piece of software), it does not apply to big companies when the rules would destroy them.
The last time this was talked about someone pointed out that Microsoft "stole", as they call it, the software to do product keys. They were convicted for doing that, and the judge even increased damages because of Microsoft's behavior in the case.
But there is no way in hell you'll ever get justice from the courts in this. In fact courts have already decided that AI training is fair use on 2 conditions:
1) that the companies acquired the material itself without violating copyright. Of course it has already been proven that this is not the case for any of them (they scraped it without permission, which has been declared illegal again and again in the file sharing trials)
2) that the models refuse to reproduce copyrighted works. Now go to your favorite model and ask "Give me some code written by Linus Torvalds": not a peep about copyright violation.
... but it does not matter, and it won't matter. Courts are making excuses to allow LLM models to violate any copyright, the excuse does not work, does not convince rational people, but it just doesn't matter.
But of course, if you thought that just because they cheat against the law to make what they're already doing legal, they'll do the same for you, help you violate copyright, right? After all, that's how they work! Ok now go and ask:
"Make me an image of Mickey Mouse peeling a cheese banana under an angry moon"
And you'll get a reply "YOU EVIL COPYRIGHT VILLAIN". Despite, of course, Mickey Mouse no longer being covered under copyright!
And to really get angry, find your favorite indie artist, and ask to make something based on their work. Even "Make an MC Escher style painting of Sonic the Hedgehog" ... even that doesn't count as copyright violation, only the truly gigantic companies deserve copyright protection.
The argument that a rewrite is a copyright violation because they are familiar with the code base is not fully sound.
"Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law.
Or else a artist having seen a picture of a sunset over an empty ocean wouldn't be allowed to pain another sunset over an empty ocean as people could claim copyright violation.
Through what is a violation is, if you place the code side by side and try to circumvent copyright law by just rephrasing the exact same code.
This also means that if you give an AI access to a code base and tell it to produce a new code base doing the same (or similar) it will most likely be ruled as copyright violation as it's pretty much a side by side rewriting.
But you very much can rewrite a project under new license even if you have in depth knowledge. IFF you don't have the old project open/look at it while doing so. Rewrite it from scratch. And don't just rewrite the same code from memory, but instead write fully new code producing the same/similar outputs.
Through while doing so is not per-se illegal, it is legally very attackable. As you will have a hard time defending such a rewrite from copyright claims (except if it's internally so completely different that it stops any claims of "being a copy", e.g. you use complete different algorithms, architecture, etc. to produce the same results in a different way).
In the end while technically "legally hard to defend" != "illegal", for companies it's most times best to treat it the same.
> "Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law.
On the contrary. Except for discussions about punitive damages and so on, insider knowledge or lack thereof is completely irrelevant to patent law. If company A has a patent on something, they can assert said patent against company B regardless of whether any person in company B had ever seen or heard of company A and their patent. Company B could have a legal trail proving they invented their product that matches the patent from scratch with no outside knowledge, and that they had been doing this before company A had even filed their patent, and it wouldn't matter at all - company A, by virtue of filing and being granted a patent, has a legal monopoly on that invention.
In contrast, for copyright the right is intrinsically tied to the origin of a work. If you create a digital image that is entirely identical at the pixel level with a copyrighted work, and you can prove that you had never seen that original copyrighted work and you created your image completely independently, then you have not broken anyone's copyright and are free to sell copies of your own work. Even more, you have your own copyright over your own work, and can assert it over anyone that tries to copy your work without permission, despite an identical work existing and being owned by someone else.
Now, purely in principle this would remain true even if you had seen the other work. But in reality, it's impossible to convince any jury that you happened to produce, entirely out of your own creativity, an original work that is identical to a work you had seen before.
> But you very much can rewrite a project under new license even if you have in depth knowledge. IFF you don't have the old project open/look at it while doing so.
No, this is very much false. You will never be able to win a court case on this, as any significant similarity between your work and the original will be considered a copyright violation, per the preponderance of the evidence.
> In contrast, for copyright the right is intrinsically tied to the origin of a work. If you create a digital image that is entirely identical at the pixel level with a copyrighted work, and you can prove that you had never seen that original copyrighted work and you created your image completely independently, then you have not broken anyone's copyright and are free to sell copies of your own work.
This is not true. I will just give the example of the nighttime illumination of the Eiffel Tower:
> https://www.travelandleisure.com/photography/illegal-to-take...
> https://www.headout.com/blog/eiffel-tower-copyright/
This has no relation to what I was saying. Taking a photo of a copyrighted work is a method for creating a copy of said work using a mechanical device, so it is of course covered by copyright (whether buildings or light shows fall under copyright is an irrelevant detail).
What I'm saying is that if you, say, create an image of a red oval in MS Paint, you have copyright over said image. If 2 years later I create an identical image myself having never seen your image, I also have copyright over my image - despite it being identical to your image, I have every right to sell copies of my image, and even to sue someone who distributes copies of my image without my permission (but not if they're distributing copies of your image).
But if I had seen your image of a red oval before I created mine, it's basically impossible for me to prove that I created my own image out of my own creativity, and I didn't just copy yours. So, if you were to sue me for copyright infringement, I would almost certainly lose in front of any reasonable jury.
> This is not true. I will just give the example of the nighttime illumination of the Eiffel Tower:
That example is not analogous to the topic at hand.
But furthermore, it also is specific to French/European copyright law. In the US, the US Copyright Act would not permit restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces.
actually, the US Copyright Act does in fact allow restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portlandia_(statue)
the Portlandia statue is one such architectural work - and its creator is fairly litigious.
I don't know the details of that specific case so I can't speak to it, but the text of the AWCPA is very clear:
> The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.
This codifies an already-established principle in US law. French law does not have that same principle.
If I read Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and then proceed to write a structurally identical novel with many of the same story beats and character types, it will not be difficult to convince a jury exposed to these facts that I’ve created a derivative work.
On the other hand, if I can prove to the jury’s satisfaction that I’ve never been exposed to Puzo’s work in any form, it’s independent creation.
To the contrary, there have been many cases of very similar novels with largely identical plot points and settings that survive copyright allegations, even if the author was exposed to the original work.
For a rather entertaining example (though raunchy, for a heads up): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhWWcWtAUoY&themeRefresh=1
In the case of chardet though it wouldn't it be more like you were the publisher of the godfather novel, withdrawing it from print and releasing a novel with the same name with much of the same plot and characters but claiming the new version was an independent creation?
That's even worse for your case.
If the new maintainers used Claude as their “fancy code generator” (there’s a Claude.md file in the repository so it seems so) then it was almost certainly trained with the chardet source code.
> And don't just rewrite the same code from memory, but instead write fully new code producing the same/similar outputs.
How different does the new code have to be from the old code and how is that measured?
nobody can tell and this is how we entered this very turbulent modern times of "everything can be retold" without punishment. LLMs already doing it at large, while original author is correct in terms of the LGPL, it is nearly impossible to say how different should expression of an idea be to be considered separate one. this is truly fundamental philosophical question that may not have an easy answer.
This is a bad argument.
Think of a rewrite (by a human or an LLM) as a translation. If you wrote a book in English and somebody translated it into Spanish, it'd still be a copyright issue. Same thing with translations.
That's very different to taking the idea of a body of work. So you can't copyright the idea of a pirate taking a princess hostage and a hero rescuing her. That's too generic. But even here there are limits. There have been lawsuits over artistic works being too similar.
Back to software, you can't copyright the idea of photo-editing software but you can copyright the source code that produces that software. If you can somehow prompt an LLM to produce photo editing software or if a person writes it themselves then you have what's generally referred to as a "cleanroom" implmentation and that's copyright-free (although you may have patent issues, which is a whole separate issue).
But even if you prompted an LLM that way, how did the LLM learn what it needed? Was the source code of another project an input in its training? This is a legal grey area, currently. But I suspect it's going to be a problem.
Suchir Balaji, the OpenAI researcher who was found dead in his flat just before testifying against his employer, published an excellent article somehow related to this topic:
When does generative AI qualify for fair use?
https://suchir.net/fair_use.html
Balaji's argument is very strong and I feel we will see it tested in court as soon as LLM license-washing starts getting more popular.
Hate to be "that guy" but in a corrupt legal system, which ours is, none of this matters. Who has the influence and dollars to make the decision theirs is all that matters.
I think you could have an LLM produce a written English detailed description of the complete logic of the program and tests.
Then use another LLM to produce code from that spec.
This would be similar to the cleanroom technique.
Producing a copy of a copyrighted work through a purely mechanical process is clear violation of copyright. LLMs are absolutely not different from a copier machine in the eyes of the law.
Original works can only be produced by a human being, by definition in copyright law. Any artifact produced by an animal, a mechanical process, a machine, a natural phenomenon etc is either a derived work if it started from an original copyrighted work, or a public domain artifact not covered by copyright law if it didn't.
For example, an image created on a rock struck by lightning is not a copyright covered work. Similarly, an image generated by an diffusion model from a randomly generated sentence is not a copyrightable work. However, if you feed a novel as a prompt to an LLM and ask for a summary, the resulting summary is a derived work of said novel, and it falls under the copyright of the novel's owner - you are not allowed to distribute copies of the summary the LLM generated for you.
Whether the output of an LLM, or the LLM weights themselves, might be considered derived works of the training set of that LLM is a completely different discussion, and one that has not yet been settled in court.
Perhaps - but an argument might still be made that the result is a derivative work of the original, given that it's produced by feeding the original work through automated tooling.
But either way, deleting the original version from the repo and replacing it with the new version - as opposed to, say, archiving the old version and starting a new repo with the new version - would still be a dick move.
Assuming the second LLM hadn’t been trained on the existing codebase. Which in this case we can’t know, but can assume that it was.
Does the second LLM have the codebase in its training?
One could use Comma, which has only been trained on public domain texts:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05209
The copyright argument is a sidetrack both in the PR comment thread and here. The issue opened claims the new code is based on the old code, and therefore derivative, and therefore must be offered in a modified version of the source code under the previous license, LGPL. The complaint is the maintainers violated the terms of LGPL, that they must prove no derivation from the original code to legally claim this is a legal new version without the LGPL license. Claim is if they or Claude read the old code (or of course directly use any of it) it is a license violation. “… in the release 7.0.0, the maintainers claim to have the right to “relicense” the project. They have no such right; doing so is an explicit violation of the LGPL. Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation).“ By this reasoning, I am genuinely asking (I’m not a license expert) if a valid clean room rewrite is possible, because at a minimum you would need a spec describing all behavior, which ses to require ample exposure to the original to be sufficiently precise.
That's not what a derivative work means, though. Being exposed to something doesn't mean you can't create original work which is similar to it (otherwise every song or artwork would be a derivative work of everything before it)
People do cleanroom implementations as a precaution against a lawsuit, but it's not a necessary element.
In fact, even if some parts are similar, it's still not a clear-cut case - the defendant can very well argue that the usage was 1. transformative 2. insubstantial to the entirety of work.
"The complaint is the maintainers violated the terms of LGPL, that they must prove no derivation from the original code to legally claim this is a legal new version without the LGPL license."
The burden of proof is on the accuser.
"I am genuinely asking (I’m not a license expert) if a valid clean room rewrite is possible, because at a minimum you would need a spec describing all behavior, which ses to require ample exposure to the original to be sufficiently precise."
Linux would be illegal if so (they had knowledge of Unix before), and many GNU tools are libre API-compatible reimplementations of previous Unix utilities :)
The copyright argument is the only relevant argument. If the new work is a derived work of the original, then it follows by definition that the new work is under the copryight of the original's author(s). Since the original chardet was distributed by its author(s) only under the LGPL, any copy/derivative of it that anyone else creates must be distributed only under the LGPL, per the terms of the LGPL.
Now, whether chardet 7.0.0 is a derivative of chardet or not is a matter of copyright law that the LGPL has no say on, and a rather murky ground with not that much case law to rely on behind it. If it's not, the new author is free to distribute chardet 7.0.0 under any license they want, since it is a new work under his copyright.
As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context. A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern.
One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical.
Took him a week after work. It's not as stable, the unit-tests need more work, the code has some unnecessary duplication, hosting isn't fully figured out, but the end-to-end test-harness is even more stable than their own.
"How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"
Noodling on this at the moment.
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.
> You don't protect yourself from your competitor by worrying about them copying your mobile app.
They did not copy the mobile app. They copied the service.
Replace “mobile app” with “backend” in my comment.
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.
> It’s hard to use external services
I think it's interesting to add what they use it for and why its hard.
What they use it for:
- It's about automated testing against third party services.
- It's not about replicating the product for end users
Why using external services is hard/problematic
- Performance: They want to have super fast feedback cycles in the agentic loop: In-Memory tests. So they let the AI write full in-memory simulations of (for example) the slack api that are behaviorally equivalent for their use cases.
- Feasiblity: The sandboxes offered by these services usually have performance limits (= number of requests per month, etc) that would easily be exhausted if attached to a test harness that runs every other minute in an automated BDD loop.
> "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.
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.
OTOH as of yesterday the output of the LLM isn't copyrightable, which makes licensing it difficult
As other's have pointed out, this case is really about refusing to allow an LLM to be recognised as the author. The person using the LLM waived any right to be recognised as the author.
Its also US only. Other countries will differ. This means you can only rely on this ruling at all for something you are distributing only in the US. Might be OK for art, definitely not for most software. Very definitely not OK for a software library.
For example UK law specifically says "In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken."
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/9
> The person using the LLM waived any right to be recognised as the author.
They can't waive their liability from being identified as an infringer though.
> the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.
This seems extremely vague. One could argue that any part of the pipeline counts as an "arrangement necessary for the creation of the work", so who is the author? The prompter, the creator of the model, or the creator of the training data?
The courts will have to settle that according to circumstances. I think it is likely to be the prompter, and in some cases the creator of the training data as well. The creator of the model will have copyright on the model, but unlikely to have copyright on its outputs (any more than the writer of a compiler has copyright on its output).
I wrote this comment on another thread earlier, but it seems relevant here, so I'll just c/p:
I think we didn't even began to consider all the implications of this, and while people ran with that one case where someone couldn't copyright a generated image, it's not that easy for code. I think there needs to be way more litigation before we can confidently say it's settled.
If "generated" code is not copyrightable, where do draw the line on what generated means? Do macros count? Does code that generates other code count? Protobuf?
If it's the tool that generates the code, again where do we draw the line? Is it just using 3rd party tools? Would training your own count? Would a "random" code gen and pick the winners (by whatever means) count? Bruteforce all the space (silly example but hey we're in silly space here) counts?
Is it just "AI" adjacent that isn't copyrightable? If so how do you define AI? Does autocomplete count? Intellisense? Smarter intellisense?
Are we gonna have to have a trial where there's at least one lawyer making silly comparisons between LLMs and power plugs? Or maybe counting abacuses (abaci?)... "But your honour, it's just random numbers / matrix multiplications...
In terms of adoption, "it's not settled" is even worse
Maybe we should build an LLM that can be the judge of that :)
That's a very incorrect reading.
AI can't be the author of the work. Human driving the AI can, unless they zero-shotted the solution with no creative input.
Only the authored parts can be copyrighted, and only humans can author [0].
"For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user."
"In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that 'the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.'"
"Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection. In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are 'independent of' and do 'not affect' the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself."
IMO this is pretty common sense. No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it.
[0]: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-40
> IMO this is pretty common sense. No one's arguing they're authoring generated code; the whole point is to not author it.
Actually this is very much how people think for code.
Consider the following consequence. Say I work for a company. Every time I generate some code with Claude, I keep a copy of said code. Once the full code is tested and released, I throw away any code that was not working well. Now I leave the company and approach their competitor. I provide all of the working code generated by Claude to the competitor. Per the new ruling, this should be perfectly legal, as this generated code is not copyrightable and thus doesn't belong to anyone.
So if I want to publish a project under some license and I put a comment in an AI generated file (never mind what I put in the comment), how do you go about proving which portion of that file is not protected under copyright?
If the AI code isn't copyrightable, I don't have any obligations to acknowledge it.
You're looking at this as the infringer rather than the owner. How do you as a copyright owner prove you meaningfully arranged the work when you want to enforce your copyright?
Copyright office says this has to be done case-by-case. My guess is they'd ask to see prompts and evidence of authorship.
The human is still at best a co-author, as the primary implementation effort isn't theirs. And I think effort involved is the key contention in these cases. Yesterday ideas were cheap, and it was the execution that matters. Today execution is probably cheaper than ideas, but things should still hold.
That's not really what the ruling said. Though, I suspect this type of "vibe rewrite" does fall afoul of the same issue.
But for this type of copyright laundering, it doesn't really matter. The goal isn't really about licensing it, it's about avoiding the existing licence. The idea that the code ends up as public domain isn't really an issue for them.
As of yesterday?
I think they mean this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47232289
> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"
You can try patenting; but not after the fact. Copyright won't help you here. You can't copyright an algorithm or idea, just a specific form or implementation of it. And there is a lot of legal history about what is and isn't a derivative work here. Some companies try to forbid reverse engineering in their licensing. But of course that might be a bit hard to enforce, or prove. And it doesn't work for OSS stuff in any case.
Stuff like this has been common practice in the industry for decades. Most good software ideas get picked apart, copied and re-implemented. IBM's bios for the first PC quickly got reverse engineered and then other companies started making IBM compatible PCs. IBM never open sourced their bios and they probably did not intend for that to happen. But that didn't matter. Likewise there were several PC compatible DOS variants that each could (mostly) run the same applications. MS never open sourced DOS either. There are countless examples of people figuring out how stuff works and then creating independent implementations. All that is perfectly legal.
No serious enterprise SaaS company differentiates themselves solely on the product (the products are usually terrible). It's the sales channel, the fact that you know how to bill a big company, the human engineer who is sent on site to deploy and integrate the product, the people on the support line 24/7, the regulatory framework that ensures the customer can operate legally and obtain insurance, the fact that there's a deep pool of potential hires who have used and understand the product. Those are the differentiators.
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.
I suspect you're underestimating the capabilities of today's LLMs.
"How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"
That's the neat thing: you don't!
> "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.
What about jurisdictions where reverse engineering is an inalienable right?
Maybe a better question is:
How do our competitors protect themselves against us doing this?
Makes me wonder when AI will put the mobile phone OS duopoly to an end.
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,_....
Nothing. This is why SaaS stocks took a dump last week.
I think the genie is out of the bottle on this one and there's really no putting it back.
There is a certain amount of brand loyalty and platform inertia that will keep people. Also, as you point out, just having the source code isn't enough. Running a platform is more than that. But that gap will narrow with time.
The broader issue here is that there are people in tech who don't realize that AI is coming for their jobs (and companies) too. I hope people in this position can maybe understand the overall societal issues for other people seeing their industries "disrupted" (ie destroyed) by AI.
A comment from 2021:
> Unfortunately, because the code that chardet was originally based on was LGPL, we don't really have a way to relicense it. Believe me, if we could, I would. There was talk of chardet being added to the standard library, and that was deemed impossible because of being unable to change the license.
So the person that did the rewrite knew this was a dive into dangerous water. That's so disrespectful.
On a side note, it is interesting to see Mark Pilgrim rise from the "dead": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pilgrim#%22Disappearance%...
His Python books, although a bit dated, are something I still recommend to new Python programmers.
Let's see how much time it takes for the Wikipedia page to mention the "a2mark" GitHub user :)
(I can hear a "challenge accepted" from some random HNer already)
Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code.
Question: if they had built one using AI teams in both “rooms”, one writing a spec the other implementing, would that be fine? You’d need to verify spec doesn’t include source code, but that’s easy enough.
It seems to mostly follow the IBM-era precedent. However, since the model probably had the original code in its training data, maybe not? Maybe valid for closed source project but not open-source? Interesting question.
> 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.
Yeah I mention that in the question.
Might still be valid for closed source projects (probably is).
I think courts would need to weigh in on the open source side. There’s legal precedent is that you can use a derived work to generate a new unique work (the spec derived for the copyrighted code is very much a derived work). There are rulings that LLMs are transformative works, not just copies of training data.
LLMs can’t reproduce their entire training set. But this thinking is also ripe for misuse. I could always train or fine-tune a model on the original work so that it can reproduce the original. We quickly get into statistical arguments here.
It’s a really interesting question.
> There’s legal precedent is that you can use a derived work to generate a new unique work (the spec derived for the copyrighted code is very much a derived work)
Indeed, but in the clean room scenario, the party who implements the spec has to be a separate entity that has never seen the code. Whether or not the LLM is copyright infringing is a separate question - it definitely has (at least some) familiarity with the code in question, which makes the "clean room" argument an uphill battle
I just wrote a long comment about that, but yes, you are on to something here.
The key to me is that the LLM itself is a derived work and that by definition it can not produce something original. Which in turn would make profiting off such a derived work created by an automated process from copyrighted works a case of wholesale copyright infringement. If you can get a judge to agree on that I predict the price of RAM will come down again.
So by that logic, you're not legally allowed to implement your own character detector and license it as your own if you've ever looked at chardet's source code? I'm confused. I thought copyright laws protect intellectual property as-is, not the impression it leaves on someone.
Well, you are not making things easier for yourself by looking at that source code if the author of chardet brings a case for copyright infringement against you.
The question is: if you had not looked at chardet's source would you still be able to create your work? If the answer is 'yes' then you probably shouldn't have looked at the source, you just made your defense immeasurably harder. And if the answer is 'no' then you probably should have just used chardet and respected its license.
Sorry, but that sounds like a witch hunt to me, not modern law. Isn't the burden of proof on the accuser? I.e. the accuser has to prove that "this piece of code right here is a direct refactoring of my code, and here are the trivial and mechanical steps to produce one from the other"? And if they present no such evidence, we can all go home?
Not all legal systems put the burden of proof on the accuser. In fact, many legal systems have indefinite detentions, in which the government effectively imprisons a suspect, sometimes for months at a time. To take it a step further, the plea-bargain system of the USA, is really just a method to skip the entire legal process. After all, proving guilt is expensive, so why not just strong-arm a suspect into confessing? It also has the benefit of holding someone responsible for an injustice, even if the actual perpetrator cannot be found. By my personal standards, this is a corrupt system, but by the standards of the legal stratum of society, those KPIs look _solid_.
By contrast, in Germany (IIRC), false confessions are _illegal_, meaning that objective evidence is required.
Many legal systems follow the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", but also have many "escape hatches" that let them side-step the actual process that is supposed to guarantee that ideal principle.
EDIT: And that is just modern society. Past societies have had trial by ordeal and trial by combat, neither of which has anything to do with proof and evidence. Many such archaic proof procedures survive in modern legal systems, in a modernized and bureaucratized way. In some sense, modern trials are a test of who has the more expensive attorney (as opposed to who has a more skilled champion or combatant).
No, the burden of proof is on the defender: if you didn't create it you are not the copyright holder.
Copyright is automatic for a reason, the simple act of creation is technically enough to establish copyright. But that mechanism means that if your claimed creation has an uncanny resemblance to an earlier, published creation or an unpublished earlier creation that you had access to that you are going to be in trouble when the real copyright holder is coming to call.
In short: just don't. Write your own stuff if you plan on passing it off as your own.
The accuser just needs to establish precedence.
So if you by your lonesome have never listened to the radio and tomorrow morning wake up and 'Billy Jean' springs from your brain you're going to get sued, even if the MJ estate won't be able to prove how you did it.
That much I understand, but that question only comes up when the similarity is already an established fact, no? If we take the claim that this is a "complete rewrite" at face value, then there should be no reason for the code to have any uncanny similarities with chardet 6 beyond what is expectable from their functionality (which is not copyrightable) being the same, right?
So my (perhaps naive) understanding is if none can be found, then the author of chardet 1-6 simply doesn't have a case here, and we don't get to the point of asking "have you been exposed to the code?".
No, they're on the record as this being a derived work. There is no argument here at all. Not finding proof in a copyright case when the author is on the record about the infringement is a complete non-issue.
You'd have to make that claim absent any proof and then there better not be any gross similarities between the two bodies of code that can not be explained away by coincidence.
And then there is such a thing as discovery. I've been party to a case like this and won because of some silly little details (mostly: identical typos) and another that was just a couple of lines of identical JavaScript (with all of the variable names changed). Copyright cases against large entities are much harder to win because they have deeper pockets but against smaller parties that are clearly infringing it is much easier.
When you're talking about documented protocols or interface specifications then it is a different thing, those have various exceptions and those vary from one jurisdiction to another.
What can help bolster the case for the defense is for instance accurate record keeping, who contributed what parts, sworn depositions by those individuals that they have come up with these parts by their lonesome, a delivery pace matching that which you would expect from that particular employee without any suspicious outliers in terms of amount of code dropped per interval and so on. Code copied from online sources being properly annotated with a reference to the source also helps, because if you don't do that then it's going to look like you have no problem putting your own copyright on someone else's code.
If it is real, then it is fairly easy to document that it is real. If it is not, after discovery has run its course it is usually fairly easy to prove that it is not if it is not.
> when the similarity is already an established fact
The similarity is an established fact - the authors claim that this is chardet, to the extent that they are even using the chardet name!
Had they written a similar tool with a different name, and placed it in its own repo, we might be having a very different discussion.
This is a balance of probabilities standard of proof. Both sides have the same burden of proof, it's equally split. Whoever has the stronger proof wins.
> if you've ever looked at chardet's source code
If you wish to be able to claim in court that it is a "clean room" implementation, yes.
Clean room implementations are specifically where a company firewalls the implementing team off from any knowledge of the original implementation, in order to be able to swear in court that their implementation does not make any use of the original code (which they are in such a case likely not licensed to use).
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!
How would a team verify this for any current model? They would have to observe and control all training data. In practice, any currently available model that is good enough to perform this task likely fails the clean room criteria due to having a copy of the source code of the project it wants to rewrite. At that point it's basically an expensive lossy copy paste.
You can always verify the output. Unless the problem being solved really is exceedingly specific and non-trivial, it's at least unlikely that the AI will rip off recognizable expression from the original work. The work may be part of the training but so are many millions of completely unrelated works, so any "family resemblance" would have to be there for very specific reasons about what's being implemented.
It requires the original project to not be in the training data for the model for it to be a clean room rewrite
That only matters if expression of the original project really does end up in the rewrite, doesn't it? This can be checked for (by the team with access to the code) and it's also quite unlikely at least. It's not trivial at all to have an LLM replicate their training verbatim: even when feasible (the Harry Potter case, a work that's going to be massively overweighted in training due to its popularity) it takes very specific prompting and hinting.
> That only matters if expression of the original project really does end up in the rewrite, doesn't it?
No, I don't think so. I hate comparing LLMs with humans, but for a human being familiar with the original code might disqualify them from writing a differently-licensed version.
Anyway, LLMs are not human, so as many courts confirmed, their output is not copyrightable at all, under any license.
Uh, this is just a curiosity, but do you have a reference for that last argument?
If true, it would mean most commercial code being developed today, since it's increasingly AI-generated, would actually be copyright-free. I don't think most Western courts would uphold that position.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47232289
The headline was misleading. The courts avoided to decide what Thaler could have copyrighted because he said he was not the author.
> That only matters if expression of the original project really does end up in the rewrite, doesn't it?
If that were the case, nobody would bother with clean-room rewrites.
Somewhat annoyingly, there's been research that suggests that models can pass information to each other via (effectively) steganographic techniques - specific but apparently harmless choices of tokens, wordings, and so on; see https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.02950 and https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/ for some simple examples.
While it feels unlikely that a simple "write this spec from this code" + "write this code from this spec" loop would actually trigger this kind of hiding behaviour, an LLM trained to accurately reproduce code from such a loop definitely would be capable of hiding code details within the spec - and you can't reasonably prove that the frontier LLMs have not been trained to do so.
Not if the codebase was included in training the implementer.
Answer: probably not, as API-topography is also a part of copyright
Edit: this is wrong
Didn't the Google - Oracle case about Java APIs in Android https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_.... directly disprove this?
In the end, the supreme court case decided that the re-implementation fell under fair use, it did not answer the copyright question.
The courts decided that wasn’t true for IBM, Java and many other cases. API typography describes functionality, which isn’t copyrightable (IANAL).
Wasn't Oracle vs Google about all of that?
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.
“Mr Teacher, how many words do I have to change after copy pasting wikipedia so its not plagiarism?” has grown up and entered the workforce.
Pin your dependency versions people! With hashes at this point, cant trust anybody out here.
There's a subtext in your point that I want to expand on.
Tech people, particularly engineers, tend to make a fundamental error when dealing with the law that almost always causes them to make wrong conclusions. And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic.
An example I like to use is people who do something illegal on the Internet and then use the argument "you can't prove I did it (with absolute certainty)". It could've been someone who hacked your Wifi. You don't know who on the Wifi did it, etc. But the law will look at the totality of the evidence. Did the activity occur when you were at home and stop when you weren't? How likely are alternative explanations? Etc.
All of that will be considered based on some legal standard depending on the venue. In civil court that tends to be "the preponderance of the evidence" (meaning more likely than not) while in criminal court it's "beyond a reasonable doubt" (which is a much higher standard).
So, using your example, an engineer will often fall into a trap of thinking they can substitute enough words to have a new original work, Ship of Theseus-like. And the law simply doesn't work that way.
So, when this gets to a court (which it will, it's not a question of "if"), the court will consider how necessary the source work was to what you did. If you used it for a direct translation (eg from C++ to Go) then you're going to lose. My prediction is that even using it in training data will be cause for a copyright claim.
If you use Moby Dick in your training data and ask an LLM to write a book like Moby Dick (either explicitly or implicitly) then you're going to have an issue. Even if you split responsibilities so one LLM (training on Moby Dick) comes up with a structure/prompt and another LLM (not trained on Moby Dick) writes it, I don't think that'll really help you avoid the issue.
> So, when this gets to a court (which it will, it's not a question of "if"), the court will consider how necessary the source work was to what you did. If you used it for a direct translation (eg from C++ to Go) then you're going to lose. My prediction is that even using it in training data will be cause for a copyright claim.
This has a lot of similarity to when colorization of film started popping up. Did colorizing black and white movies suddenly change the copyright of the film? At this point is seems mostly the courts say no. But you may find sometimes people rule the other way and say yes. But it takes time and a lot of effort to get what in general people want.
But basically if you start with a 'spec' then make something you probably can get a wholly owned new thing. But if you start with the old thing and just transform it in some way. You can do that. But the original copyright holders still have rights too to the thing you mangled too.
If I remember right they called it 'color of copyright' or something like that.
The LLM bits you are probably right. But that has not been worked out by the law or the courts yet. So the courts may make up new case law around it. Or the lawmakers might get ahead of it and say something (unlikely).
A work could even have two copyrights! Copying a colorized film could require the permission of both the studio that made the film, and the studio that colorized it.
> And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic.
I know it sounds like an oversimplification, but "got off on a technicality" is a common thing among the well-connected and well-heeled. Sure, us nerds probably focus too much on the "technicality" part, since we are by definition technical, but the rest is wishy-washy, unfair BS as far as many of our brains work much of the time.
"Get off on a technicality" is largely police propaganda. The "technicality" tends to be the police violated their rights in some way or did something illegal.
And if you get to trial (without being coerced into a guilty plea for something you may not have done [1]), the cops will lie constantly in police reports and even on the stand. It happens so often it has a name: testalying [2].
The well-connected don't really get off on a "technicality". They simply never get charged in the first place. Only two people were ever charged because of Jeffrey Epstein. One is Epstein, who died, and the other is Ghislane Maxwell who got convicted of trafficking minors to... nobody in particular... and is now in a low-security work camp it's technically illegal for sex offenders to be in.
And even if somehow you, as a connected person, are charged and convicted, well you just buy a pardon [3].
[1]: https://www.vera.org/news/how-the-criminal-legal-system-coer...
[2]: https://www.chicagoappleseed.org/2020/11/09/testilying/
[3]: https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-pardons-clemency-ge...
Wow that's hot. I was not aware that you need to be "untainted" by the original LGPL code. This could mean that...
All AI generated code is tainted with GPL/LGPL because the LLMs might have been taught with it
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
"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.
It's harder than some people think, but the author does a lot of the work when he names the resulting artifact "chardet v7.0.0". If I thought I was writing the kind of arms-length reimplementation that's required, I would never put it into the versioning scheme of the original, come on.
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.
Yes, that's what some lonely people have been shouting in the desert since the LLM craze started.
Does "lonely" in this case encompass people who've formed relationshios with said LLMs?
I'm not lonely! And I stopped shouting that since 24, because you know :/
The law is what a court says it is; there is precedent for decisions on human rewrites but LLM (assisted) code might still be fairly uncharted territory.
I torn on where the line should be drawn.
If the code is different but API compatible, Google Java vs Oracle Java case shows that if the implementation is different enough, it can be considered a new implementation. Clean room or not.
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?
> plenty of projects changed licenses lol.
They usually did that with approval from existing license holders (except when they didn't, those were the bad cases for sure).
No. Because they couldnt have done any of that refactoring without a licence to do so, and that licence forbids them from relicencing it.
Ok since this is not really answered... Hypothetically, If I'm a maintainer of this project. I decided I hate the implementation, it's naive, horrible performance, weird edge cases. I'm wiser today than 3 years ago.
I rewrite it, my head full of my own, original, new ideas. The results turn out great. There's a few if and while loops that look the same, and some public interfaces stayed the same. But all the guts are brand new, shiny, my own.
Do I have no rights to this code?
You have all rights to the code that you wrote that is not "colored" by previous code. Aka "an original work"
But code that is any kind of derivative of code before it contains a complex mix of other peoples rights. It can be relicensed, but only if all authors large and small agree to the terms.
You have rights, but if it's a derivative, the original author might have rights too. If you made a substantial creative input, the original author can't copy your project without your permission, but neither can you copy theirs.
Hmm are we in a ship of Theseus/speciation area? Each individual step of refactoring would not cross the threshold but would a rewrite? Even if the end result was the same?
Let us also remember that certain architectural changes need to happen over a period of planned refractors. Nobody wants to read a 5000 line shotgun-blast looking diff
So effective, LGPL means you freely give all copyright for your work to the license holder? Even if the license holder has moved on from the project?
What if I decide to make a JS or Rust implementation of this project and use it as inspiration? Does that mean I'm no longer doing a "clean room" implementation and my project is contaminated by LGPL too?
The standard way of "relicensing" a project is to contact all of the prior code contributors about it and get their ok.
Generally relicensing is done in good faith for a good reason, so pretty much everyone ok's it.
Trickiness can turn up when code contributors aren't contactable (ie dead, missing, etc), and I'm unsure of the legally sound approach to that.
If a copyright holder does not give you permission, you can't legally relicense. Even if they're dead.
If they're dead and their estate doesn't care, you might pirate it without getting sued, but any recipient of the new work would be just as liable as you are, and they'd know that, so I probably wouldn't risk it.
The legally-sound approach is to keep track of your actions, so you can later prove you've made "reasonable" efforts to contact them.
Afaik you can do whatever you like to GPL licensed code, you do not need a license to refactor it.
I understand you need to publish the source code of your modifications, if you distribute them outside of your company.
You can do anything except change the license, which ensures that right to do anything passes on to others in perpetuity. That's how it's designed.
You also can't relicense it to be less restrictive
Or more restrictive! There are certain exceptions permitting combinations of open-source code however.
Governance change or refactoring don’t give you a right to relicense someone else’s work. It needs to be a whole new work, which you own the copyright to.
Which is what happened here? The maintainers did a rewrite, apparently, but it's not enough!
No, that defeats the entire purpose of GPL licenses
It's not clear at all why the current maintainers wanted/needed this re-licensing. I guess that their employee, Monarch Money, wants to use derivative work in their application without releasing the changes? It was already LGPL, perfect for a library, not GPL.
Python wouldn't take LGPL code in the standard library. And Dan Blanchard imagined more people would want to work on it.[1]
[1] https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...
That take and the link within it to https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36 which is from 2014 (!!) and revived in 2021 (!) make me think now that Dan Blanchard is in good faith, but still acted in a naive manner. Rewriting from "scratch" with Claude Code and basically taking over the project by changing the license, all in one single pull request, well... it's not going to end well on the public relations side.
"I prefer MIT/BSD licenses just because they're simpler"[0]
Seems like there is no real point, just vibes.
[0] https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36
Does anyone understand the intent behind the changed license on the package, why are the current maintainers trying to do it in the first place? What's actually going on?
Nobody that is not already writing (L)GPL licensed software wants to pull LGPL licensed libraries into his software. I'm not a lawyer. If you have it in separate object artefacts that you can dynamically link to, you should be fine. Everything else may be more difficult.
See what FFmpeg writes on this topic: https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html
Unicode detection is the kind of utility the language maintainers want in their package collection if not in the standard library, and programmers who have to do anything with "plain text" files might want to rely on.
Releasing a core library like this under a genuinely free licence (MIT) is a service to anyone working in the ecosystem.
Maybe. Enabling more GPL software to become proprietary isn't exactly a service.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260749
Huh, 7e25bf4 was a big commit.
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/7e25bf40bb4ae68848...Impossible to code inspect and verify. Someone else commented 'smells like a supply chain attack' and while I'm sure it's not intended to be, there is no way to verify. And who believes, in half a million lines of code, no bugs have been introduced?
FastAPI's underlying library, Starlette, has been going through licensing shenanigans too lately: https://github.com/Kludex/starlette/issues/3042
Be really careful who you give your projects keys to, folks!
That doesn't seem related at all, this is just adding attribution, not changing the license through LLM-washing
Does using the old version’s tests to create a new version make it a derivative work? That’s certainly some pretty tight coupling.
My gut feeling is no, a work is not a derivative of a compliance test suite that it passes and was used to guide it. But I'm not a lawyer.
Perhaps notable: years ago the original original chardet was rewritten with a different license: https://github.com/hsivonen/chardetng
AFAIK this was not a clean room reimplementation. But since it was rewritten by hand, into a different language, with not just a different internal design but a different API, I could easily buy that chardetng doesn't infringe while Python chardet 7 does.
Isn't the real issue here that tons of projects that depend on the "chardet" now drag in some crappy still unverified AI slop? AI forgery poisoning, IMHO.
Why does this new project here needed to replace the original like that in this dishonourable way? The proper way would have been to create a proper new project.
Note: even Python's own pip drags this in as dependency it seems (hopefully they'll stick to a proper version)
This indeed the real issue (not the AI angle per se, but the wholesale replacement. The licensing issue is real, but less important IMO).
Half a million lines of code have been deleted and replaced over the course of four days, directly to the main branch with no opportunity for community review and testing. (I've no idea whether depending projects use main or the stable branch, but stable is nearly 4 years old at this point, so while I hope it's the version depending projects use, I wouldn't put money on it.)
The whole thing smells a lot like a supply chain attack - and even if it's in good faith, that's one hell of a lot of code to be reviewed in order to make sure.
The test coverage is going to be entirely different, unless of course they copied the tests, which would then preclude them from changing the license. They didn't even bother to make sure the CI passed on merging a major version release https://github.com/chardet/chardet/actions/runs/22563903687/...
Woah. As someone not in this particular community but dependent on these tools this is exactly the terrifying underbelly we've all discussed with the user architecture of tools like pip and npm. It's horrifying that a major component just got torn apart, rebuilt, and deployed to anyone who uses those python ecosystems (... many millions? ... billions of people?)
The drop"-in" compatibility claims are also just wrong? I ran it on the old test suite from 6.0 (which is completely absent now), and quickly checking:
- the outputs, even if correctly deduced, are often incompatible: "utf-16be" turns into "utf-16-be", "UTF-16" turns into "utf-16-le" etc. FWIW, the old version appears to have been a bit of a mess (having had "UTF-16", "utf-16be" and "utf-16le" among its outputs) but I still wouldn't call the new version _compatible_,
- similarly, all `ascii` turn into `Windows-1252`
- sometimes it really does appear more accurate,
- but sometimes it appears to flip between wider families of closely related encodings, like one SHIFT_JIS test (confidence 0.99) turns into cp932 (confidence 0.34), or the whole family of tests that were determined as gb18030 (chinese) are now sometimes determined as gb2312 (the older subset of gb18030), and one even as cp1006, which AFAIK is just wrong.
As for performance claims, they appear not entirely false - analyzing all files took 20s, versus 150s with v6.0. However, looks like the library sometimes takes 2s to lazy initialize something, which means that if one uses `chardetect` CLI instead of Python API, you'll pay this cost each time and get several times slower instead.
Oh, and this "Negligible import memory (96 B)" is just silly and obviously wrong.
Yeah, there's really low quality code added if you take a look.
This is not unprecedented, TCC relicensed part of its code by being approved by all authors:
https://repo.or.cz/tinycc.git/blob/3d963aebcd533da278f086a3e...
The interesting part is that the original author is against it but some people claims it could be a rewrite and not a derivative work.
I don't know the legal basis of everything but it's definitly not morally correct toward the original author.
I have successfully reproduced a few projects with LLM assistance via strict cleanroom rules and only working off public specifications.
Once you use a LLM, the room is no longer clean.
same is true for using humans
Human training and AI training are legally distinct processes.
No, it isn't. A human wasn't trained on the material they're trying to reproduce.
> Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation).
I don't think that the second sentence is a valid claim per se, it depends on what this "rewritten code" actually looks like (IANAL).
Edit: my understanding of "clean room implementation" is that it is a good defence to a copyright infrigement claim because there cannot be infringement if you don't know the original work. However it does not mean that NOT "clean room implementation" implies infrigement, it's just that it is potentially harder to defend against a claim if the original work was known.
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).
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.
"Exposure" means here, I think, that they feed the 6.X code version to Claude.
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
>the ai copy pasted the existing project.
The change log says the implementation is completely different, not a copy paste. Is that wrong?
>Internal architecture is completely different (probers replaced by pipeline stages). Only the public API is preserved.
It's up to them to prove that a) the original implementation was not part of whatever data set said AI used and b) that the engineers in question did not use the original as a basis.
It's up to the accuser to prove that they copied it and did not actually write it from scratch as they claimed.
No, that's not how copyright laws work. Especially in a world where the starting point is the accused making something and marketing it as someone else's IP with a license change.
It's still on the claimant to establish copying, which usually involves showing that the two works are substantially similar in protected elements. That the defendants had access to the original helps establish copying, but isn't on its own sufficient.
Only after that would the burden be on the defendants, such as to give a defense that their usage is sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use.
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.
> “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”
This is not a good analogy.
A "rewrite" in context here is not a reproduction of the original work but a different work that is functionally equivalent, or at least that is the claim.
To stay with the analogy, Harry Potter is not a rewrite of A Wizard of Earthsea, even if they both contain schools that teach magic.
Possibly important is that it’s largely api compatible but it’s not functionally equivalent in that its performance (as accuracy not just speed) is different.
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 spent like two minutes looking at the diff between the original and the supposed "clean room" implementation [1] and already found identical classes, variable names, methods, and parameters. It looks like there was no actual attempt at clean-rooming this, regardless of whether that "counts".
[1]https://github.com/chardet/chardet/compare/6.0.0.post1...7.0...
Lol at the statement that "clean room" would have been invented to scare people from suing. It's the opposite: clean room is a fairly-desperate attempt to pre-empt accusations in court when it is expected that the "derivative" argument will be very strong, in order to then piggyback on the doctrine about interoperability. Sometimes it works, but it's a very high bar to clear.
I thought we were debating if it was legal, not if it's wrong. The law is about creativity. Was this creative or a more mechanical translation?
I wonder if LLMs will push the industry towards protecting their IP with patents like the other branches of engineering rather than copyright. If you patent a general idea of how your software works then no rewrite will be able to lift this protection.
General patents aren't allowed.
If there wasn't a specific limitation against software patents, you could patent the process of "first we look at the first 3 bytes for a BOM, then we take statistics of the most frequently used bytes and match them against this table..." which is the software equivalent of "the device contains a large box full of water, underneath which is a flame and on the upper side is a pipe leading to a valve box which contains..."
Either one would still have to meet the requirements like being sufficiently non-obvious. The first steam engine was patented, even though you couldn't patent one any more.
If the code is written by an Ai they can't copyright it. It is all public domain.
Setting aside the legal questions, what a nasty thing to do. I would expect to see this kind of move from some big corpo, not an OSS maintainer. This feels like it runs counter to the whole open source ethos and undermines the idea that authorship means anything anymore.
If you license a project MIT, you're telling the legal system that you don't want to own it.
Clean room implementations are not necessary to avoid copyright infringement.
The README has clearly been touched by an LLM. Count the idiosyncrasies:
“chardet 7.0 is a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x”
Do people not write anymore?
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.
FWIW, I don't think there's even a room for interpretation here, given the commit that created the README (and almost all commits since the rewrite started 4 days ago) is authored by
> dan-blanchard and claude committed 4 days ago
Sure, I just could use a break from the needless side tracks.
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)
> 12-stage detection pipeline
What is this recent (clanker-fueled?) obsession to give everything fancy computer-y names with high numbers?
It's not a '12 stage pipeline', it's just an algorithm.
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?"
I think Mark Pilgrim misrepresents the legal situation somewhat: The AI rewrite does not legally need to be a clean room implementation (whatever exactly that would even mean here).
That is just the easiest way to disambiguate the legal situation (i.e. the most reliable approach to prevent it from being considered a derivative work by a court).
I'm curious how this is gonna go.
Interesting.
While I am obviously Team GPL and not team "I 'rewrote' this with AI so now it's mine", I'm team anti-fork, and definitely not team 'Chardet'.
Forking should be a last resort, one better option is to yeet the thing entirely.
And chardet lends itself perfectly for this, using chardet is a sign of an issue and low craftmanship, either by the developer using chardet, or the developer that failed to signal the encoding of their text. (See Joel Spolsky's "The absolute minimum every developer should know about character encoding") (And let's be honest, it's probably the developers problem, not everything is someone else's fault.)
Just uninstall this thing where you can, and avoid installing it always, because you always can.
You know I'm right. I will not be replying to copium
Licenses are cancer and the enemy of opensource.
There would be no open source without the gpl
MIT and BSD are doing just fine.
The 25519 crypto package that's built into practically everything these days (SSH, TLS, most e2e messaging) was released as both a spec and a C reference implementation _in the public domain_.
Open source as a concept is intertwined with the concept of a license.
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.
The GPL exists for the benefit of end users, not developers. It being a chore for developers who want to deny their users the software freedoms is a feature, not a bug.
How does the GPL help a user who doesn't write code themselves?
They have the right to use the code, and they have the right to use improvements that someone else made, and they have the right to get someone to make improvements for them.
If you have ill intentions or maybe you're a corporation that wants to use someone else's work for free without contributing anything back, then yes, I can see how GPL licenses "tend to cause problems".
I like to think about GPL as a kind of an artistic performance and an elaborate critique of the whole concept of copyright.
Like, "we don't like copyright, but since you insist on enforcing it and we can't do anything against it, we will invent a clever way to use your own rules against you".
That is not really the motivation behind GPL licenses. These licenses have been designed to ensure by legal means that anyone can learn from the source code of software, fix bugs on their own, and modify the software to their needs.
If the GPL causes you problems, then it's working as intended.
Wtf are these comments? A LGPL licensed project, guaranteed to be free and open source, being LLM-washed to a permissive license, and GPL is the problem here?
They are literally stealing from open source, but it's the original license that is the issue?
They have been maintaining the project for years. It's not like some Joe Random with ChatGPT randomly entered the scene
And? Doesn't give them any right to re-license the code. Especially not to strip rights for other users.
Why? What's your problem with them? They do exactly what they're supposed to do, to ensure that future derivatives of the source code have to be distributed under the same license and distribution respects fundamental freedoms.
And what exactly are some of these problems?
I feel like the author is missing a huge point here by fighting this. The entire reason why GPL and any other copyleft license exists in the first place is to ensure that the rights of a user to modify, etc a work cannot be ever taken away. Before, relicensing as MIT - or any other fully permissive license - would've meant open doors to apply restrictions going forward, but with AI this is now a non-issue. Code is now very cheap. So the way I see this, anyone who is for copyleft should be embracing AI-created things as not being copyrightable (or a rewrite being relicensable) hard*.
Depends on who wants to take what away.
If I release blub 1.0.0 under GPL, you cannot fork it and add features and release that closed-source, but I can certainly do that as I have ownership. I can't stop others continuing to use 1.0.0 and develop it further under the GPL, but what happens to my own 1.1.0 onwards is up to me. I can even sell the rights to use it closed-source.
The user is the end-user of the product. If the relicensing means that someone down the line receives a close-down binary application that he cannot modify, that's a violation of the user's rights.
That is still true, but it was more relevant back when "user" meant "programmer at another university". The "end-user" for most software is not a programmer these days.
But it's a non-issue as said user can just have AI reverse engineer said binary. Or reimplement something with the same specs. That's what it means for code to be cheap.
It may be "cheap" at the moment. Let's revisit when the AI companies decide they need to regain a little bit of the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they're creating.
China is always waiting for this. And the US won't allow China to get all the users who'd emigrate over increased costs, so the costs will remain low. They'll have to find ways to recoup that don't involve raising the cost of code.
Code is only cheap with AI because AI ignores the law.
Laws change, and it's also law that now says AI-generated works can't be copyrighted, which makes everything even cheaper.