Apparently chardet got Claude to rewrite the entire codebase from LGPL to MIT?

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@scy
A license violation usually implies that there is a copyright violation to begin with.

[k@layer8.space]

@Foxboron dear god fuck

[scy@chaos.social]

@Foxboron Yeah but that's what I mean: Just because the end result is not copyrightable, does that automatically mean that it can't be a copyright violation?

Like, changing the format or medium of something is not a copyrightable work.

So, by that logic, if I take a copyrighted MP3 and convert it to AAC and publish that, my AAC is not copyrightable, but it's not a copyright violation to take it and publish it?

That's what I mean.

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@scy
I'm not a lawyer so I'm not going to try and debate what is and isn't a copyright violation.

[claudius@darmstadt.social]

@scy @Foxboron Using code to create a (highly) derivative thing off it without honoring the original license is pretty much the definition of a license violation.

[bubu@chaos.social]

@Foxboron Oh ffs: https://github.com/psf/requests/issues/7223#issuecomment-3993094073

[mgorny@social.treehouse.systems]

@Foxboron, not to mention it doesn't pass its own test suite.

[joshbressers@infosec.exchange]

@Foxboron @scy

This will have to go through a court case to settle it probably

But if I look at your source code, then I reproduce some of your source exactly, that's a problem

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@mgorny
Amazing.

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@joshbressers @scy

Supreme Court has already dismissed such cases.

Access Denied

(www.cnbc.com)

So we are getting a precedent in US law. Yet to be settled in any high court in the EU though.

[Guest]

@Foxboron but can it even be considered a "clean-room rewrite" given not only it read the original code but also it has been trained on lots of other GPL code?

I guess that's a very interesting field for some lawyers.

[lynne@mk.pars.ee]

@Foxboron@chaos.social What a horrible way to do it.

[muelli@chaos.social]

@Foxboron @scy you could still have an opinion. Discussing legal matters is not a subject to be discussed exclusively by legal professionals as it affects non professionals, too.

[joshbressers@infosec.exchange]

@Foxboron @scy

I suspect this is different. That case someone trying to copyright something the AI spit out, not asking if AI can violate a copyright by copying something almost verbatim

Of course I haven't looked to see if the chardet code is mostly a copy, if it's not, then

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@muelli @scy
Sure.

But I'm not going to spend time on a strawman disguised as a logic puzzle. That isn't how laws work nor how they are formed.

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@joshbressers @scy

Sure, but we are not really looking at, nor discussing, cases where LLMs spits out something verbatim from another project in this case.

[dekkia@dekkia.com]

@Foxboron Considering that nobody can hold a copyright on AI-generated stuff, and therefore also can't release it under a different license, doesn't that mean this rewrite is basically public domain?

[duckattack@chaos.social]

@Foxboron lol, this is in a way what they suggest in this talk from #fosdem26: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@dekkia
Public domain is not really a thing in most of the world. So "yes", for US. For EU it's more complicated.

[hannah@moonserver.yorha.nexus]

@Foxboron@chaos.social "Laundering code" through an LLM...

But:
Since the LLM-generated code cannot be copyrighted in any way, this entire project (or at least the part the LLM generated) is technically public domain.

Oh well. Not like certain entities care for the law! ​​