Over the past few months it’s become clear that coding agents are extraordinarily good at building a weird version of a “clean room” implementation of code. The most famous version …
My response was no, because the output will always be in the public domain, which is the opposite of licensed.
However your reply asked a different question:
So you are agreeing using the LLM worked?
This is a different question, because it’s asking not about the general case of “can a coding agent produce a clean-room reimplementation” but rather “did the chardet rewrite achieve the goals of the maintainer?”
It’s clear from the information uncovered about the chardet rewrite that it cannot be considered a clean-room reimplementation, therefore there is an argument to be made of copyright infringement, regardless of whether anyone can own the copyright for it.
But the title of the article is asking whether the general case is possible. In that case, an agent reimplementing a project that does not appear in its own training data and whose prompts do not contain any copyrighted source code, could in theory produce a clean-room reimplementation from functional descriptions alone, that would not violate the copyright of the author of the original project.
However in that case, the rewrite would still not be licensable since nobody would own the copyright to it.
I hope that clears up the point I was making and why it’s relevant to the post.
That all makes sense to me, all I meant is that you are answering the relicense question literally, which I don’t think actually matters. The situation we are pondering is that someone wants to free a project from it’s original license.
They are claiming they did a magic trick with an LLM and now the project is MIT licensed. And you are saying that it’s not, it’s public domain. But the distinction is immaterial to the person’s goal. Whether the author is right or you are right, the project is no longer under its original license, and whether that is something that can happen is the actual question here, regardless if the resulting output can be licensed or not.
They are claiming they did a magic trick with an LLM and now the project is MIT licensed. And you are saying that it’s not, it’s public domain.
That’s absolutely not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the rewrite of chardet infringes on the copyright of the original work. That is neither MIT licensed nor public domain. It’s illegally reproduced and distributed copyrighted work.
I’m saying that the rewrite of chardet infringes on the copyright of the original work. That is neither MIT licensed nor public domain. It’s illegally reproduced and distributed copyrighted work.
That I never disputed, I’m not interested about chardet or whatever happened here, I’m interested about your comment that LLM output is always public domain, and if so, whether it could be used to achieve the goal of reimplementing a library so that it achieves the same purpose but isn’t bound by the original license, if you do it without infringing on the copyright of the original work.
Whether you own the copyright to your derivative work is not the same question as whether you are infringing someone else’s copyright.
Yes, but what does that have to do with LLM output being not copyrightable?
Because the title of the post is
My response was no, because the output will always be in the public domain, which is the opposite of licensed.
However your reply asked a different question:
This is a different question, because it’s asking not about the general case of “can a coding agent produce a clean-room reimplementation” but rather “did the chardet rewrite achieve the goals of the maintainer?”
It’s clear from the information uncovered about the chardet rewrite that it cannot be considered a clean-room reimplementation, therefore there is an argument to be made of copyright infringement, regardless of whether anyone can own the copyright for it.
But the title of the article is asking whether the general case is possible. In that case, an agent reimplementing a project that does not appear in its own training data and whose prompts do not contain any copyrighted source code, could in theory produce a clean-room reimplementation from functional descriptions alone, that would not violate the copyright of the author of the original project.
However in that case, the rewrite would still not be licensable since nobody would own the copyright to it.
I hope that clears up the point I was making and why it’s relevant to the post.
That all makes sense to me, all I meant is that you are answering the relicense question literally, which I don’t think actually matters. The situation we are pondering is that someone wants to free a project from it’s original license.
They are claiming they did a magic trick with an LLM and now the project is MIT licensed. And you are saying that it’s not, it’s public domain. But the distinction is immaterial to the person’s goal. Whether the author is right or you are right, the project is no longer under its original license, and whether that is something that can happen is the actual question here, regardless if the resulting output can be licensed or not.
That’s absolutely not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the rewrite of chardet infringes on the copyright of the original work. That is neither MIT licensed nor public domain. It’s illegally reproduced and distributed copyrighted work.
Then what did you mean when you said:
It seems to me like a pretty clear statement.
That I never disputed, I’m not interested about chardet or whatever happened here, I’m interested about your comment that LLM output is always public domain, and if so, whether it could be used to achieve the goal of reimplementing a library so that it achieves the same purpose but isn’t bound by the original license, if you do it without infringing on the copyright of the original work.