2 days
habilain
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Re: Prompts?
They did post the design document eventually - https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/f51f523506a73f89f0f9538fd31be458d007ab93.

Other people have pored over it, but I suspect that instructions to download things from the original chardet repository mean that the AI generated version can not be considered "clean room". And that's ignoring the likelihood that Claude Code has injested the entirety of the chardet repo during training.

2 days
MonkeyJuiceSilver badge
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Re: Prompts?
It's hard to see how anything an LLM produces could even remotely be described as 'clean room'.

habilain
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Re: Prompts?
Well yes, but the lawyers are still arguing over that, and the legal fights aren't all going in the way that any sensible reading of the facts would indicate.

It's much easier to say "this is not clean room" when the instructions to the AI clearly break the definition of what "clean room implementation" means.

1 day
timrichardson
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Re: Prompts?
I doubt that matters very much.. copyright infringement is based on a level of similarities in two works. A clean room implementation is a defence, but it's not a necessary defence.

3 hrs
habilain
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Re: Prompts?
The issue you'd find is that a) APIs are copyrightable, at least in the USA b) The AI in question was instructed to match the API and c) The AI in question was instructed to use code from the original source. I think that's pretty clear cut.

And besides, the reason why I highlighted "clean room" is Dan Blanchard's repeated insistence that the AI did a clean room implementation - not because of any particular legal merits.

Richard 12Silver badge
Pirate
It's LGPL or public domain now
If this v7 genuinely was mostly generated by an LLM, existing court rulings say that it is not covered by copyright.

Therefore, it cannot be licenced under the MIT either. It is public domain.

Or maybe that's not true and it's still LGPL.

Commercially, who would want to take the risk of touching v7 with a bargepole?

It now cannot ever become part of the Python standard library because it's forever tainted by licence clarity issues.

It would require a court case to sort out whether it's LGPL, MIT, or public domain, and nobody wants to burn the cash on that when they can stick with a v6 fork and avoid all the legal risk.

Charlie ClarkSilver badge
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Re: It's LGPL or public domain now
I think the release was poorly handled – a new release under a different name as with, say, PIL -> pillow (Python Imaging Library) might have been a better approach. There may be some legal challenges in the US but I can't see them going anywhere and then the taint will be gone – well, maybe add something to the licence referring to the original implementation.

A perfectly legal approach, as others have pointed out, would have been to port the library to another language, say Rust. This could then be wrapped or the basis of another perfectly legal port back to Python. All software is essentially the expression of one algorithm or another and these have never been copyrightable.

//

Charlie ClarkSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: It's LGPL or public domain now
I think the release was poorly handled – a new release under a different name as with, say, PIL -> pillow (Python Imaging Library) might have been a better approach. There may be some legal challenges in the US but I can't see them going anywhere and then the taint will be gone – well, maybe add something to the licence referring to the original implementation.

A perfectly legal approach, as others have pointed out, would have been to port the library to another language, say Rust. This could then be wrapped or the basis of another perfectly legal port back to Python. All software is essentially the expression of one algorithm or another and these have never been copyrightable.

Richard 12Silver badge
Pirate
It's LGPL or public domain now
If this v7 genuinely was mostly generated by an LLM, existing court rulings say that it is not covered by copyright.

Therefore, it cannot be licenced under the MIT either. It is public domain.

Or maybe that's not true and it's still LGPL.

Commercially, who would want to take the risk of touching v7 with a bargepole?

It now cannot ever become part of the Python standard library because it's forever tainted by licence clarity issues.

It would require a court case to sort out whether it's LGPL, MIT, or public domain, and nobody wants to burn the cash on that when they can stick with a v6 fork and avoid all the legal risk.

Charlie ClarkSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: It's LGPL or public domain now
I think the release was poorly handled – a new release under a different name as with, say, PIL -> pillow (Python Imaging Library) might have been a better approach. There may be some legal challenges in the US but I can't see them going anywhere and then the taint will be gone – well, maybe add something to the licence referring to the original implementation.

A perfectly legal approach, as others have pointed out, would have been to port the library to another language, say Rust. This could then be wrapped or the basis of another perfectly legal port back to Python. All software is essentially the expression of one algorithm or another and these have never been copyrightable.

Earlier this week, Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license.

In doing so, he may have killed "copyleft." //

Blanchard says he was in the clear to change licenses because he used AI – Anthropic's Claude is now listed as a project contributor – to make what amounts to a clean room implementation of chardet. That's essentially a rewrite done without copying the original code – though it's unclear whether Claude ingested chardet's code during training and, if that occurred, whether Claude's output cloned that training data. //

The use of AI raises questions about what level of human involvement is required to copyright AI-assisted code.

The US Supreme Court recently refused to reconsider Thaler v. Perlmutter, in which the plaintiff sought to overturn a lower court decision that he could not copyright an AI-generated image. This is an area of ongoing concern among the defenders of copyleft because many open source projects incorporate some level of AI assistance. It's unclear how much AI involvement in coding would dilute the human contribution to the extent that a court would disallow a copyright claim. //

"As far as the intention of the GPL goes, a permissive license is still technically a free software license, but undermining copyleft is a serious act. Refusing to grant others the rights you yourself received as a user is highly [antisocial], no matter what method you use. Now more than ever, with people exploring new ways of circumventing copyright through machine learning, we need to protect the code that preserves user freedom. Free software relies on user and development communities who strongly support copyleft. Experience has shown that it's our strongest defense against similar efforts to undermine user freedom." //

Bruce Perens, who wrote the original Open Source Definition, has broader concerns about the entire software industry.

"I'm breaking the glass and pulling the fire alarm!" he told The Register in an email. "The entire economics of software development are dead, gone, over, kaput!

"In a different world, the issue of software and AI would be dealt with by legislators and courts that understand that all AI training is copying and all AI output is copying. That's the world I might like, but not the world we got. The horse is out of the barn and can't be put back. So, what do we do with the world we got?" ////

The courts are going to have to deal with this, but it really should be legislators thinking and debating it. I think that ultimately, material produced by A/I should be public domain, because you can't hold a computer responsible.

"Computers should not make management decisions because computers cannot be held responsible."

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