Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens • The Register Forums
2 days
habilain
Reply Icon
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
Reply Icon
Re: Prompts?
It's hard to see how anything an LLM produces could even remotely be described as 'clean room'.
habilain
Reply Icon
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
Reply Icon
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
Reply Icon
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
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.
//
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.
