Post #3089533
2026-03-04 13:18 UTC
Replies (2)
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@jzb@hachyderm.io 2026-03-04 14:39
@Foxboron@chaos.social @joshbressers@infosec.exchange @scy@chaos.social Open-source projects that have sought to be compatible with proprietary software, e.g. Samba trying to be compatible with Windows SMB, etc., have (if I'm not misremembering) taken a "clean room" approach and outright stated they do not want any code from any developer who had even looked at the MSFT code for fear of being accused of infringement. The copyrightability of LLM output is not relevant here - the only question is whether a court would consider the original license infringed upon in the creation of the output. As I understand it, though, this is a reimplementation of a codebase by the same contributors -- Dan Blanchard seems to be the primary maintainer before and after the rewrite, so ISTM he'd be able to relicense the project regardless of whether it was passed through an LLM first. It will be interesting when this happens because a company or person decides "I don't like copyleft, so I'll just run this through the LLM wash until I get a functional copy". But this doesn't seem to be that.
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@glyph@mastodon.social 2026-03-04 18:59
@Foxboron@chaos.social @joshbressers@infosec.exchange @scy@chaos.social verbatim isn’t the question here, the question is infringement. is the output here substantially derivative of previous versions of chardet to the point that it could be considered infringing? US copyright precedent is a muddled mess and I think this could implicate at least one unresolved circuit split. I don’t know what the answer will be but I know I wouldn’t want to be standing in the blast radius of that decision