@scy
US court is leaning towards that LLM generated code is fundamentally not copyrightable.

This is a different problem to the moral issues I have with this.

@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 @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

@joshbressers @scy

Supreme Court has already dismissed such cases.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/02/us-supreme-court-declines-to-hear-dispute-over-copyrights-for-ai-generated-material.html

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

@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 🤷

@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.

@Foxboron @joshbressers @scy 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.