Apparently chardet got Claude to rewrite the entire codebase from LGPL to MIT?

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@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.

[scy@chaos.social]

@Foxboron But does "is not copyrightable" mean that "is not a license violation of its input data"? I highly doubt it.

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@scy
A license violation usually implies that there is a copyright violation to begin with.

[k@layer8.space]

@Foxboron dear god fuck

[scy@chaos.social]

@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@chaos.social]

@scy
I'm not a lawyer so I'm not going to try and debate what is and isn't a copyright violation.

[claudius@darmstadt.social]

@scy @Foxboron Using code to create a (highly) derivative thing off it without honoring the original license is pretty much the definition of a license violation.

[bubu@chaos.social]

@Foxboron Oh ffs: https://github.com/psf/requests/issues/7223#issuecomment-3993094073

(requests planning to switch to chardet 7+ as it's only character detection library again now that the licensing is MIT.)

[mgorny@social.treehouse.systems]

@Foxboron, not to mention it doesn't pass its own test suite.

[joshbressers@infosec.exchange]

@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

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@mgorny
Amazing.

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@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.

[rayslava@mitra.do.rayslava.com]

@Foxboron but can it even be considered a "clean-room rewrite" given not only it read the original code but also it has been trained on lots of other GPL code? 🤔

I guess that's a very interesting field for some lawyers.

[lynne@mk.pars.ee]

@Foxboron@chaos.social What a horrible way to do it.

[muelli@chaos.social]

@Foxboron @scy you could still have an opinion. Discussing legal matters is not a subject to be discussed exclusively by legal professionals as it affects non professionals, too.

[joshbressers@infosec.exchange]

@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 🤷

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@muelli @scy
Sure.

But I'm not going to spend time on a strawman disguised as a logic puzzle. That isn't how laws work nor how they are formed.

[foxboron@chaos.social]

@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.

[dekkia@dekkia.com]

@Foxboron Considering that nobody can hold a copyright on AI-generated stuff, and therefore also can't release it under a different license, doesn't that mean this rewrite is basically public domain?

[duckattack@chaos.social]

@Foxboron lol, this is in a way what they suggest in this talk from #fosdem26: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/