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cubefox | on: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
That's naive. Copyright doesn't just apply to software. There already have been countless lawsuits about copying music long before the term "open source" was invented. No, changing the lyrics a bit doesn't circumvent copyright. Nor does translating a Stephen King novel to German and switching the names of the places and characters.

A court ordered the first Nosferatu movie to be destroyed because it had too many similarities to Dracula. Despite the fact that the movie makes rather large deviations from the original.

If Claude was indeed asked to reimplement the existing codebase, just in Rust and a bit optimized, that could well be a copyright violation. Just like rephrasing A Song ot Ice and Fire a bit, and switching to a different language, doesn't remove its copyright.

zozbot234 | parent | next
Claude was asked to implement a public API, not an entire codebase. The definition of a public API is largely functional; even in an unusually complex case like the Java standard facilities (which are unusually creative even in the structure and organization of the API itself) the reimplementation by Google was found to be fair use.
cubefox | root | parent
> Claude was asked to implement a public API, not an entire codebase.

Allegedly. There have been several people who doubted this story. So how to find out who is right? Well, just let Claude compare the sources. Coincidentally, Claude Opus 4.6 doesn't just score 75.6% on SWE-bench Verified but also 90.2% on BigLaw Bench.

It's like our copyright lawyer is conveniently also a developer. And possibly identical to the AI that carried out the rewrite/reimplemention in question in the first place.

Marsymars | parent
> Just like rephrasing A Song ot Ice and Fire a bit, and switching to a different language, doesn't remove its copyright.

There is some precedent for this, e.g. Alchemised is a recent best seller that had just enough changed from its Harry Potter fan fiction source in order to avoid copyright infringement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemised

(I avoided the term “remove copyright” here because the new work is still under copyright, just not Harry Potter - related copyright.)

cubefox | root | parent
That's apparently a different story with different plot, so that's not comparable.
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