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Comment by rustc | Hacker News Reader

> “It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements”

How would that work if it's a patch to a project with a copyleft license like GPL which requires all derivate work to be licensed the same?

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IANAL, but it means the commit itself is public domain. When integrated into a code base with a more restrictive license, you can still use that isolated snippet in whatever way you want.

More interesting question is whether one could remove the GPL restrictions on public code by telling AI to rewrite the code from scratch, providing only the behavior of the code.

This could be accomplished by making AI generate a comprehensive test suite first, and then let it write the code of the app seeing only the test suite.

Hmm, so basically automated clean room reimplementation, using coding agents? Our concepts of authorship, copying, and equivalence are getting a real workout these days!

you'd need a pretty good opsec and non-search capable agent and logs of all its actions/chain of thought/process to be able to truly claim cleanroom implementation tho

The logs and traceability are the secret sauce here. It's one thing to have an artifact that mysteriously replicates the functionality of a well known IP-protected product without just straight up copying it. It's another thing to be able to demonstrate that said artifact was generated solely from information in the public domain or otherwise legally valid to use.

if its of your interest, i was investigating this and found out all the big labs like openai offer and indemnity clause for enterprise customers, that is supposed to assure you that it doesn't output non-compliant license code (like copyrighted or AGPL or whatever), BUT you have to accept them keeping all your logs, give them access, and let them and their lawyers do build their own case in case of getting sued.

I guess they're mostly selling insurance to bigCo's, and saying, hey we have the money to go to law, and the interests to win such a case, so we'll handle it

GPL is a copyright licence, not a ToS.

> GPL is a copyright licence, not a ToS.

How is ToS relevant to this thread?

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