Comment by minimaxir

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

There is a lot of legal history of doing new designs with influence from reverse engineered sources. The basic rule is that you can't have someone familiar with the original code involved with writing the new code.

LLMs are a new area, but I would expect that feeding the original source into an LLM context and saying "Write this, but different" wouldn't qualify as a clean-room design. There isn't enough general removal from the original subject matter.

Would have to be proven in court. Look up history of cases and settlements for GPL violations and it quickly becomes apparent that it’s relatively toothless and mostly license theater.

In my opinion yes. Just like if you watch a Bob Ross episode and copy all his brushstrokes, you have made a derivative (in the literal sense of the word) of his painting.

https://www.paulaoki.com/.admin/930108.oppose.html

  Not content to destroy one potential competitor, USL also seeks to keep a stranglehold on the entire market by claiming that everyone who has had ever had access to UNIX source code a group that include~ most experienced programmers in the industry is "mentally contaminated" and may not develop any functionally similar product, without first purchasing an exorbitantly expensive license from USL.  In accordance with this argument, USL requests this Court to  prohibit BSDI from hiring anyone who has had access to UNIX source code. USL's request would not only require BSDI to fire all of its  current employees, but would make it difficult to find any qualified replacements. Having chosen to widely disseminate its source code in order to build a market for its product and having succeeded in making it an industry standard, USL cannot now claim that everyone with knowledge of it is restricted from developing competing products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

Mechanical transformation is always considered derived.

The difference is that if humans do it, there's plausible deniability that it is derived.

I mean, even when humans do it, we still do clean room engineering.

It goes further though: LLMs are just a tool, and tools don't get rights, humans do.

Humans having the right to learn from a few dozen books and projects is not the same as a tool that infers output using all copyrighted works know to man.

Yeah, absolutely. The defense there is "clean room reimplementation ". If anything, the use of an LLM would be stronger than a human doing the copying. (Assuming American jurisdiction!)

This is not really a question. Accidental patent infringement is still patent infringement. Just because you used new trendy technology to do it does not mean that it isn't infringement.