>If I studied a bunch of different open-source projects, learned techniques from them, and implemented them in my own projects, is that a derivative work? Proba

>If I studied a bunch of different open-source projects, learned techniques from them, and implemented them in my own projects, is that a derivative work? Probably not. That's pretty unclear actually. If it's quite close to the original work, it is derivative. Even though you have probably been "trained" on quite a few different codebases over the years. Hence the existence of clean-room implementations, wherein the people building a new implementation have never seen the original. Also, given that code that has been passed through a biological network (ie, brain) can constitute infringement, it seems obvious that code passed through a mechanical one could too. Maybe not in every case, but it certainly seems plausible.