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My opinion on the ending open questions: > Does this library represent a legal violation of copyright of either the Rust library or the Python one? Even if thi

My opinion on the ending open questions: > Does this library represent a legal violation of copyright of either the Rust library or the Python one? Even if this is legal, is it ethical to build a library in this way? Currently, I am experimenting with two projects in Claude Code: a Rust/Python port of a Python repo which necessitates a full rewrite to get the desired performance/feature improvements, and a Rust/Python port of a JavaScript repo mostly because I refuse to install Node (the speed improvement is nice though). In both of those cases, the source repos are permissively licensed (MIT), which I interpret as the developer intent as to how their code should used. It is in the spirit of open source to produce better code by iterating on existing code, as that's how the software ecosystem grows. That would be the case whether a human wrote the porting code or not. If Claude 4.5 Opus can produce better/faster code which has the same functionality and passes all the tests, that's a win for the ecosystem. As courtesy and transparency, I will still link and reference the original project in addition to disclosing the Agent use, although those things aren't likely required and others may not do the same. That said, I'm definitely not using an agent to port any GPL-licensed code.

simonw 11mo ago
That's about where I'm settled on this right now. I feel like authors who select the GPL have made a robust statement about their intent. It may be legal for me to copyright-launder their library (maybe using the trick where one LLM turns their code into a spec and another turns that spec into fresh code) but I wouldn't do that because it would subvert the spirit of the license.
- EmilStenstrom 11mo ago
  Would it be a problem if you maintained the GPL license and released your code as open source?
  - simonw 11mo ago
    Good point, that might actually be fine (especially if you kept copyright for the original authors too.)
    - ZeroGravitas 11mo ago
      Can a human even put GPL on bot written code since it relies on copyright to protect it? Is that like museums adding copyright to scans of public domain paintings in their holdings? Which was fought about in courts for years.
      - fluidcruft 11mo ago
        Probably a human could put a copyright on a prompt (that would be the "source" and the LLM would be a compiler or interpreter) and the generated code would be derivative of the prompt and any inputs. It would probably get into whether the prompt itself is considered copyrightable. There is some threshold for that since I have heard some patches are considered insignificant and uncopyrightable.
throwup238 11mo ago
> As courtesy and transparency, I will still link and reference the original project in addition to disclosing the Agent use, although those things aren't likely required and others may not do the same. That said, I'm definitely not using an agent to port any GPL-licensed code. IANAL but regardless of the license, you have to respect their copyright and it’s hard to argue that an LLM ported library is anything but a derivative work. You would still have to include the original copyright notices and retain the license (again IANAL).
- minimaxir 11mo ago
  A similar argument could be made about generative AI and whether text/image outputs themselves are derivative works, which is a legal point of contention still being argued. It's unclear if code text from a generative AI is in scope.
  - throwup238 11mo ago
    That’s a legal point of contention because the nature of language/image models is hard to fit into the existing copyright framework. That only really applies to cleanroom-ish one shot requests where the inference input doesn’t contain the copyrighted material in question. It’s a lot easier to argue that it’s a derivative work when you feed the copyrighted code directly into the context and ask it to port it to another language. If the copyrighted code is literally an input to the inference request, that would not escape any judge’s notice. The law may not have any precedent for this technology but judges aren’t automatons beholden to trivially buggy code that can’t adapt.
  - fluidcruft 11mo ago
    This sort of translation is probably well trodden the status of something like "Translate Jules Verne's 'Vingt Mille Lieues sous Les Mers' to English" has plenty of predicates. In terms of images, this seems more like a translation. "Translate this photo into the style of George Seurat". Whether George Seurat would have a copyright claim is not as clear but it seems pretty intuitive that the result is a derivative of the photo.

simonw 11mo ago

That's about where I'm settled on this right now. I feel like authors who select the GPL have made a robust statement about their intent. It may be legal for me to copyright-launder their library (maybe using the trick where one LLM turns their code into a spec and another turns that spec into fresh code) but I wouldn't do that because it would subvert the spirit of the license.

EmilStenstrom 11mo ago
Would it be a problem if you maintained the GPL license and released your code as open source?
- simonw 11mo ago
  Good point, that might actually be fine (especially if you kept copyright for the original authors too.)
  - ZeroGravitas 11mo ago
    Can a human even put GPL on bot written code since it relies on copyright to protect it? Is that like museums adding copyright to scans of public domain paintings in their holdings? Which was fought about in courts for years.
    - fluidcruft 11mo ago
      Probably a human could put a copyright on a prompt (that would be the "source" and the LLM would be a compiler or interpreter) and the generated code would be derivative of the prompt and any inputs. It would probably get into whether the prompt itself is considered copyrightable. There is some threshold for that since I have heard some patches are considered insignificant and uncopyrightable.

throwup238 11mo ago

> As courtesy and transparency, I will still link and reference the original project in addition to disclosing the Agent use, although those things aren't likely required and others may not do the same. That said, I'm definitely not using an agent to port any GPL-licensed code. IANAL but regardless of the license, you have to respect their copyright and it’s hard to argue that an LLM ported library is anything but a derivative work. You would still have to include the original copyright notices and retain the license (again IANAL).

minimaxir 11mo ago
A similar argument could be made about generative AI and whether text/image outputs themselves are derivative works, which is a legal point of contention still being argued. It's unclear if code text from a generative AI is in scope.
- throwup238 11mo ago
  That’s a legal point of contention because the nature of language/image models is hard to fit into the existing copyright framework. That only really applies to cleanroom-ish one shot requests where the inference input doesn’t contain the copyrighted material in question. It’s a lot easier to argue that it’s a derivative work when you feed the copyrighted code directly into the context and ask it to port it to another language. If the copyrighted code is literally an input to the inference request, that would not escape any judge’s notice. The law may not have any precedent for this technology but judges aren’t automatons beholden to trivially buggy code that can’t adapt.
- fluidcruft 11mo ago
  This sort of translation is probably well trodden the status of something like "Translate Jules Verne's 'Vingt Mille Lieues sous Les Mers' to English" has plenty of predicates. In terms of images, this seems more like a translation. "Translate this photo into the style of George Seurat". Whether George Seurat would have a copyright claim is not as clear but it seems pretty intuitive that the result is a derivative of the photo.