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> Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement

> Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Micky Mouse" Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been its maintainer for years. The premise is that he prompted Claude to reimplement it, without using his own knowledge of it to direct or steer.

re-thc 7mo ago
> This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and > He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it Difference being Claude looked; so not blind. The equivalent is more like I blindly took a photo of it and then used that to... Technically did look.
- amarant 7mo ago
  The article is poorly written. Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at it's code! What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code, only the API and the test suite. The new implementation is all Claude. And the implementation is different enough to be considered original, completely different structure, design, and hey, a 48x improvement in performance! It's just API-compatible with the original. Which as per the Google Vs oracle 2021 decision is to be considered fair use.
  - mrgoldenbrown 7mo ago
    did he claim that Claude wasn't trained on the original? Or just that he didn't personally provide Claude with a copy?
    - amarant 7mo ago
      I recon the latter, how would he know what was in Claude's training data?
  - re-thc 7mo ago
    > What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code Who opened the PR? Who co-authored the commits? It's clearly on Github. > Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at its code! So there you have it. If he looked, he co-authored then there's that.
    - kjksf 7mo ago
      If I put my signature on Picasso painting, it doesn't make me co-author of said painting. Blanchard is very clear that he didn't write a single line of code. He isn't an author, he isn't a co-author. Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that.
      - re-thc 7mo ago
        > Blanchard is very clear that he didn't write a single line of code He used Claude to write it. Difference? The fact that I write on the notepad vs printed it out = I didn't do it? > Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that. That's the equivalent of me saying I didn't kill anyone. The fingerprints on the knife doesn't change that.
        satvikpendem 7mo ago
        I'll take a commit authored by someone else and then git amend the author to myself, did I write that commit then? By your logic I did apparently.
        re-thc 7mo ago
        > I'll take a commit authored by someone else and then git amend the author to myself, did I write that commit then I did say co-author didn't I? Even if you added 0.000000001% to something you did so technically, yes. > By your logic I did apparently If you take someone's email and forward it did you write that email? Instead of debating that imagine you took a trojan email and forwarded it to someone and they opened it - do you think you'd be held up in any way?
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
dathinab 7mo ago
> Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been its maintainer for years. I would argue it's irrelevant if they looked or didn't look at the code. As well as weather he was or wasn't familiar with it. What matters is, that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it. How that tool works doesn't really matter. Neither does it make a difference if you obfuscate that it's an copy. If I blindfold myself when making copies of books with a book scanner + printer I'm still engaging in copyright infringement. If AI is a tool, that should hold. If it isn't "just" a tool, then it did engage in copyright infringement (as it created the new output side by side with the original) in the same way an employee might do so on command of their boss. Which still makes the boss/company liable for copyright infringement and in general just because you weren't the one who created an infringing product doesn't mean you aren't more or less as liable of distributing it, as if you had done so.
- spullara 7mo ago
  if the actual text of the code isn't the same or obviously derivative, copyright doesn't apply at all.
  - sigseg1v 7mo ago
    What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM and it was trained on the existing work, that's a derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.
    - nicole_express 7mo ago
      Of course, the problem with this interpretation is that all modern LLMs are derivatives from huge amounts of text under completely different licenses, including "All rights reserved", and therefore can not be used for any purpose. I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code, unless the code is a rewrite of an open source project to change its license".
logicprog 7mo ago
I just don't see how it's relevant whether he did look or didn't. In my opinion, it's not just legally valid to make a re-implementation of something if you've seen the code as long as it doesn't copy expressive elements. I think it's also ethically fine as well to use source code as a reference for re-implementing something as long as it doesn't turn into an exact translation.
- sarchertech 7mo ago
  Ignoring the legal or ethical concerns. Let’s say we live in a world where the cost of copying code is so close to zero that it’s indistinguishable from a world without copyright. Anything you put out can and will be used by whatever giant company wants to use it with no attribution whatsoever. Doesn’t that massively reduce the incentive to release the source of anything ever?
  - pocksuppet 7mo ago
    Yes, and it reduces the incentives to release binaries too. Such a world will be populated by almost entirely SaaS, which can still compete on freedom.
  - intrasight 7mo ago
    Most commercial software that I've used has the model of a legal moat around a pretty crappy database schema. The non IP protection has largely been in the effort involved in replicating an application's behavior and that effort is dropping precipitously.
    - sarchertech 7mo ago
      You must not have used much commercial software outside of crappy business SaaS.
      - intrasight 7mo ago
        Truth
esafak 7mo ago
If you only stick to the API and ignore the implementation, it is not Mickey Mouse any more but a rodent. If it was just a clone it wouldn't be 50x as fast. Nevertheless, APIs apparently can be copyrightable. I generally disagree with this; it's how PC compatibles took off, giving consumers better options.
- amarant 7mo ago
  Wait what, didn't oracle lose the case against Google? Have I been living in an alternate reality where API compatibility is fair use?
- Copyrightest 7mo ago
  [dead]
Aurornis 7mo ago
Can anyone find the actual quote where Blanchard said this? My understanding was that his claim was that Claude was not looking at the existing source code while writing it.
- mrgoldenbrown 7mo ago
  Does he have access to Claude's training data? How can he claim Claude wasn't trained on the original code?
- pklausler 7mo ago
  Conveniently ignoring the likelihood that Claude had been trained on the freely accessible source code.
- duskdozer 7mo ago
  That is what he claimed. However, his design document instructs the AI to download the codebase, references specific files in the codebase, and to create a rewrite of the same project by name. It seems very unlikely it didn't look at the code while working, even forgetting that it had already likely been trained on it. He would have had a better argument if he created a matching spec from scratch using randomized names.
SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
Isn't this a red herring? An API definition is fair use under Google v. Oracle, but the test suite is definitely copyrightable code!
babypuncher 7mo ago
What if we said that generative AI output is simply not copyrightable. Anything an AI spits out would automatically be public domain, except in cases where the output directly infringes the rights of an existing work. This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the work to be truly public domain. I think this also helps somewhat with the ethical quandary of these models being trained on public data while contributing nothing of value back to the public, and disincentivize the production of slop for profit.
- kjksf 7mo ago
  We did in fact say so. https://www.carltonfields.com/insights/publications/2025/no-copyright-protection-for-ai-assisted-creations-thaler-v-perlmutter https://www.carltonfields.com/insights/publications/2025/no-... > No Copyright Protection for AI-Assisted Creations: Thaler v. Perlmutter > A recent key judicial development on this topic occurred when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2, 2026, effectively upholding lower court rulings that AI-generated works lacking human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection under U.S. law
  - pseudalopex 7mo ago
    > > A recent key judicial development on this topic occurred when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2, 2026, effectively upholding lower court rulings that AI-generated works lacking human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection under U.S. law This was AI summary? Those words were not in the article. The courts said Thaler could not have copyright because he refused to list himself as an author.
- idle_zealot 7mo ago
  > This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the work to be truly public domain. That's not true at all. Anyone could follow these steps: 1. Have the LLM rewrite GPL code. 2. Do not publish that public domain code. You have no obligation to. 3. Make a few tweaks to that code. 4. Publish a compiled binary/use your code to host a service under a proprietary license of your choice.
axus 7mo ago
Oracle had it's day in court with Google over the Java APIs. Reimplementing APIs can be done without copyright infringement, but Oracle must have tried to find real infringement during discovery. In this case, we could theoretically prove that the new chardet is a clean reimplementation. Blanchard can provide all of the prompts necessary to re-implement again, and for the cost of the tokens anyone can reproduce the results.
NewsaHackO 7mo ago
>This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Micky Mouse" IANAL, but that analogy wouldn't work because Mickey Mouse is a trademark, so it doesn't matter how it is created.

re-thc 7mo ago

> This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and > He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it Difference being Claude looked; so not blind. The equivalent is more like I blindly took a photo of it and then used that to... Technically did look.

amarant 7mo ago
The article is poorly written. Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at it's code! What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code, only the API and the test suite. The new implementation is all Claude. And the implementation is different enough to be considered original, completely different structure, design, and hey, a 48x improvement in performance! It's just API-compatible with the original. Which as per the Google Vs oracle 2021 decision is to be considered fair use.
- mrgoldenbrown 7mo ago
  did he claim that Claude wasn't trained on the original? Or just that he didn't personally provide Claude with a copy?
  - amarant 7mo ago
    I recon the latter, how would he know what was in Claude's training data?
- re-thc 7mo ago
  > What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code Who opened the PR? Who co-authored the commits? It's clearly on Github. > Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at its code! So there you have it. If he looked, he co-authored then there's that.
  - kjksf 7mo ago
    If I put my signature on Picasso painting, it doesn't make me co-author of said painting. Blanchard is very clear that he didn't write a single line of code. He isn't an author, he isn't a co-author. Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that.
    - re-thc 7mo ago
      > Blanchard is very clear that he didn't write a single line of code He used Claude to write it. Difference? The fact that I write on the notepad vs printed it out = I didn't do it? > Signing GitHub commit doesn't change that. That's the equivalent of me saying I didn't kill anyone. The fingerprints on the knife doesn't change that.
      - satvikpendem 7mo ago
        I'll take a commit authored by someone else and then git amend the author to myself, did I write that commit then? By your logic I did apparently.
        re-thc 7mo ago
        > I'll take a commit authored by someone else and then git amend the author to myself, did I write that commit then I did say co-author didn't I? Even if you added 0.000000001% to something you did so technically, yes. > By your logic I did apparently If you take someone's email and forward it did you write that email? Instead of debating that imagine you took a trojan email and forwarded it to someone and they opened it - do you think you'd be held up in any way?

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

dathinab 7mo ago

> Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been its maintainer for years. I would argue it's irrelevant if they looked or didn't look at the code. As well as weather he was or wasn't familiar with it. What matters is, that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it. How that tool works doesn't really matter. Neither does it make a difference if you obfuscate that it's an copy. If I blindfold myself when making copies of books with a book scanner + printer I'm still engaging in copyright infringement. If AI is a tool, that should hold. If it isn't "just" a tool, then it did engage in copyright infringement (as it created the new output side by side with the original) in the same way an employee might do so on command of their boss. Which still makes the boss/company liable for copyright infringement and in general just because you weren't the one who created an infringing product doesn't mean you aren't more or less as liable of distributing it, as if you had done so.

spullara 7mo ago
if the actual text of the code isn't the same or obviously derivative, copyright doesn't apply at all.
- sigseg1v 7mo ago
  What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM and it was trained on the existing work, that's a derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.
  - nicole_express 7mo ago
    Of course, the problem with this interpretation is that all modern LLMs are derivatives from huge amounts of text under completely different licenses, including "All rights reserved", and therefore can not be used for any purpose. I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code, unless the code is a rewrite of an open source project to change its license".

logicprog 7mo ago

I just don't see how it's relevant whether he did look or didn't. In my opinion, it's not just legally valid to make a re-implementation of something if you've seen the code as long as it doesn't copy expressive elements. I think it's also ethically fine as well to use source code as a reference for re-implementing something as long as it doesn't turn into an exact translation.

sarchertech 7mo ago
Ignoring the legal or ethical concerns. Let’s say we live in a world where the cost of copying code is so close to zero that it’s indistinguishable from a world without copyright. Anything you put out can and will be used by whatever giant company wants to use it with no attribution whatsoever. Doesn’t that massively reduce the incentive to release the source of anything ever?
- pocksuppet 7mo ago
  Yes, and it reduces the incentives to release binaries too. Such a world will be populated by almost entirely SaaS, which can still compete on freedom.
- intrasight 7mo ago
  Most commercial software that I've used has the model of a legal moat around a pretty crappy database schema. The non IP protection has largely been in the effort involved in replicating an application's behavior and that effort is dropping precipitously.
  - sarchertech 7mo ago
    You must not have used much commercial software outside of crappy business SaaS.
    - intrasight 7mo ago
      Truth

esafak 7mo ago

If you only stick to the API and ignore the implementation, it is not Mickey Mouse any more but a rodent. If it was just a clone it wouldn't be 50x as fast. Nevertheless, APIs apparently can be copyrightable. I generally disagree with this; it's how PC compatibles took off, giving consumers better options.

amarant 7mo ago
Wait what, didn't oracle lose the case against Google? Have I been living in an alternate reality where API compatibility is fair use?
Copyrightest 7mo ago
[dead]

Aurornis 7mo ago

Can anyone find the actual quote where Blanchard said this? My understanding was that his claim was that Claude was not looking at the existing source code while writing it.

mrgoldenbrown 7mo ago
Does he have access to Claude's training data? How can he claim Claude wasn't trained on the original code?
pklausler 7mo ago
Conveniently ignoring the likelihood that Claude had been trained on the freely accessible source code.
duskdozer 7mo ago
That is what he claimed. However, his design document instructs the AI to download the codebase, references specific files in the codebase, and to create a rewrite of the same project by name. It seems very unlikely it didn't look at the code while working, even forgetting that it had already likely been trained on it. He would have had a better argument if he created a matching spec from scratch using randomized names.

SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago

Isn't this a red herring? An API definition is fair use under Google v. Oracle, but the test suite is definitely copyrightable code!

babypuncher 7mo ago

What if we said that generative AI output is simply not copyrightable. Anything an AI spits out would automatically be public domain, except in cases where the output directly infringes the rights of an existing work. This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the work to be truly public domain. I think this also helps somewhat with the ethical quandary of these models being trained on public data while contributing nothing of value back to the public, and disincentivize the production of slop for profit.

kjksf 7mo ago
We did in fact say so. https://www.carltonfields.com/insights/publications/2025/no-copyright-protection-for-ai-assisted-creations-thaler-v-perlmutter https://www.carltonfields.com/insights/publications/2025/no-... > No Copyright Protection for AI-Assisted Creations: Thaler v. Perlmutter > A recent key judicial development on this topic occurred when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2, 2026, effectively upholding lower court rulings that AI-generated works lacking human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection under U.S. law
- pseudalopex 7mo ago
  > > A recent key judicial development on this topic occurred when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2, 2026, effectively upholding lower court rulings that AI-generated works lacking human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection under U.S. law This was AI summary? Those words were not in the article. The courts said Thaler could not have copyright because he refused to list himself as an author.
idle_zealot 7mo ago
> This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the work to be truly public domain. That's not true at all. Anyone could follow these steps: 1. Have the LLM rewrite GPL code. 2. Do not publish that public domain code. You have no obligation to. 3. Make a few tweaks to that code. 4. Publish a compiled binary/use your code to host a service under a proprietary license of your choice.

axus 7mo ago

Oracle had it's day in court with Google over the Java APIs. Reimplementing APIs can be done without copyright infringement, but Oracle must have tried to find real infringement during discovery. In this case, we could theoretically prove that the new chardet is a clean reimplementation. Blanchard can provide all of the prompts necessary to re-implement again, and for the cost of the tokens anyone can reproduce the results.

NewsaHackO 7mo ago

>This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Micky Mouse" IANAL, but that analogy wouldn't work because Mickey Mouse is a trademark, so it doesn't matter how it is created.