4 ms·
That's naive. Copyright doesn't just apply to software. There already have been countless lawsuits about copying music long before the term "open source" was in
by cubefox 8mo ago
That's naive. Copyright doesn't just apply to software. There already have been countless lawsuits about copying music long before the term "open source" was invented. No, changing the lyrics a bit doesn't circumvent copyright. Nor does translating a Stephen King novel to German and switching the names of the places and characters.
A court ordered the first Nosferatu movie to be destroyed because it had too many similarities to Dracula. Despite the fact that the movie makes rather large deviations from the original.
If Claude was indeed asked to reimplement the existing codebase, just in Rust and a bit optimized, that could well be a copyright violation. Just like rephrasing A Song ot Ice and Fire a bit, and switching to a different language, doesn't remove its copyright.
- zozbot234 8mo agoClaude was asked to implement a public API, not an entire codebase. The definition of a public API is largely functional; even in an unusually complex case like the Java standard facilities (which are unusually creative even in the structure and organization of the API itself) the reimplementation by Google was found to be fair use.
- cubefox 8mo ago> Claude was asked to implement a public API, not an entire codebase. Allegedly. There have been several people who doubted this story. So how to find out who is right? Well, just let Claude compare the sources. Coincidentally, Claude Opus 4.6 doesn't just score 75.6% on SWE-bench Verified but also 90.2% on BigLaw Bench. It's like our copyright lawyer is conveniently also a developer. And possibly identical to the AI that carried out the rewrite/reimplemention in question in the first place.
- Marsymars 8mo ago> Just like rephrasing A Song ot Ice and Fire a bit, and switching to a different language, doesn't remove its copyright. There is some precedent for this, e.g. Alchemised is a recent best seller that had just enough changed from its Harry Potter fan fiction source in order to avoid copyright infringement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemised https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemised (I avoided the term “remove copyright” here because the new work is still under copyright, just not Harry Potter - related copyright.)
- cubefox 8mo agoThat's apparently a different story with different plot, so that's not comparable.
- Marsymars 8mo agoPlots are broadly not copyrightable, “different plot” is less important than “different characters”.
- cubefox 8mo agoI'm pretty sure the plot is copyrightable, otherwise you could just translate Harry Potter to a different language and change the names of the characters.
- Marsymars 8mo agoWell the general guideline is that copyright covers the *expression of an idea*, not the idea itself. Translations are pretty much the textbook example of a derivative work in copyright. Your jurisdiction may vary, of course, but it's pretty well established in mine (Canada) that "plot" is an idea, and can't be copyrighted, only the expression of the idea (e.g. the written novel) falls under copyright.
- cubefox 8mo agoIf I translate Harry Potter to another language and change all the names, the resulting book clearly expresses the same ideas as the original.
- Marsymars 8mo agoYes, I agree. But "expresses the same idea" isn't the benchmark, "ideas expressed in the same way" is the benchmark. A translated work is "ideas expressed in the same way", a translation doesn't change that. See e.g. this question/top answer on stackexchange, it details pretty well how plot can't be copyrighted using Harry Potter as an example: https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/3928/on-copyright-laws-and-plots https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/3928/on-copyrigh...