vbarrielle (u/vbarrielle)

vbarrielle commented on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft writings.hongminhee.org/2... · Posted by u/dahlia

xbar · 4 days ago

Oracle v Google concluded that APIs could not be protected by either copyright or copyleft. It seemed to me at the time that most here supported that decision. Has anything changed?

vbarrielle · 4 days ago

No, APIs fall under copyright, but the Supreme Court found that Google's reimplementation of Java's API was falling under fair use. Fair use is decided case by case, one cannot use that decision as a precedent.

vbarrielle commented on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft writings.hongminhee.org/2... · Posted by u/dahlia

marcus_holmes · 4 days ago

Good news! LLM output cannot be copyrighted. Everything that an LLM produces is automatically, irrevocably, in the public domain.

vbarrielle · 4 days ago

Not quite in my opinion. The output of an LLM from a simple prompt falls into the public domain, but if you also give a copyrighted work as input, the mechanistic transformation performed will not alter the original license (same as encoding a video does not change its license).

vbarrielle commented on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft writings.hongminhee.org/2... · Posted by u/dahlia

derangedHorse · 4 days ago

Is this perspective implying that the maintainer might be legally culpable because he, the *human*, was trained on the codebase?

vbarrielle · 4 days ago

Well I'm implying that someone who's been reading a codebase for 10+ years is the worst person to claim an "independent reimplementation".

vbarrielle commented on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft writings.hongminhee.org/2... · Posted by u/dahlia

serial_dev · 4 days ago

So if I read any LGPL code in my life, I can never think about working on something similar in my life?

vbarrielle · 4 days ago

There's a difference between "I've read a LGPL code once, maybe I could do something similar" and "I've been reading this LGPL code for 12 years and now I'm going to do exactly the same thing".

vbarrielle commented on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft writings.hongminhee.org/2... · Posted by u/dahlia

Legend2440 · 4 days ago

>that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it

Well, no. They fed the spec (test cases, etc) into a tool which made a new program matching the spec. This is not a copy of the original code.

But also this feels like arguing over the color of the iceberg while the titanic sinks. If you have a tool that can make code to spec, what is the value in source code anymore? Even if your app is closed-source, you can just tell claude to write new code that does the same thing.

vbarrielle · 4 days ago

Everyone writes as if he just fed the spec and tests to Claude Code. Ignoring for now that the tests are under LGPL as well, the commit history shows that this has been done with two weeks of steering Claude Code towards the desired output. At every one of these interactions, the maintainer used his deep knowledge of the chardet codebase to steer Claude.

vbarrielle commented on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft writings.hongminhee.org/2... · Posted by u/dahlia

tty456 · 4 days ago

Google v. Oracle ruled that use of APIs are fair game and could be argued that test cases are strictly a use of APIs and not implementation.

vbarrielle · 4 days ago

Google vs Oracle ruled that APIs fall under copyright (the contrary was thought before). However, it was ruled that, in that specific case, fair use applied, because of interoperability concerns. That's the important part of this case: fair use is never automatic, it is assessed case by case.

Regarding chardet, I'm not sure "I wanted to circumvent the license" is a good way to argue fair use.

vbarrielle commented on AI and the Ship of Theseus lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/3/5... · Posted by u/pixelmonkey

vbarrielle · 8 days ago

The test suite was also licensed under the LGPL. The reimplementation can be seen as a derivative work of the test suite, and thus should fall under the LGPL. This does not even mention the fact that the coding agent, AND the user steering it, both had ample exposure to chardet's source code, making it hard to argue that the reimplementation is a new ship.

vbarrielle commented on Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite tuananh.net/2026/03/05/re... · Posted by u/tuananh

abrookewood · 9 days ago

Why does it matter if it is 'ripped off' if you released it as open source anyway? I get that you might want to impose a particular licence, but is that the only reason?

vbarrielle · 8 days ago

Even the most permissive open source licenses such as MIT require attribution. Releasing as open source would therefore benefit the author through publicity. Bein able to say that you're the author of library X, used by megacorp Y with great success, is a good selling point in a job interview.

LLM ripping off open source code removes that.

vbarrielle commented on British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time cbc.ca/news/canada/britis... · Posted by u/ireflect

theshrike79 · 11 days ago

This has to be done in two steps

1) Do ANYTHING you can to stop the clocks being fucked with twice a year.

2) After that is done and stabilised, everything has been updated to non-wobbly time. Now's the time you can start arguing what the exact time zone should be.

Never try to argue both at the same time. This is what prevents the EU from stopping the DST madness.

vbarrielle · 10 days ago

I'm in strong agreement with this. Even though I'd prefer winter time all year round, I would rather enjoy permanent summer time over switching twice a year. And I'm living in France, so my "winter time" is actually already a DST compared to the standard time (France's timezone should be UTC like the UK, but WW2 changed that to UTC+1 and we never switched back), so the "summer time" is actually a "double DST".

vbarrielle commented on GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple blog.tomaszdunia.pl/graph... · Posted by u/to3k

dotancohen · 24 days ago

Why does a banking app that I'm not currently using need to ping a server occasionally?

When I want to do banking I'll open the app, do my business, then close the app. A banking application does not need push notifications.

vbarrielle · 24 days ago

Unfortunately it needs push notifications to authorize online payments.

u/vbarrielle

KarmaCake day247December 7, 2016View Original