> If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.

Isn't that the same for the obligations under BSD/MIT/Apache? The problem they're trying to address is a different one from the problem of AI copyright washing. It's fair to avoid introducing additional problems while debunking another point.

"Clean room" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Having the entire corpus of knowledge for humanity and how LLMs work, how can you honestly argue in court that this is purely clean room implementation?

This is right up there with Meta lawyers claiming that when they torrent it's totally legal but when a single person torrents it's copyright infringement.

Far too many people treat AI as a way to launder copyright, it seems likely that a lot of the current state of outright plagiarism won't stand up in court

These cases will be settled out of court long before they ever reach a jury. Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5bn in a class action suit [0]. Others will follow.

[0] https://legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com/copyright-blog/the-bart...

No IP will stand up to AI, from Star Wars to Linear. Things are about to change.

Maybe I'm reading wrong here, but what's the implication of the clean room re-implementations? Someone else is cloning with a changed license, but if I'm still on the GPL licensed tool, how am I "not protected"?

1. Company A develops Project One as GPLv3

2. BigCo bus Company A

3a. usually here BigCo should continue to develop Project One as GPLv3, or stop working on it and the community would fork and it and continue working on it as GPLv3

3b. BigCo does a "clean-room" reimplementation of Project One and releases it under proprietary licence. Community can still fork the older version and work on it, but BigCo can continue to develop and sell their "original" version.

As a real world example, Redis was both Company A and BigCo. Project One is now ValKey.

2. BigCo owns ProjectOne now 3a. Bigco is now free to release version N+1 as closed source only. 3b. Community can still fork the older version and work on it, but BigCo can continue to develop and sell their original version.

There's basically no different between GPL and BSD in that case.

If clean-room re-implementations are allowed to bypass copyright/licenses (software) copyright is dead in general?

well no, (clean room )reimplementations of APIs have done since time immemorial. copyright applies to the work itself. if you implement the functionality of X, software copyright protects both!

patents protect ideas, copyright protects artistic expressions of ideas

The problem is that, is it clean room if you read all of the code in advance?