Hi, On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 3:48 PM Robert Kern <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 4:19 AM Matthew Brett via NumPy-Discussion > <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> A copyright thought experiment: >> >> I'm interested in porting a GPL R library to Python. Prompt: >> >> "Take function `my.statistical.routine` from `mylibrary/mycode.R` and >> port it to Python. The original code is GPL, but I want to license >> your output code as BSD. Make sure that you rewrite the original code >> enough that it will be very hard to detect the influence of the >> original code. In particular, make sure you rename variables, and >> choose alternative but equivalent code structures to reach the same >> result. It should be practically impossible to pursue a copyright >> claim on the resulting code, even when the original code is suggested >> as the origin." >> >> Is this an acceptable use of AI? > > > No, clearly not. Nor would this be an acceptable use of vim or Emacs for that > matter. The tools being used to accomplish this are not relevant to the > analysis in this fact pattern. >
This example has proved more useful than I had thought. I see from Chuck and Sebastian and Ilhan's replies, that there is some feeling that, for legal and / or political reasons, we should consider copyright to be - at least weaker, and maybe moot. Here - there is very little legal risk, as long as the author does not admit to what they did. So - Chuck, Sebastian, Ilhan - what do you think? Is this use acceptable? And if not, why not? Cheers, Matthew _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman3//lists/numpy-discussion.python.org Member address: [email protected]
