How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 3, 2025 17:43 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: How to check copyright? by ballombe
Parent article: Fedora floats AI-assisted contributions policy

It definitely can be used to write the new program; because it had access to the code on GitHub, you cannot assert lack of access as evidence of lack of copying (which is what the clean room setup is all about), but you can still assert that either the copied code falls on the idea side of the idea-expression distinction, or that it is not a derived work (in the legal, not mathematical, sense) for the purposes of copyright law for some other reason.

The point of the clean room process is that the only thing you need to look at to confirm that the second team did not copy the original code is the specification produced by the first team, which makes it tractable to confirm that the second team's output is not a derived work by virtue of no copying being possible.

But that's not the only way to avoid infringing - it's just a well-understood and low-risk way to do so.