Re: reading LLM code may rule out white room re-implementation; was: On keybindings and the slow erosion of help's utility

"Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <[email protected]> Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:57:33 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.emacs.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Ihor Radchenko <[email protected]> writes:

> "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <[email protected]> writes:
>> So if code under an incompatible license may prove to have been material
>> to the LLM output, and if the legal landscape changes so LLM processing
>> of code preserves some copyright (which currently seems likely), then
>> LLM code posted here may make it illegal for anyone who read it to write
>> a free software implementation of the idea.
>
> Maybe. So does any other code posted by people without copyright
> assignment. Yet, we never had a rule not to post proprietary code
> here.

Preface: I’m only talking about interpretations of the legal situation.
This is not meant as judgement of anything people do, only as a try to
understand the consequences different decisions can have.

Posting proprietary code that you do not own is already illegal by law,
so no extra rule was needed and I don’t think that equivalence applies.

The risk with LLM-code is that at the moment it is legal to post it, but
a court ruling could change that and it’s unclear what that would mean
for all code built on it.

If you post code you do own in here, I’m pretty sure that lawyers could
make a legal argument that your intention was for others to understand
it, so no white room re-implementation would be needed, just one that’s
not a copy.

For LLM code you currently can’t know whether you will own it a year
from now.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
https://www.draketo.de

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