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This is either brilliant or scary: Anthropic accidentally leaked the TS source code of Claude Code (which is closed source). Repos sharing the source are taken down with DMCA. BUT this repo rewrote the code using Python, and so it violates no copyright & cannot be taken down!

The repo: github.com/instructkr/c... The brilliance: copyright does not protect derived works. Rewriting TypeScript code in Python means copyright no longer applies. The scary thing: it can be done in trivial amount of time, with AI agents. This one was done with Codex.

Copyright does protect derived works. But translating the code at least makes it harder to detect and prove, and possibly harder for Github's automated tools to pick up. So in practice, although doing this has little legal effect, it may stay up much longer.

My understanding is that AI-generated content does not have copyright protection, at least in the United States. That is, it is not considered a derivative work, in a legal sense - because of the lack of human authorship. Happy to be corrected.

I’d imagine this would be quite a contentious issue in legal sense & not really a sure thing either way?

I dont think they have any standing from a copyright POV. Mayyybe from a trade secrets angle. But given they have provably not looked after their own trade secrets, would need to be tested in court!

My point is that an LLM is programmed by another person & there will be no small amount of work put in by others to program the LLM & then to unspool whatever it pumps out. As I say, there would most likely b solid arguments either way.

“Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine, however, would undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of copyright.” www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025...