My article was about how copyright law actually supports projects like PhotoCraft and ArtCraft (the software that reverse engineered Photoshop and other adobe products) and REA because, under current law (which is a long case review), clean rooming is okay. It goes back to the Compaq case and a few others. It relies on the idea that copyright protects expression, not function, and if you put a team of lawyers in a room with software and they purely describe the function of the software, and they hand that document to a team of engineers, that is fine under copyright law because it breaks the chain of expression. There’s much more detail, but my argument is that AI clean rooming projects are good for consumers in this regard, but that software patents for would be used more expansively in the coming years to counter those products. And so on and so forth. There are like eight more steps and guesses after that, but that was the gist.
As a personal thing, I agree with your conclusions for the most part. I just think there’s a lot more to consider in getting there. The road is much more complex than most people give it credit for.
So you’re saying PhotoCraft is okay because it counts as a clean room reimplementation of Photoshop, yet you’re not commenting on whether LLM-generated code is tainted by the training data, and thus can never be considered “clean” for the purposes of clean rooming?
I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding of clean rooming has always been that the engineer can’t have specific knowledge of the thing he’s reimplementing. For example, those lawyers in that room can’t describe a Microsoft product to an ex-Microsoft engineer, because that engineer has seen Microsoft’s code base and may use that knowledge to inform their design. Likewise, you can’t give the engineer a copy of, say, Microsoft Office’s source code to use as a reference.
Yet an LLM trained on Microsoft Office’s code base being used to reimplement Microsoft Office counts as a clean room reimplementation? It seems to me like the benefit of the doubt in that situation should go to Microsoft, and the engineer is the one responsible for proving they didn’t use the part of the LLM trained on Microsoft code…which is impossible.
…although tbf Photoshop isn’t open source, so its not obvious how much of its code exists in Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. Maybe the code leaked in the past, or maybe Adobe engineers who use Claude inadvertently shared company code, and that ended up in the training data.
A lot of companies have started using AI a lot lately which means they have given access to their codebase to various AI agents. There’s no way to tell if those AI agents haven’t already incorporated that code into their training data.
Like if Adobe uses Claude to help with Photoshop development then Claude most likely has access to the Photoshop code. The clean room argument would never stand.
My article was about how copyright law actually supports projects like PhotoCraft and ArtCraft (the software that reverse engineered Photoshop and other adobe products) and REA because, under current law (which is a long case review), clean rooming is okay. It goes back to the Compaq case and a few others. It relies on the idea that copyright protects expression, not function, and if you put a team of lawyers in a room with software and they purely describe the function of the software, and they hand that document to a team of engineers, that is fine under copyright law because it breaks the chain of expression. There’s much more detail, but my argument is that AI clean rooming projects are good for consumers in this regard, but that software patents for would be used more expansively in the coming years to counter those products. And so on and so forth. There are like eight more steps and guesses after that, but that was the gist.
As a personal thing, I agree with your conclusions for the most part. I just think there’s a lot more to consider in getting there. The road is much more complex than most people give it credit for.
So you’re saying PhotoCraft is okay because it counts as a clean room reimplementation of Photoshop, yet you’re not commenting on whether LLM-generated code is tainted by the training data, and thus can never be considered “clean” for the purposes of clean rooming?
I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding of clean rooming has always been that the engineer can’t have specific knowledge of the thing he’s reimplementing. For example, those lawyers in that room can’t describe a Microsoft product to an ex-Microsoft engineer, because that engineer has seen Microsoft’s code base and may use that knowledge to inform their design. Likewise, you can’t give the engineer a copy of, say, Microsoft Office’s source code to use as a reference.
Yet an LLM trained on Microsoft Office’s code base being used to reimplement Microsoft Office counts as a clean room reimplementation? It seems to me like the benefit of the doubt in that situation should go to Microsoft, and the engineer is the one responsible for proving they didn’t use the part of the LLM trained on Microsoft code…which is impossible.
…although tbf Photoshop isn’t open source, so its not obvious how much of its code exists in Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. Maybe the code leaked in the past, or maybe Adobe engineers who use Claude inadvertently shared company code, and that ended up in the training data.
(Also, for the record, fuck Microsoft and Adobe)
The only way it wouldn’t be clean rooming Microsoft code is if the AI had seen literal actual Microsoft source code.
A lot of companies have started using AI a lot lately which means they have given access to their codebase to various AI agents. There’s no way to tell if those AI agents haven’t already incorporated that code into their training data.
Like if Adobe uses Claude to help with Photoshop development then Claude most likely has access to the Photoshop code. The clean room argument would never stand.