I would counter that "AI clean rooming" is not clean rooming, because they are feeding the actual code to imitate directly. Even ignoring the training, it has, verbatim, the object code and is trying to make code that compiles to match the object code. It isn't deriving the functions to a spec and the using the spec to go back to code.

I would further counter that the Compaq case dovetails with the idea that APIs are broadly not copyrightable in and of themselves. Compaq cloned a thin ABI layer, which was not considered substantial by itself, so the argument rested with whether the implementing backend necessarily infringed in resemblance or if resemblance derived from merely following a similar asked. If you clone an entire application down to the human presentation, I think no "clean room" argument would overcome that you cloned far more than some thin application to library interface.

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)

20 year old patents would be an improvement time-wise over 100+ years of copyright, but a horrible thing given how much more annoying it is to get them invalidated.