> As courtesy and transparency, I will still link and reference the original project in addition to disclosing the Agent use, although those things aren't likely required and others may not do the same. That said, I'm definitely not using an agent to port any GPL-licensed code.
IANAL but regardless of the license, you have to respect their copyright and it’s hard to argue that an LLM ported library is anything but a derivative work. You would still have to include the original copyright notices and retain the license (again IANAL).
A similar argument could be made about generative AI and whether text/image outputs themselves are derivative works, which is a legal point of contention still being argued. It's unclear if code text from a generative AI is in scope.
That’s a legal point of contention because the nature of language/image models is hard to fit into the existing copyright framework. That only really applies to cleanroom-ish one shot requests where the inference input doesn’t contain the copyrighted material in question.
It’s a lot easier to argue that it’s a derivative work when you feed the copyrighted code directly into the context and ask it to port it to another language. If the copyrighted code is literally an input to the inference request, that would not escape any judge’s notice. The law may not have any precedent for this technology but judges aren’t automatons beholden to trivially buggy code that can’t adapt.
This sort of translation is probably well trodden the status of something like "Translate Jules Verne's 'Vingt Mille Lieues sous Les Mers' to English" has plenty of predicates.
In terms of images, this seems more like a translation. "Translate this photo into the style of George Seurat". Whether George Seurat would have a copyright claim is not as clear but it seems pretty intuitive that the result is a derivative of the photo.
IANAL but regardless of the license, you have to respect their copyright and it’s hard to argue that an LLM ported library is anything but a derivative work. You would still have to include the original copyright notices and retain the license (again IANAL).