> It is also not fair to claim that an AI-copy is fundamentally different from photocopying.

If you clean-room copy it, I think it is different. Eg, first get one agent to make a complete spec of what the program does. And a list of all the correctness guarantees it meets. Then feed that spec into another AI model to generate a program which meets that spec.

The second program will not be based on any of the code in the first program. They'll be as different as any two implementations of the same idea are. I don't think the second program should be copyrighted. If it should, why shouldn't one C compiler should be able to own a copyright over all C compilers? Why doesn't the first JSON parsing library own JSON parsing? These seem the same to me. I don't see how AI models change anything, other than taking human effort out of the porting process.