alt Hacker News> That's not actually the case at hand here - the agents were given the original source to reference: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...
yeah fair - the "The canonical Git source code we're targeting to replicate the functionality of is in the git/ subdirectory." part makes this hard to argue against.
> To the extent the resulting work is a derivative of the test suite it is possibly infringing
It's this bit that I have a problem with. If I run the test, it fails and reports a failure. Now I write code and run the test again. What is the theory there that code that I wrote infringes.
Simplify this down:
Assume the following is copyrighted:
fn test_sum() {
assert_eq!(sum(1, 1), 2);
}
fn sum(a: u8, b: u8) {
a + b
}
Replies
If you did it in a loop until the test passed, maybe?
Your result is essentially impossible without the original. With ffmpeg, your result does not depend on ffmpeg specifically - you can use any video creation tool.
Writing
Doesn't infringe upon copyright period, because there's no creative element in that work.Imagine a more substantial example though. Perhaps you have a test that checks that some file written in a binary format is correct, and gives names (creative elements) to each field of the format that it prints when you mess up the field, and has comments describing why the bytes are laid out like they are (the comments being copyrightable even if the facts they describe aren't), and the LLM copies those field names and comments verbatim... Now it's quite likely that the LLMs work is a derivative of the test suite.