AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright
Source: Slashdot
Background
A satirical but functional tool called Malus uses AI to create “clean‑room” clones of open‑source software, aiming to reproduce the same functionality while shedding attribution and copyleft obligations.
“It works,” Mike Nolan, one of the two people behind Malus, who researches the political economy of open‑source software and currently works for the United Nations, told 404 Media. “The Stripe charge will provide you the thing, and it was important for us to do that, because we felt that if it was just satire, it would end up like every other piece of research I’ve done on open source, which ends up being largely dismissed by open‑source tech workers who felt that they were too special and too unique and too intelligent to ever be the ones on the bad side of the layoffs or the economics of the situation.”
Historical Clean‑Room Design
Malus’s legal strategy for bypassing copyright is based on a historically pivotal moment for software and copyright law dating back to 1982. At that time, IBM dominated home computing, and competitors such as Columbia Data Products wanted to sell products compatible with software that IBM customers were already using. Directly reverse‑engineering IBM’s computer would have infringed the company’s copyright, so Columbia Data Products devised what is now known as a clean‑room design.
The approach involved two separate teams:
- Specification team – examined IBM’s BIOS and produced detailed specifications for a compatible clone.
- Implementation team – never exposed to IBM’s code, built a BIOS from scratch that met those specifications.
The resulting system was compatible with IBM’s ecosystem but did not violate copyright because it did not copy IBM’s code; it counted as original work.
AI and Clean‑Room Methodology
The clean‑room method, validated by case law and dramatized in the first season of Halt and Catch Fire, made computing more open and competitive. In the age of generative AI, the concept has taken on new meaning. It is now easier than ever to ask AI tools to produce software that is functionally identical to existing open‑source projects, and some argue that such software, being generated from scratch, is original work that can bypass existing copyright licenses. Others contend that software produced by large language models (LLMs) is inherently derivative, because LLM output is trained on the collective output of humans scraped from the internet, including specific open‑source projects.
Malus Tool
Malus (pronounced “malice”) applies AI to the clean‑room process. Its website claims:
“Finally, liberation from open‑source license obligations. Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open‑source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate‑friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.”
Copyleft is a type of copyright license that ensures reproductions or derivative works remain free to share and modify. Malus seeks to produce code that avoids these obligations entirely.