Earlier quoted context omitted.
Write your own what? Code? If so, it could be argued in court that you're still violating copyright, because you looked at the code beforehand. At least, that's what happens with anti-reverse-engineering clauses.
You’re allowed to describe how it works to someone else and have them write it. If you can write a full specification of the code without any code snippets, or write a full TDD test set, and hand it off to someone who can swear they’ve never looked at the source material, you can still pull off a clean-room copy. I had to do that for a small lib due to European copyright laws. They don’t like Public Domain. There’s s…
Couldn’t you get an LLM to do that? “Here’s the code for this function, add conditionals to fix any null pointer bugs”
Or: “Here’s a function and a unit test that exposes a bug in it, modify the function so the unit test passes”. With that approach, the LLM could even (autonomously) try multiple times until the test passed.
> I had to do that for a small lib due to European copyright laws. They don’t like Public Domain.
This shouldn’t be an issue for public domain dedications which contain a fallback copyright license such as CC0. [0] People say the Unlicense also falls in that category, but (unfortunately) its wording is less than completely clear, so it is debatable. Another option is “PD-equivalent licenses” such as 0BSD or MIT-0, which are technically copyright licenses but designed to give you the same rights as PD (e.g. reuse without requiring attribution). Now, what some random German judge is going to make of them, who knows.
[0] Although some people, e.g. Fedora, don’t like its clauses around patents