Right - I see the other topic has been locked / author hasn’t returned to follow community rules.
Here’s the original topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
and a measured (IMHO) response to it. (BTW, do your self a favour and change tabs with that site open :)
https://マリウス.com/i-regret-migrating-to-codeberg/
It’s a tough spot, Codeberg has found themselves in and I wish them luck. But beyond that, this is (yet) another reminder that in 2026, if you don’t self host it, the cloud is just someone else computer
Copyright can also apply to code rewritten in another programming language, if the overall structure and functionality is identical. Although tbh, that is a bit of a grey area, and in previous rulings there is some precedence that if the “translation” involves significant human effort then it can be considered to be sufficiently transformative. But promting an LLM to “rewrite this in Go” very likely doesn’t pass that relatively high bar.
The study you linked is interesting (and likely underestimates the issue*), but it also shows that it is possible to automate detection of copyright infringing code in LLM output, and even just 2% is more than enough to open a case for malicious litigation. Large companies can write that off as the cost of doing business, but for small individual open-source developers this is a significant risk.
‘*’ Because human programmers usually reuse existing licensed code as libraries, while LLMs are prone to rewrite them, and as explained above a rewrite is at an elevated risk of being considered copyright infringing.
You can also set a LLMs to completely rewriting code snippets from scratch to perform the same function, writing and fulfilling the same unit tests. Not just rewrite in a different language or changing variable names. Basically the transformative abilities of LLMs can make copyright obsolete.
That is wishful thinking. Copyright was originally designed to protect human creativity, and a lot of the laws and precedence cases involve human effort specifically to distinguish between plagiats and original works.
As long as courts don’t start to rule otherwise, LLM generated code is not considered to be copyrightable itself, thus it can not be original work as defined under copyright laws. This in turn lowers the threashold for such code to be considered a derivative regardless of if there is a clear pathway from one to the other. All it takes is someone to claim that it is derivative, and the burden of proof that it isn’t largly falls onto the person accused. And if the code is functionally identical and with no significant human involvement, that is very hard to proove.
IANAL of course.