The advent of generative AI continues to undermine the very concept of copyright, from entire books shamelessly ripping off authors to tasteless AI slop depicting beloved characters going viral on social media. The sin is foundational: all today’s popular AI tools were built by pillaging copyrighted material without permission.
Even software isn’t safe. As 404 Media reports, a new tool dubbed Malus.sh — pronounced “malice,” to give a subtle clue where this is headed — uses AI to “liberate” a piece of software from existing copyright licenses, essentially creating a “clean room” clone that technically doesn’t infringe on the original code’s copyright.
The project is a tongue-in-cheek jab at tensions in the open source community. But it’s also a real product being developed by an LLC with real paying customers.
“It works,” cofounder and United Nations political economy of open source software researcher Mike Nolan told 404. He argued that if it were “just satire,” it would largely be “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.”
The process relies on a “clean room” design process that dates back to IBM’s competitors reverse engineering its computers by using two teams: one that figured out specifications to recreate its BIOS, and another “clean” team that had never seen the company’s code, as dramatized in the HBO show “Halt and Catch Fire.”
Thanks to AI, the process has become much more straightforward, allowing code-generating tools to replicate the functions of a piece of software without being exposed to its underlying code, thereby technically bypassing copyright licenses.
“Finally, liberation from open source license obligations,” Malus.sh’s website boasts. “Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing.”
“No attribution,” the website reads. “No copyleft. No problems.”
Malus may be satire, but it’s meant to shed light on a real phenomenon that’s already taking place. Lat month, for instance, a new version of a popular open source python code library called “chardet,” raised the alarm bells among developers. As Ars Technica reported at the time, the new “ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite” of the library, built with Anthropic’s Claude Code, triggered a heated debate over “clean room” copies, which don’t acknowledge or credit the original authors at all.
“I have seen Malus.sh, and like many people, I wasn’t sure it was satire at first, because I’m sure someone will probably make that for real eventually,” developer Dan Blanchard, who vibe-coded the library rewrite with Claude Code, told 404 Media.
Malus also highlights ongoing concerns from service-as-a-service companies, who fear AI could render their often expensive offerings redundant thanks to competitors building their own customized versions. The fears have triggered massive sell-offs, with the stock of software companies like Oracle taking a beating earlier this year.
To Blanchard, who eventually slapped an open-source community-approved “zero-clause BSD” license on his new version of chardet, it’s too late to go back to a time when copyright licenses protected software companies.
“A rewrite that would’ve taken a team of people months or years can be done in days with AI,” he told 404 Media. “As a professional software engineer, I don’t love that much of the business model around selling software is in danger, but I don’t think there’s any putting the genie back in the bottle at this point.”
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