An interesting stunt: Malus.sh will take your money and in exchange it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:
404media.co/this-ai-tool-rips-β¦
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2026/04/23/poiβ¦
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This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright
Malus, which is a piece of satire but also fully functional, performs a "clean room" clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell software without crediting the original developers.Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)
Bandersnatch
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Great essay. Corporate America has a lot more to lose from this tool than the Free Software community.
Now every single corporate hack can result in their Golden Goose being freed, permanently.
Domestic Supply
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Alan Langford π¨π¦π§€π§ζ
in reply to Domestic Supply • • •@ddgulledge I look forward to hearing the horror stories from organizations who are so unethical to think this is a good way forward.
Many moons ago I was asked to do some due diligence on a company. They proudly explained to me how they had extended a FOSS product, but failed to contribute back or to integrate patches from the original. They were a major release out of date and getting up to date would be major work.
For that reason my recommendation was that the investor give this one a pass.
DNAvinci
in reply to Domestic Supply • • •@ddgulledge
Academic scientific software authors have been slitting each other's throats this way for decades.
You have a grad student re-derive all the features in a competitors software and swear that they never saw the code. You write a paper with a few cherry picked benchmarks to show how your software is the same or better.
Then the grad student leaves and new grants don't pay for maintenance on old software.
This is basically a 5 year cycle.
@pluralistic
Joshua Miller
in reply to Domestic Supply • • •@ddgulledge Honestly, I see no such risk. There could be thousands of forks of open source things today! That's perfectly legal and trivial to do.
Using this to shift open source into a proprietary product (eg. violating the GPL) is a legit risk.
Using this on proprietary software is another likely outcome (ex. take that custom SAP app, get clean room implementation, stop paying).
Faraiwe
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Huh!
You mean... A scummy scammy business is using LLM, and selling a novel idea: steal other people's work and sell it. With little to no attention paid to actual consequences.
ORIGINAL, amirite??? LLMs were NOT created like this or their entire business model focused on that practice. Whatsoever. No...
#LLM #ai #scam
Faraiwe
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •TL;DR
Product:
#LLM #ai #scam
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Scott Galloway
in reply to Faraiwe • • •Faraiwe
in reply to Scott Galloway • • •@scottgal She made some money. She also destroyed a wonderful piece of art, generated heaps of work that may not even be feasible to restore the art work.
She is an obscure, one-hit meme maker, with an even more obscure online shop, to cash in on her shitjob.
Nobody knows her name. You'd have to search HARD.
And the search would need to include the original work title/artist.
It's the PERFECT analogue, what the hell are you talking about, man =D
#LLM #ai #scam
Faraiwe
in reply to Faraiwe • • •@scottgal WITHOUT searching online.... WHAT IS HER NAME?
IS SHE ALIVE?
I remember the NAME of the art work.
I don't even know if she is alive.
So, yeah.
Chuckles
in reply to Faraiwe • • •Ciourte Piaille
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •It was weird and a bit sickening seeing the audience of this FOSDEM talk cheering and clapping, even if it's "satirical".
FOSDEM 2026 - Let's end open source together with this one simple trick
fosdem.orgtschenkel
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Is that technically still a Clean Room design? In the original scenario anybody who had ever even "seen" bits of the original code was deemed contaminated and couldn't be on the clean room team.
Since every LLM has been trained on the original FOSS code, it must be seen in the same way.
Bernd Paysan R.I.P Natenom π―οΈ
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •One problem with the LLM generated code is that the LLM used available source code on the net for training. I.e. all existing free software. So the part that recreates the free software from the spec has deep knowledge of the project it is going to rip off.
Which is not the same situation as the IBM case.
In fact, my copyright police point here would be that any software created by LLMs is based on human works used as training data, and therefore a derivative work of the training data. Which is all some kind or another of FOSS, different licenses mixed together. You have to comply to all of them.
I.e. LLM generated code is already the free software apocalypse. It's not PD. It is derived from copyrighted code.
This time Disney is our friend. They'll jump through all the hoops to make sure AI animation slop will count as Disney-derived work, and pave the road to claim all generated software back to the commons where it was ripped off.
uis
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •[PART 1/2]
*Applies an algorithm(compiler) to source code*
Corporations moving government's lips: "machine code is still copyrightable as a book despite not being written by or easily readable by humans".
*Applies an algorithm(LLM) to source code*
Corporations moving government's lips: "new source code is not covered by GPL despite being as readable by humans as a book".
And as usual, there are more than sides in this: developers/users, AI corpos and publishers.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Malus was co-created by Mike Nolan, who "researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations." Nolan told 404 Media's Emanuel Maiberg that he shipped Malus as a real, live-fire business that will exchange money for an AI service that destroys the commons as a way to alert the free software movement to a serious danger.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
As Maiberg writes, Malus relies on a precedent set in 1982, when IBM brought a copyright suit against an upstart called Columbia Data Products for reverse-engineering an IBM software product. IBM's argument was that Columbia must have copied its *code* - the copyrightable part of a work of software - in order to reimplement the *functionality* of that code. Functions aren't copyrightable: copyright protects creative expressions, not the ideas that inspire those expressions.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The *idea* of a computer program that performs a certain algorithm is *not* copyrightable, but the *code* that turns that idea into a computer program *is* copyrightable.
Columbia's successful defense against IBM involved using a "clean room" in which two isolated teams collaborated on the reimplementation.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The first team examined the IBM program and wrote a specification for *another* program that would replicate its functionality. The second team received the specification and turned it into a computer program. The first team *did* handle IBM software, but they did not create a new work of software. The second team *did* create a new work of software, but they never handled any IBM code.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is the model for Malus: it pairs two LLMs, the first of which analyzes a free software program and prepares a specification for a program that performs the identical function. The second program receives that specification and writes a new program.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The Malus FAQ performs a "be as evil as possible" explanation for the purpose of this exercise:
> 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.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This business about attribution and copyleft is a reference to the terms imposed by some free software licenses. The point of free software is to create a commons of user-inspectable, user-modifiable software that anyone can use, improve and distribute. To achieve this, many free software licenses impose obligations on the people who distribute their code: you are allowed to take the code, improve the code, give it away or sell it, *but* you have to let other people do the same.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Typically, you have to inform people when there's free software in a package you've distributed (attribution) and supply them with the "source code" (the part that humans read and write, which is then "compiled" into code that a computer can use) on demand, so they can make their own changes.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This system of requiring other people to share the things they make out of the code you share with them is sometimes called "copyleft," because it uses copyright, which is normally a system for restricting re-use to require people *not* to restrict that use.
Companies *love* to *use* free software, but they don't like to *share* free software.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Companies like Vizio raid the commons for software that is collectively created and maintained, then simply refuse to live up to their end of the bargain, violating the license terms and (incorrectly) assuming no one will sue them:
pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizβ¦
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Pluralistic: 20 Oct 2021 β Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Malus's promise, then, is that you can pay them to create fully functional reimplementations of any free/open source software package that your company can treat as proprietary, without any obligations to the commons. You won't even have to attribute the original software project that you knocked off!
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is the risk that Nolan and his partner are trying to awaken the free/open source community to: that our commons is about to be raided by selfish monsters who serve as gut-flora for the immortal colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations," who will steal everything we've built and destroy the social contract we live by.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is a real problem, but not because of AI. We *already* have this situation, and it's *really bad*. Most of the foundational free software projects were created under older licenses that did not contemplate cloud computing and software as a service. The "copyleft" obligations of these licenses are triggered by the *distribution* of the software - that is, when I send you a copy of the code.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But cloud services don't have to send you the code: when you run Adobe Creative Cloud or Google Docs, the most important code is all resident on corporate servers, and never sent to you, which means that you are not entitled to a copy of the new software that has been built atop of our commons.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
In other words, big companies have "software freedom" (the freedom to use, modify and improve software) and we've got "open source" (the impoverished right to look at the versions of these packages that are sitting on services like Github - itself a division of Microsoft):
mako.cc/copyrighteous/libreplaβ¦
Then there's "tivoization," a tactic for stealing from the commons that wasn't *quite* invented by Tivo, though they were one of its most notorious abusers.
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How markets coopted free softwareβs most powerful weapon (LibrePlanet 2018 Keynote)
copyrighteousCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Tivoization happens when you distribute free software as part of a hardware device, then use "digital locks" (sometimes called "technical protection measures") to prevent the owner of this device from running a modified version of the code. With tivoization, I can sell you a device running free software and I can comply with the license by giving you the code, but if you change the code and try to get the device to run it, it will refuse.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
What's more, "anti-circumention" laws like Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act make it a *felony* to tamper with these digital locks, so it becomes a *crime* to use modified software on your own device:
pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whiβ¦
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Pluralistic: Tools vs uses (16 Mar 2026) β Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
There's no question that the tech industry would devour the free software commons if they were allowed to, and the AI threat that Nolan raises with Malus seems alarming, but while there's *something* to worry about there, I think the risk is being substantially overstated.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That's because copyleft licenses - and indeed, all software licenses - are *copyright* licenses, and *software written by AI is not eligible for a copyright*, because *nothing made by AI is eligible for copyright*:
pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/itsβ¦
Copyright is awarded *solely* to works of *human* authorship.
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Pluralistic: Supreme Court saves artists from AI (03 Mar 2026) β Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This fact has been repeatedly affirmed by the US Copyright Office, which has fought appeals of this principle all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. That's because the principle that copyright is strictly reserved for human creativity isn't remotely controversial in legal circles. This is just how copyright works.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Which means that the "be evil" version of Malus's business model has a fatal flaw. While the code that Malus produces is indeed "legally distinct" with "no attribution" and "no copyleft," it's not true that there are "no problems." That's because Malus's code doesn't have "corporate-friendly licensing." Far from it: Malus's code has *no* licensing, because it is born in the public domain and *cannot be copyrighted.*
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
In other words, if you're a corporation hoping to use Malus to knock off a free software project so that you can adapt it and distribute it without having to make your modifications available, Malus's code will not suit your needs. If you give me code that Malus produced, *you can't stop me from doing anything I want with it*. I can sell it. I can give it away. I can make a competing product that reproduces all of your code and sell it at a 99% discount.
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Jonas Vautherin
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •