Chardet relicensed from LGPL to MIT via Claude Code rewrite, sparking copyright debate

The maintainers of chardet, a widely-used Python character encoding library, used Claude Code to rewrite the entire codebase and relicensed from LGPL to MIT in v7.0.0. The original author called it a potential GPL violation, arguing that AI prompted with the original code cannot produce a "clean room" rewrite. The case raises unsettled legal questions about whether AI-assisted rewrites can bypass copyleft obligations. Traditional clean-room rewrites require strict information barriers between teams; critics argue that feeding LGPL code into an AI collapses that wall entirely. No court has ruled on this specific scenario.

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