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The title is pretty much it. There is a fork of this project that I had started making before they wiped all traces of the application. Now I'm stuck with a fully rebranded application that I want to release to be used as a replacement for that program since it's now dead.

What am I legally allowed to do here? This is all being done in the US and hosted on GitHub fully open source with quite literally zero monetary or commercial gain. I simply want people to be able to enjoy the app without having to deal with the drama of the old creator that killed their program too early.

The app wasn't paid and was hosted on GitHub open source with a GNU General Public License v3.0 on it. The person who made it is also based out of the US if what I'm told is correct.

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  • Hi @Ferretpaws, welcome to the site. Although this doesn't answer your question, you may find the GPL FAQ useful. Also note that unlike many legal documents, the full text of the GPL-3.0 is relatively short and comprehensible, including sections 4. Conveying Verbatim Copies and 5. Conveying Modified Source Versions. Commented Nov 28, 2024 at 17:42
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    When you upload it, please post here to follow up. The curiosity is getting to me! Commented Nov 29, 2024 at 16:42

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You may act just as you would if the owner had not removed their copy.

The GPLv3 is explicitly irrevocable:

All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met.

You received GPLv3 rights at the time you downloaded the program, and those rights cannot be rescinded. You continue to have any GPLv3 rights you had previously, just as you would if the upstream copy had never been removed, and you may exercise them as you please.

One thing I'd be concerned about: the app might have been removed because it wrongfully made use of someone else's code that couldn't be licensed under the GPLv3, and the author removed the app because they realized they couldn't distribute that third-party code. In this case, their GPLv3 grant might not be valid (but not because they removed the app for public download).

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  • This developer stated themselves that a large majority of the code was created using ChatGPT/other AI programming tools. I plan to just put the same GPL it had on it before just to be safe but, if this code could be verified as being not written by them, could I change the license too something I want? Commented Nov 28, 2024 at 4:56
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    @FerretPaws If you are not the author or copyright holder of the code, the GPL doesn't give you rights to change the license, only to propagate the work further under the same terms. I understand LLM-generated code is an unsettled area of copyright law, so (1) the legal uncertainty suggests to me you ought to cautiously not assume the work has no author and (2) it's not perfectly clear what lines were LLM-generated and which may have been created or edited by a human, so I'd assume the worst case than any given line was human-edited. Commented Nov 28, 2024 at 5:17
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    And even if the author gave strong proof that the entire work was LLM-generated without any human edits or intervention, that would probably just mean the work is either not copyrightable or is burdened by the copyright of some set of trained-on works that were relevant to weighting the LLM's output. In neither of these cases could you license the copyright of the original work (it's either non-existent or someone else's) but in the former case, you could add your own modifications to uncopyrightable text and license those additions of yours. But whether that's legally the case is yet unknown. Commented Nov 28, 2024 at 5:25
  • I'm going to just stay on the cautious side and keep it listed as GPL and follow the terms they have. It's really unfortunate they put this code under this license to purposefully stop someone like me from being able to use the project after they decided to be done with it Commented Nov 28, 2024 at 12:24
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    @FerretPaws no, the GPL is designed specifically to preserve your right to be able to use the project after the creator is done with it. But it preserves everyone's rights to do that, and then later to do that with your code if you similarly decide to withdraw your project, which is why you're not allowed to change the licence. Commented Nov 28, 2024 at 12:59
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Previous commenters have given thoughtful answers on the legality of resurrecting the project, but I think that the marketing aspect could use some discussion. The GPLv3 is pretty simple and although I am not a lawyer, I think it is pretty clear that marketing the project as a repo under the identical name as the original is covered under the license under section 4. Conveying Verbatim Copies as is marketing it under a new name under section 5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.

For your own information and legal protection you might contact the original owner to find out if they deleted it due to any legal claims, but barring that I think you are as safe as anyone can be seeing that the law around A.I. copyright is still being settled.

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  • the law around A.I. copyright is still being settled => ~99% of code used to train LLMs comes from open source repositories so using it for a GPL-licensed project is a type of use that has a <0.01% chance of being declared illegal in the next decade. Commented Dec 1, 2024 at 11:18
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The project being so-called "fully deleted" is a lie. If it was fully deleted, you wouldn't have access to a copy. So the project still exists just like it always did.

When a developer deletes his copy, that means one single copy has been deleted. That makes no difference to the existence of the project.

So you have to act the same as you would if the other developers were still working on it and still updating it, even though they're probably not.

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Other answers have fairly well covered the copyright on the code. In short, you can continue to distribute it under the same GPL license. A related but separate issue is trademark on the name. You said it's rebranded, so that's probably pretty well covered. Just be mindful of how you mention the old name. You can say it was forked from Acme, but don't want to imply it's endorsed by the old maker, by the maintainers of Acme.

Regarding the tools the original author used - there are two copyright issues around AI / LLMs. The US copyright office issued some guidance about this in January 2025. A summary of that guidance:

The person has copy rights only to their own work.

If the person who originally published the code wrote the code the way they wanted it and used AI tools for syntax checking, perhaps boilerplate code, etc, but they actually wrote the code while using AI-powered tools, they have the copyright the same as of they used a pencil, and licensed that copyright to you. No problem in that case. This would be if they designed how the code should work.

If the person entered a general description of what the code should do and the AI wrote the code, and then the human fixed errors in the AI, it's probably not copyrightable.

If the person requested a program that does the thing and the AI handed them someone else's code, the person who actually wrote it has the copyright. There is a lot of controversy around that, people worried that is happening. I've been unable to make this happen, despite consulting with some AI experts and them helping me try to make an AI regurgitate and summarize sentences from the source material.

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    The issue is AI doesn't write code, it regurgitates what others wrote, potentially under licenses that should have been preserved. If I write a piece of code looking at another project as "inspiration", copyright very much states it's a derived work. But until law catches up, these are opinions that don't really belong in answers Commented Nov 29, 2024 at 21:00
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    The situation with LLMs is similar to that of other code transformation tools such as compilers or parser-generators. In such cases, it's well known that the result is a derivative of the input (e.g. the LLM "prompt") but it's also a derivative work of the tool (or models contained in the tool), and such tools typically carry licenses which explicitly exempt the output from being encumbered by the copyright on the tool/model. Commented Nov 29, 2024 at 21:17
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    If someone uses (excerpts from) Google Books to write some code, the copyright is most likely not theirs. If someone uses (books from) a public library to write some code, the copyright is most likely not theirs. If someone uses (examples from) Github to write some code, the copyright is most likely not theirs. If someone uses (output from) a LLM to write some code, the copyright is most likely not theirs. Commented Nov 30, 2024 at 1:16
  • +1 for adressing trademark, but not sure about LLM copyright issues. While I personally wouldn't worry about it, it's not legally settled so there is some unknown risk. Commented Nov 30, 2024 at 5:39
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If I write software, and publish it with a GPL license then you have certain rights to make copies of the software and modified copies of the software.

If I delete all copies of the software except for the one modified copy on your computer, then people have the right but not the ability to make such copies. You yourself have no ability to get an unmodified copy of the software if you didn’t keep one, but you have the right to use, further modify, and distribute the software that you have under the GPL terms.

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    While I accept this answer is technically correct, the comments on apsiller's answer include the important fact that the original code was (in legal terms) possibly not written by the person that first released it. Commented Dec 1, 2024 at 9:08
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This has happened earlier. You may want to check story of Elastic vs Amazon web services. Birth of OpenSearch from previous fork.

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    You may wish to read the comments on the other answers; this isn't prima facie the same as it may be the case that the OP deleted the repository because they never had the right to release it under the GPL in the first place. Commented Nov 30, 2024 at 8:20

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