Sentry CEO on reverse engineering vs copyright: selling reimplementation invites lawsuits; LLM clean-room arguments fail
zeeg · x · 2026-10-13
Sentry CEO David Cramer (@zeeg) weighed in on the reverse-engineering debate: reverse engineering itself isn't illegal, but selling a reimplementation of copyrighted material will get copyright owners to enforce their rights. He also argues the clean-room defense for LLMs reimplementing code fails when the model was trained on the very code it reimplements.
- He expects many court cases in coming years
- Legal standards will likely stay roughly where they are today — imperfect but better than nothing
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