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I appreciate the summary of the legal and cultural issues; however, by “permitted” I meant specifically, where does Claude currently draw the line? i.e. how much can one get away with?

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Per a screenshot of Claude Code on Twitter, the full rule is: “Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets. Don’t build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.”

It's so broadly worded, the LLM could refuse just about any retro or vintage related decomp. Pong (1972) and Space Invaders (1978) are both "specific existing games." Seems like dropping a grenade when a scalpel would have sufficed. The "Do" and "Don't" also seem bizarrely inverted. Using actual existing game assets or code is copyright infringement. Re-implementing an existing game without original assets or code is generally legal.

Yes, agreed… and beyond that, the question of what is “original” is thorny enough that it should not be left up to a machine’s judgement. As Paul Valéry put it: ‘There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works whose affiliation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the intervention of the gods.’

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