With more plugins being written with AI help, a few misconceptions keep coming up. Quick corrections:
"I gave the AI the paid plugin as a reference, but I told it not to use it."
The AI doesn't have an "ignore this" switch. Everything you paste in becomes part of what it's reasoning over, and your instruction is just another line in that same pile. It might avoid pasting exact lines, but the original's layout, naming, and approach are still steering the result. You can't un-show it something.
"It rewrote everything in its own words, so it's original."
Rewording isn't originality. Copyright protects how a program is structured and organized, not just its literal text. A plugin that follows someone else's design with different variable names is a derivative of their work, the same way a retold novel is still that novel.
"That was a different chat. This one is fresh."
Not necessarily. The most recent AI keep memory across sessions and can search old conversations. You don't decide what they retain, and code structure and snippets are fair game. Starting a new chat doesn't reset what the system knows.
"I only looked at their code to compare."
Then you're the contaminated one. Once you've read it, your prompts, corrections, and design choices carry that knowledge into the AI even if the code itself never does.
The real clean-room rule, for people and machines alike:
The one doing the writing never sees the original. If that's not how your plugin was built, treat it as derivative — and don't share it on the Hub, on Patreon, or by DM. That's redistribution of someone else's paid work.
