I'm glad that Copilot is bringing the grey areas of copyright into discussion. If I write a book and it is copyright, what's the smallest unit which is covered by that copyright? Each word is obviously not. Some sentences will be fairly generic and I will not be the first person to write them. But some sentences will be characteristic of the work or my own style. Clearly how we apply copyright to subdivisions of an original work is an open question.
This. You realize it doesn’t make any sense. All ideas are shared creations, by definition. If you’ve created something that has meaning for other people, the meaning comes from the ideas you are incorporating into your own tree.
There is no defending copyright. It is indefensible from first principles. It makes no logical sense.
> Above a certain level of creativity people do produce novel or exceptional things that are worthy of protection.
Name your very best example that will prove me wrong. It should be so simple. One example, that's all it takes. Take your time, make sure you've got a good one. I'll tell you that not once, not a single time in over 17 years, have I ever seen a single example of this argument hold up under scrutiny.
Oh wait, you already did:
> Because naked men are a shared concept Michelangelo's David is not protect-worthy?
Ah yes, Michelangelo's David. A work free of copyright built under commission! Thank you for again pointing out the futility of the defense of copyright.
Okay, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I’m legitimately trying to understand. Do you think after that book was published it should have no copyright protection? That it should be totally legal for me to print and sell my own copies?
Yes. Our government should not be in the business of regulating the distribution of a sequence of words about imaginary wizards.
JK is a talented and hard working writer, and though I'm not a fan personally of those books I respect that they likely are great pieces of work, but I believe we are getting the scraps of what we could get in the Intellectually Oppressed world compared to an Intellectually free world. I'd rather have a world without cancer, a world with 100x more people able to provide medical care, a world with less pollution, than a world of artificial scarcity where a few who go along with a system of oppression get to be billionaires.
> Our government should not be in the business of regulating the distribution of a sequence of words about imaginary wizards.
So not imaginary wizards then.
What should be regulated? Is it nothing? Does your statement become "Our government should not be in the business of regulating the distribution of a sequence of words"?
> Does your statement become "Our government should not be in the business of regulating the distribution of a sequence of words"?
Yes. Your lungs is a tree that needs healthy air. Your brain is a tree that needs healthy ideas. When people are not free to clean the ideawaves, they fill with pollution, and that is where we find ourselves.
Sure why not? Do you think JK Rowling needs more money?
Maybe the state could grant protection for 10 years after publishing to give the author a chance to recoup their investment. I don't know why the protection extends to the author's grandchildren.
If there is no copyright, what incentive is there to ever create anything digital? Adobe would never invest in Photoshop if any random person was legally able to sell copies for $1 each. A production company will never publish a book or create a TV show if anyone can just undercut them by taking what they have produced and resell it. Doesn't seem like a con to me, it sounds pretty critical for any kind of functional digital market.
Most of people who contribute to open source software are not motivated by copyright. I think without copyright we would still have our software, just would have way bigger share of open source software in the world, as well as nastier copy-protection mechanisms. And more services that are online only.
> Most of people who contribute to open source software are not motivated by copyright.
I disagree. License choice is deliberate, and many open source licenses are chosen for the strict stipulations they put on users and developers, like mandatory attribution and terms of distribution or reproduction.
I release some software under the GPL and AGPL. I don't want anyone to use my software that doesn't intend to abide by the terms it was released under.
If I wanted to release software with less stipulations, then I would, and I have.
Both licenses have mandatory attribution clauses, which is one of the stipulations I mentioned, along with mandatory inclusion of copyright notice and license. BSD in particular has specifics about advertising and distributing other files, as well.
I recognise your comments from several different threads, and I'm wondering if you might not be working against your own ideals. The GPL license is intended to persuade other sources to share their contributions when building on top, which I assume is what you would like to see happen. If everything is GPL then everything is open source, everyone can use anything, including training AI methods, etc.
The problem posed with copilot is in fact the opposite. By taking it to its logical conclusion, this might make it possible to disregard this effort and use GPL code on your private project.
If we abolish copyright then there is no need for GPL. I am so forever grateful for GPL, as Stallman and the like weaponized copyright against itself, and then gave us crystal clear data that open source software is strictly superior in the long run.
But even if only 1% of ideas were copyrighted, that is still a tax on the use of all ideas. In a world without copyright, I can download any dataset at will and analyze and remix it to my heart's content, and share my findings. But in a world with copyright, if there was one "copyrighted" land mine in there I open myself up to financial ruin. So one must tread carefully when working with any external ideas.
The GPL isn't about sharing contributions back to the project, but ensuring the end-users have the source code and permission to use, modify and share it.
Did you mean to say that "GPL isn't just about sharing ..."? It most certainly is part of the intention behind GPL. Changes to GPL software must be disclosed and made open source.
If you as an end user want to modify the source code for your own use, then that is fine. If you want to distribute it, you must state the changes, and you must also do so for any code it is linked with. The original maintainers are then also free to incorporate said changes should they chose.
Nothing in the GPL requires making changes public or sharing them with the developers of the project. You only have to give your changes to people you give your modified binaries to. You never have to give your changes back to the upstream project. So AFAICT the GPL is about user freedom rather than sharing and any sharing that happens is a side effect of user freedom. There are organisations who make changes and share them with their customers but not with the wider community. There might be situations where sharing publicly could lead to detrimental effects, Debian's "Desert Island", "Dissident" and "Tentacles of Evil" tests are some examples of that.
> There is no defending copyright. It is indefensible from first principles. It makes no logical sense.
What does that even mean? The intent from the beginning of copyright was to allow people to live off of intellectual works by claiming legal rights over the work.
There are no “first principles” from which basically any societal agreements like these are derived.
Even something as simple as “murder is illegal” isn’t actually derived from any first principles because the government is allowed to murder people, citizens are during self defense, etc.
We know that there was a written intent that it was "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". However, who knows whether or not that was the true intent of all those who signed off on it. We see that lots of written intent, (Exhibit A: Purdue's "Partners Against Pain" Oxycontin promotion), may not match the mathematical reality on the ground. Also, we know that there was plenty of places in the Constitution that were good to amend (the three fifths clause, for instance).
This site (http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/index.php) has lots of fascinating old docs where you can come up with your own impressions about the early days of copyright. My general impression was that while it didn't ever actually promote the progress of science and useful arts, it absolutely did in the early days serve as a super smart free hack for the new federal government to build a central intelligence and library of all the latest and greatest inventions from throughout the land.
> What does that even mean?
It means that if you analyze it using logic and put all assumptions on the table (start high up on the tree), you deduce that this is a system of intellectual slavery, not of intellectual "property". You deduce that if there is such a thing as stealing ideas, then all ideas with any value are majority stolen and but a fraction novel.
I think an interesting analogy is if you rewrote a book in your own words but with each paragraphs meaning intact. So you rewrote Harry Potter but with slightly different sentence structures, but meaning was otherwise near identical. It’s that copyright infringement? I think it would certainly be plagiarism.
The other similar analogy is of translation: a translated work is still copied by ‘derived from’ copyright laws.
Is this just what copilot is doing in some ways but for smaller components?
'Some sentences' makes me think of the link tax introduced to prevent aggregating news sources based on only headlines, so even generic sentences fall under copyright in certain cases.
