There is no defending copyright. It is indefensible from first principles. It makes no logical sense.
Though it sure has proven to be a profitable con.
Because naked men are a shared concept Michelangelo's David is not protect-worthy?
I'm very worried that such opinions are up-voted so highly when Microsoft leeches open source code (but not its own ...).
People have no respect for other people's creations. Perhaps it makes them feel better because they haven't created anything difficult themselves.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guideline... http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html
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 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.
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?
Copilot is certainly pushing that envelope.