Alarm bells of this magnitude haven't been rung about people torrenting films for decades; it's a given that some people are just going to do it and there's little that can be done to stop it.
Producing new data from original data of questionable lineage makes the questionable acts visible. Copilot and the like actively encourage this creation.
If it were possible to peek into the rooms of everyone who downloaded a torrent to admonish them then maybe pirating would have been made a modicum more taboo. But those consumers never intended to leave their rooms. Copilot forces them to leave their rooms if they want their derivative work to be used.
Google does do this though. Just Google for an easy to answer question, like “when was George Washington born”
The same applies to all realistic use-cases for copilot by the way. Whatever is produces is not copyrightable.
Correct.
>The same applies to all realistic use-cases for copilot by the way. Whatever is produces is not copyrightable.
That's a pretty bold statement to make. How do you know how people use copilot? Also IIRC Oracle vs Google essentially determined 3 lines of code can be copyrightable. So I think you statement fails on two points, you can't really predict how people use copilot and you cannot predict what a court would decide is copyrightable (this is much less straight forward than statement of facts).
Google Search is ethically acceptable because for the most part website creators like being in search results and are "compensated" in the form of more visitors, and if they don't like it they can easily exclude themselves. Website creators famously do NOT like it when Google indexes their content and then serves it up independently.
The value that is being derived here is in the curation of the material, not the material itself.
You don't do this. You get my books, cut out the bibliography, glue all the pages together, and then sell the book as your own.
It is my book and all you did is derive some work from it.
Curation companies have the same problem and there are plenty of high profile lawsuits about it.
I mean I wouldn't expect it, but I think I'd be pretty annoyed if you didn't ask permission and then made a bunch of money off my image. It's easy to find stories from the subjects of famous photographs who feel like they've been exploited. Just off the top of my head there's Afghan Girl, the kid from the Nirvana album, Harvard's collection of photos of enslaved people, and Henrietta Lacks is sort of a similar case.
> if someone compiles a list of the best restaurants in the world and sells that list, do you think the restaurants should be compensated?
No, but here's a better example: you make friends with a bunch of food critics, collect their thoughts and opinions and favorite secret spots, and then publish a book based on that stuff without ever telling them what you were doing or compensating or crediting them.
I'll give a concrete example: I was rock climbing recently and met an old guy who was sort of the local expert, and he told me how some other non-locals had come in and kind of mined him for information about the area, all the routes, etc. and then published a guidebook without crediting him at all. He felt pretty upset and exploited by that, and I felt bad for buying the guidebook because I had assumed it was written by some local climbers and didn't realize they got most of their info from someone else.
It's not illegal, but it is unethical.
The people painting Microsoft as a big, greedy trust conveniently ignore that Copilot would actually be empowering the ecosystem of tech companies to develop services that compete with Microsoft faster and more easily.
When closed source code leaks: "Copyright infringement by criminals".
What's the difference? There's plenty the world could learn from the source code of Windows or GTA6 and having access to the source of these large projects would move society forward faster. So why are OSS contributors protecting their rights "Anti progressive luddites", while the large copyright owners who guard their proprietary code like a dragon guarding gold are let off the hook?
If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.