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Comment by a254613e | Hacker News Reader

>But how will you feel if Copilot erases your open-source community?

Jesus Christ, dramatic much? Are people that stumble upon a piece of code while googling how to do something, and end up copying and pasting the code from the repo, really building the open source community? Because that's essentially what it is. Whether I use copilot to generate a tedious function, or I copy it from your open source repo I'm on the same level of being a member of your open source community.

This whole thing feels like artists screaming how AI generated art is horrible, trying to figure out how to sabotage it, or how to start lawsuits - just because their value went down just a bit. Same thing with developers.

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Couldn't agree more... It's very depressing that this post is popular, wouldn't want Copilot shut down over some drama queen lawyers that have no connection to the reality of software development and ALL creative fields. Creation requires influence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc&feature=emb_titl...

The entire fucking concept of intellectual property and copyright is flawed from the get go. The issue people are wrestling with beneath the surface is not copyright but the monetary system itself which incentivizes this "chisel off one another" behavior and "MINE!" behavior because otherwise how will you survive if you can't monetize your actions?, but intelligent socioeconomic alternatives exist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBIdk-fgCeQ

People are trying to solve this problem in an ass-backwards way. Either move to universal basic income or a resource-based economy and make all ideas 'free', 'copyable' and 'remixable' since it doesn't matter either way you have access to some resources (in UBI) or all resources for free (in resource based economy) and don't need to monetize anything since you have access to everything...instead people are content with making life shittier.

"We stand on the shoulders of giants" said Newton, but oh no.. this piece of paper called 'the law' knows better!

> The entire fucking concept of intellectual property and copyright is flawed from the get go.

Many people are upset because Microsoft is hiding behind copyright and lawyers to enforce it, while at the same time ignoring the concept of intellectual property when it comes to smaller players. I'd imagine that if Microsoft removed copyright on all their code and released it and Copilot as open source, there would be much less outrage.

The issue here, for me at least, isn't centered around copyright as a concept; it's about the asymmetry of the situation. Microsoft is exploiting those without any recourse in order to sell a product.

Your ideas about a new economy and no copyright are interesting, but they will not happen any time soon. In the meantime, in reality, Microsoft is making millions based on an enormous pile of community code while not offering their code back to that community.

This I can very much understand. I agree that this would've been the way to at least partially settle this. But then people will say "What about all the hard work of the employees / teams at Microsoft/OpenAI? Should they not get a return on their investment of time & money?"

In that case, something like the capped profit model OpenAI has (but with less profits) could work. They decide "Okay after we've reached this amount of money for Copilot, we'll both profit and have enough money to sustain it as a service until the next technological breakthrough makes this obsolete"

Then just make it free for everyone forever.

Totally agree. The fact is that this product assists developers (both experienced and non-experienced) with increasing productivity and aiding in generation of new code, products and services. This product is fantastic in my view. Attempts at baiting the service to output potentially copyright violating code (which is synthesised because it is copied thousands and thousands of times in public repositories) only shows how desperate those claims are.

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