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Comment by grondo4 | Hacker News Reader

> i.e. the act of reading may cause accidental infringement when implementing the "things you learn"

Surely you know this isn't the case right? Maybe you're confused because we're talking about programming and not a different creative artform?

Great artists read, watch and consume copyrighted works of art all day, if they didn't they wouldn't be great artists. And yet the content they produce is entirely there own, free from the copyright of the works they learned from.

What's the difference then in programming? Why can an artist be trusted not to reproduce the copyrighted works that they learned from but not the programmer?

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Artists get into trouble all the time for producing works very close to something that already exist. That's like the number one reason artists get shunned in the communities they were in.

Every filmmaker watches movies

Every author reads books

Every painter view paintings

Unless you're arguing that every single artist across every field of artistic expression is constantly being jeopardized by claims of copyright infringement, this is a nonsensical point to make.

But they’re not creating similar works, unlike AI which IS. Why is this so complicated for you?

I would seriously question if this happens all the time, these days. The whole copyright thing is way behind the digital and internet revolution. Look at what the Prince case did for transformation copyright fair use.

The process of online artists shaming each other doesn't really have anything to do with the legal system, though they all act like it is.

> Why can an artist be trusted not to reproduce the copyrighted works that they learned from but not the programmer?

They cant. which is why that quote "Good artists copy, great artists steal" exists.

AI has already been shown to be "accidentally" reproducing copyrighted work. You too, can do the same.

Its likely no-one (including yourself) will ever be aware of it - but strictly speaking it would still be copyright infringement. This is the relevance and context of the link you were given.

If everyone is infringing copyright, no one is infringing copyright. This is a dead-end thought.

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