The author is a photojournalist, not a lawyer, and not qualified to comment on copyright law beyond simply giving his personal opinion.
Right. It's the debunked, bad-faith argument that "piracy is theft" because the pirates would have bought a movie were it not for The Pirate Bay, to justify calculating monetary damages that are completely unmoored from reality. We shouldn’t let people revive this nonsense, even in the context of AI.
It would be nice if the world used clinical terms to describe what's actually going on instead of using emotional terms to equate "copying" to "stealing" or "pirating", but people would rather confuse the issue than argue it logically in good faith.
Because that’s what you’re saying and it’s certainly…a point of view.
No, because you did not use any of their intellectual property in doing so.
You are conveniently ignoring the fact that A is taking something for which B did actual work.
A song is IP. A car is not technically IP but merchandise is involved so I’d say that counts. A movie is IP. A game is most certainly IP.
By your opinion, observing that game before making my own “infringes” their IP. And same for the song. And by that test, watching a movie at a friend’s is piracy, and borrowing a friends car is robbing the car manufacturer of profits.
It really seems to fall apart if you simply place a black box over the “who” of creating something completely different, seemingly based solely on our biological memory not being digital.
It is, actually, more of a problem than theft of physical items. The latter you can just buy again while the former robs you of intangible values that among other things may grant you the ability to just buy physical property. The latter doesn’t scale and is generally more difficult because it’s more visible, while the former can be (and is being, in fact) done at population scale without people realizing it until it’s too late. Also, expectation of ownership claim is a meta level of why people want to make more original things, including new and cool physical items.
Otherwise, we maybe can agree that people who make something should be eligible for some kind of compensation to encourage them to continue making, for our shared benefit.
You can argue that Beyoncé and George Clooney and Stephen King are so rich already they don’t need the money anyway, but that omits how even these people had to make a career from the bottom up on the sole premise that their focus on their art (regardless of your opinion on it) will pay the bills.
So just saying piracy isn’t theft and thus isn’t a problem is a wholly undercooked answer to a difficult problem.
The end result however is that someone gets something for free that they otherwise would have to pay for, similar to sneaking on a train or into a concert. In these cases, I don’t think many people would argue that what you’re doing isn’t wrong, or meaningfully different from theft; safe for lawyers of course, but I fail to see why the quibbling is relevant for normal people.
Plus, open source code gets mostly written by people with a stable and well-paid day job. Take that away, and I doubt there’s much open source code left.
Open source only looks better here because it has a different cultural context. But to a person trying to make money in the field, I'm not sure why that should matter.