Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

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All the productivity enhancement provided by LLMs for programming is caused by circumventing the copyright restrictions of the programs on which they have been trained.

You and anyone else could have avoided spending millions for programmer salaries, had you been allowed to reuse freely any of the many existing proprietary or open-source programs that solved the same or very similar problems.

I would have no problem with everyone being able to reuse any program, without restrictions, but with these AI programming tools the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while the poor remain constrained by them, as before.

The copyright for programs has caused a huge multiplication of the programming effort for many decades, with everyone rewriting again and again similar programs, in order for their employing company to own the "IP". Now LLMs are exposing what would have happened in an alternative timeline.

The LLMs have the additional advantage of fast and easy searching through a huge database of programs, but this advantage would not have been enough for a significant productivity increase over a competent programmer that would have searched the same database by traditional means, to find reusable code.

> the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while the poor remain constrained by them, as before.

Claude Code is $20 a month, and I get a lot of usage out of it. I don't see how cutting edge AI tools are only for the rich. The name OpenAI is often mocked, but they did succeed at bringing the cutting edge of AI to everyone, time and time again.

Oh they will totally rent you their privilege, further enrichening themselves. Of course!

My cofounder said his plan is $100 a month and if it were $1,000 he’d still pay it.

So much of programming is tedium.

Cofounder of what?

Intellectual property law is a net loss to humanity, so by my reckoning, anything which lets us all work around that overhead gets some extra points on the credit side of the ledger.

I agree in spirit, but in actual fact this subversion of intellectual property is disproportionately beneficial to those who can afford to steal from others and those who can afford to enforce their copyright, while disproportionately disadvantageous to those who can't afford to fend off a copyright lawsuit or can't afford to sue to enforce their copyright.

The GP can free-ride uncredited on the collective work of open source at their leisure, but I'm sure Disney would string me up by my earlobes if I released a copywashed version of Toy Story 6.

Then it really proves how much the economy would be booming if we abolished copyright, doesn't it? China ignores copyright too, and look at them surpassing us in all aspects of technology, while Western economies choose to sabotage themselves to keep money flowing upwards to old guys.

Well no, because copyright != cannot use.

"Available for use" and "Automatically rewritten to work in your codebase fairly well" is very different, so copyright is probably not the blocker technically

Yeah, I love the idea that all software could just be cobbled together from other software, but none of it does anything new.

The theory behind copyright is that the enshrined monopoly guarantees profits and thus encourages r&d.

China steals our r&d (both copyrighted and non) and gets a lot of theirs from state funding.

I don’t think I’d take China’s success as proof that the copyright system doesn’t work.

It is proof that intellectual property is a transient and fickle thing, easily subverted when there is no legal framework to protect it.

Sounds like you're saying state funded R&D works much better than copyright funded R&D

China is not surpassing the US in all aspects of technology.

There is still much for them to steal.

Can you name one area of technology where the USA has better technology than China? I'll wait.

Software

UV Lithography, Space Exploration, self driving cars, weather prediction, industrial safety, circular knitting, medical imaging, robotics, bioengineering, agricultural yield management

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