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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

I'm an artist turned CTO. My perspective is really simple - theft is theft. You (not you specifically per se) can sugar coat it however you like, but copying open source codebases/work is different from stealing proprietary/licensed work without permission. It would have been ok if stealing/sharing copyrighted work was heavily normalized, but no, a lot of people have gone to prison for simply pirating DVDs and CDs and now you're telling me it's somehow ok if a corporation does it?

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How come? We give IP law / copyright legitimacy but it’s not clear to me the more I think about it. If you draw something you def own the physical drawing but owning the idea of the drawing during your lifetime feels strange to me. It’s also a very recent invention and humans created art before and will create after.

I agree that copyright is foundationally wrong, but the way out has to be through a culture shift of people putting their work in Public Domain. It's not up to a private company to decide everyone else's work is public commons.

> but owning the idea of the drawing during your lifetime feels strange to me

Oh, I wish it was limited to lifetime.

USA is currently lifetime + 70 years, and work for hire is 95 years from creation.

The issue is not stealing the idea itself. The issue is stealing the work in its entirety - as is - with all its flaws and character intact. That's what makes art unique, right?

I would think the same goes for codebases too. On a personal note, I wrote a CMS in Elixir from scratch way before even AI was a thing. It uses a lot of proprietary flows to make it scale, helping it serve millions of requests efficiently. I certainly did not give OpenAI nor Microsoft permission to steal my code. And yet they did. Is that not theft of my Intellectual Property?

Theft is theft, but learning is not theft.

Neither is fair use, and neither is copyright infringement. But learning most definitely is not theft.

> It would have been ok if stealing/sharing copyrighted work was heavily normalized, but no, a lot of people have gone to prison for simply pirating DVDs and CDs and now you're telling me it's somehow ok if a corporation does it?

There is no such thing as "stealing" copyrighted work. Either you have unauthorized access and/or distribution, or you don't.

Unauthorized access to copyrighted work is perfectly legal in a big chunk of the world, including western Europe. Read up on the french tradition of copyright law, particularly the provisions for personal use.

This brings us to how "people have gone to prison for simply pirating DVDs and CDs". The bulk of the cases were focused on mass commercial distribution of verbatim copies of third-party content. I'm talking about DVD-burning factories.

>There is no such thing as "stealing" copyrighted work

Maybe true in places with different cultural values like China or India.

However, piracy differs from the theft-of-service data scrapers use while ignoring EULA, site usage terms, and robot exclusion standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services

Getting emotionally invested in "AI" fantasy marketing is irrational. Have a wonderful day =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTAwjprV3b4

> Maybe true in places with different cultural values like China or India.

No, this is a core trait of the whole concept of copyright.

Copyright is a legal tool to allow authors to claim the exclusive right to monetize their work. But from it's inception this same legal tool is designed to ensure the public has the right to access said copyrighted works without authorization, including but not limited to the right to the unauthorized access for personal use and how public domain is extended to all works.

This notion originates from France's copyright law, from which all copyright laws in the world directly or indirectly comes from. We are talking about centuries of legal history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_France

I was alluding to the lack of Software Patent and Copyright enforcement in some jurisdictions, and hoping people would connect the issue of isomorphic plagiarism on their own.

We are in the age of "Napster" for nonsense, and "free" stuff other people made is certainly a crowd-pleaser. =3

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