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Comment by Zambyte | Hacker News Reader

To be against copyright is to not believe the idea of "adversarial copying". It doesn't matter if you like or dislike what other people do with their copies. The act of copying simply does not harm you.

The only way people can "abuse copyright against you" is if someone claims you violated their copyright, and invokes a DMCA takedown request, or sues you. You using the GPL will not protect you from this in any situation I can imagine. In fact, what Drew is doing here (claiming violation of copyright) is literally the only way to abuse copyright.

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> To be against copyright is to not believe the idea of "adversarial copying".

Not believing the (or an) idea of copyright is one form of being "against" "copyright". One can oppose copyright law while still desiring a form of social enforcement for copyright-law-like ideas. Just as there are many forms of emotional abuse that are not illegal or could not be enforced if made illegal, and just as there is such thing as "abusing one's trust", there are forms of copying behavior that deserve the label of "abuse" regardless of whether the law gives a label.

LLMs aid people in abusing copyright by stripping copyleft software of its freedoms and then making derivatives which the author then copyrights restrictively. It's simply not a level playing field when one party is allowed to restrictively copyright their work, it creates a competitive advantage. This is why copyleft exists, to prevent people enacting restrictive copyrights over their derivatives of copyleft works.

> This is why copyleft exists, to prevent people enacting restrictive copyrights over their derivatives of copyleft works.

But, even in that case, you have lost nothing. Other people doing anything with the code you released, including making restrictively licensed derivative works, does not harm you, cost you anything, or deprive you of anything you already had.

Unless I have to interact with their software in which case I've lost the right to repair it.

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