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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

> Copyright law still protects programmers when their work is unlawfully copied. They can still bring copyright infringement claims if someone uses a model to reproduce their code. Additionally, the plaintiffs’ contract claims against the AI companies are still in play. The specific holding here was narrow but important: that the absence of copyright information from a new work does not mean, by itself, that someone illegally removed it.

I’m not sure I fully understand their argument. If you reproduce the copyrighted work, minus the copyright information, the result is exactly the same as just… removing the copyright information. At least in the case of something digital.

Anyone can help clarify why it is seen as a win? I don't really buy the “small developers will be sued by large corporation for years and forced to settle”

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> Anyone can help clarify why it is seen as a win?

Because the EFF is generally not very pro-copyright and certainly, at a minimum, hates the DMCA.

>I don't really buy the “small developers will be sued by large corporation for years and forced to settle”

I (a copyright litigator) don't buy it either.

> EFF is generally not very pro-copyright

Did they forget that the entirely of GPL is built on the foundation of copyright?

Wouldn't surprise me, seems to be the case for many of the users here as well.

Yeah, the vast majority of people in FLOSS don’t understand that copyright is what enables FLOSS to exist in the first place

Copyright currently is what allows FLOSS to exist. In a vanishingly unlikely hypothetical future copyright-free USA (the legal transition to which, I believe, would almost certainly violate the First Amendment by chilling speech), new laws could be passed to provide copyright-like protection only for FLOSS-licensed works.

So it'd just be copyright again? Fascinating.

When you said

> EFF is generally not very pro-copyright

I thought you and the other replies downthread of your comment were referring to the current implementation of copyright, rather than the concept of copyright. From what I've read, EFF generally supports the concept of copyright. If I misinterpreted you, I apologize. In my reply to dgellow's comment, which included

> copyright is what enables FLOSS to exist in the first place

, I was simply arguing that the current implementation of copyright theoretically could be reduced overall in a way that would not weaken the legal power of FLOSS licenses.

It's not me with the monolithic view, that's for sure.

Not sure what was monolithic about my view. Are you sure you haven't mistaken my hypothetical example for a normative suggestion? I was expecting a lawyer to be less prone than myself to such a mistake (but I suppose almost every court case involves a lawyer who has made a mistake of some sort haha).

I still think you have misinterpreted EFF's stance on copyright, whether you meant copyright as a concept or copyright as implemented.

Because the EFF is no longer the organization that may have represented your values in 2000. Foundations go evil, co-opted and bought out.

The entire article is a pro-AI shill piece from start to finish. The EFF now sells out open source.

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