zlacker

>>zacwes+(OP)
It seems to me the communal voice of HN varies widely on copyright issues depending on who is getting sued and who is getting potentially hurt by violations.

People who generally make less money than programmers - writers, artists, musicians - should stop their whining and their unfair uses of copyright to control their creative output.

Programmers who are getting shafted by big corporations using their code to build machine learning models need urgent protection and fairness.

It probably doesn't help that almost every copyright argument here gets made with the understanding of copyright prevalent in the American model - that is to say that copyright exists to promote the progress of science and the useful arts - whereas in many countries copyright is understood as existing because the creator of something has a moral right to control and ownership of whatever they made.

Obviously this lawsuit is in the U.S but I suppose even if it loses here other lawsuits in other countries, with a different understanding of copyright, might succeed.

>>bryanr+58
I think the pushback from programmers has a different motivation.

Programmers love to share code, but they don't want to share it with corporations who don't give back. We invented copyleft as a way to (ab)use the legal system to open up everything. We hate copyright and "love" "copyleft" as a means to weaken copyright.

It would be like if artists gave away all of their art, except not to corporations who hog their copyrights.

>>Ferret+Fg
I'd argue that many artists are also fine with their art being reused and reposted elsewhere, as long as it's done with the necessary attribution.

For example, I don't think Sarah Ander­sen, one of the plaintiffs here, would've reached the popularity she's gained now if it wasn't for her comics being shared on meme sites and social media, for example, and I don't see any "do not repost" watermarks on her recent work like others that do object to resharing on other platforms have started doing.

I think many artists and copyleft programmers have the same positions. The biggest difference is that drawings are considered "art" and code is generally not, despite that fact a technical drawing and business logic are both hardly artistic and mostly an expression of skill whereas the demo scene, the indie gaming scene, and many online artists are very much about expressing themselves within a given set of boundaries.

When Microsoft steals code licensed to Github, people considered that to be a license dispute more than a copyright dispute. I'd argue there is no difference at all between artists and programmers when it comes to their work being absorbed and then reproduced by an AI company.