If you want to debate expanding IP law - that's a different discussion and one I would be rather sceptical about. I'd prefer the that IP law in general was rolled back - not forward.
It would imply that you cannot offend open source licenses by doing something as simple as recreating a codebase in another language, thus eliminating the exact matches.
Not quite - there is a reason why https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design exists as a concept to workaround copyright, and the same concept could hold for ML models.
So my current perspective is this: if a picture is drawn in a style similar to yours for example, that's not infringing, but if it's just a scrapbook collage of cutouts of your art it is, except where it's fair use. Would that be right?
So the same applies, if an AI actually can help people write code by learning from existing code, that's fine, but if an AI just copy pastes code blocks that's not.
Where am I going wrong here?
There's something quantitative in code that you don't get in drawings, drawings the unique quality is purely qualitative, so it is hard to demonstrate what exactly it was that was ripped off. When you find your exact words being returned by a code helper AI it's hard to pretend that it's not directly and plainly just copy pasting code snippets.