Re:Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot
by yellowapple on Sunday November 06, 2022 @07:14PM
(#33499280)
> No. His plays were preserved and published by his friends, after his death, so that they weren't lost.
You literally just said that there are plays of his which only survive in modified forms - i.e. ones which his friends were unable to preserve. Those modified forms are the ones that would disappear in this supposed alternate universe wherein Elizabethan England had copyright enforcement - because those modified forms would've been DCMA'd into nonexistence, and thus those plays would've been lost entirely.
> Look at the playwrights who didn't have friends like Shakespeare's. Where are their works, now?
The answer to your question seems to be: they were preserved just fine and dandy.
> If Copilot is deemed lawful, there will be justification of that decision that doesn't allow us to launder proprietary code through ML models.
A license is a license. If it's okay to ignore the terms of the GPL, then it's okay to ignore the terms of any other software license, including Microsoft's EULAs. The law works on precedents, and Copilot's legality sets a precedent that threatens the very concept of software copyright.
Even if Microsoft somehow avoids being immediately eaten alive for lunch by the myriad competitors who'd love nothing more than for Windows to lose its copyright protections (they do have plenty of money to spend on lawyers, after all), their best case scenario of "we somehow managed to carve out an exception for our EULA being enforceable that somehow doesn't apply to other software licenses" would demonstrate rather plainly the fundamental inconsistency in intellectual property law, making it all the easier to justify abolishing it entirely.
You literally just said that there are plays of his which only survive in modified forms - i.e. ones which his friends were unable to preserve. Those modified forms are the ones that would disappear in this supposed alternate universe wherein Elizabethan England had copyright enforcement - because those modified forms would've been DCMA'd into nonexistence, and thus those plays would've been lost entirely.
> Look at the playwrights who didn't have friends like Shakespeare's. Where are their works, now?
Christopher Marlowe? https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Christopher_Marlowe
Ben Jonson? https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Ben_Jonson
Francis Beaumont? https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Francis_Beaumont
John Fletcher? https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:John_Fletcher
Thomas Middleton? https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Thomas_Middleton
John Lyly? https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:John_Lyly
The answer to your question seems to be: they were preserved just fine and dandy.
> If Copilot is deemed lawful, there will be justification of that decision that doesn't allow us to launder proprietary code through ML models.
A license is a license. If it's okay to ignore the terms of the GPL, then it's okay to ignore the terms of any other software license, including Microsoft's EULAs. The law works on precedents, and Copilot's legality sets a precedent that threatens the very concept of software copyright.
Even if Microsoft somehow avoids being immediately eaten alive for lunch by the myriad competitors who'd love nothing more than for Windows to lose its copyright protections (they do have plenty of money to spend on lawyers, after all), their best case scenario of "we somehow managed to carve out an exception for our EULA being enforceable that somehow doesn't apply to other software licenses" would demonstrate rather plainly the fundamental inconsistency in intellectual property law, making it all the easier to justify abolishing it entirely.