Thanks!
this is the same argument that patent proponents had, because patents protects the little guy.
And yet, most copyright enforcement occurs via large corporations who have an interest in doing so to further some other goal as part of a strategy to gain monopoly. Patents as well as copyright is but a tool, and any tool can be more powerfully wielded if the wielder is more powerful!
The little guy is better off without copyright imho (but that horse has already bolted).
The system of copyright worked very well to protect smaller entities in this regard.
Not to mention tivoization which trivially bypasses GPLv2.
in reality your licence is only as strong as your ability to enforce it.
As long as the little guy's patent can improve the process without stepping on any of the countless pre-existing patents manufacturers have accumulated. Now how often is that the case?
Except in the cases where manufacturers just stall the little guy in court for most of their life.
The more difficult and expensive it is to use, the more it will be the domain of those with more resources, and the more the small will be defenseless.
The answer is not to eliminate copyright or patents, but rather to make them simple and easy to apply for, defend, and find. The current bar is so high it favors the big guys only, and gives them leverage against smaller folks who can’t afford to even show up to defend themselves usually.
Or eliminate it entirely, but you’ll not be able to do that because Disney, Microsoft, Oracle, and the like would murder/compromise/destroy anyone who might be able to do that.
Yes. Copyright already protects what a patent granted for source code would protect.
The problem you describe exists in both scenarios, and is resolved with enforcement. You can sneakily break the law, and you run the risk of getting caught for fraud.
I don't think that part is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
This is not correct. Patent protects the abstract functional design, copyright protects the reduction to practice. Two implementations of the same algorithm have independent copyrights.
You see the same thing in physical engineering too. A novel chemical process is protected by patent and each reduction to practice is protected by copyright. They are separately licensable.
The nice thing is that this works in both directions. Just as Microsoft and Co. can train on people's data, nothing stops the people from training on Microsoft's chatbot output.
As long as we don't get any lawsuits derailing this practice, we actually might end up fine, as there is nothing that'll allow anybody to get ahead in AI without automatically provide a mountain of training data for the competition.
If that means the end of copyright right as we know it, I am all for it.
Copyright and Artificial Intelligence April 19, 2023 – Literary Works, Including Software Listening Session
copyright.gov/ai/
a. Independent discovery of same algorithm is very likely before 17 years.
b. Big companies abuse such systems by patenting trivial ideas.
https://casetext.com/case/kern-river-gas-transmission-v-coas...
Your comments and creative expression are the only portions of your code that are protected by copyright. The function isn't.
If you strip the comments out, though, it's questionable.
To play the devil's advocate: Is it though?
Especially recently we've seen the widespread acceptance of copyright and license laundering through large machine learning systems such as copilot and chatgpt, backed by enough microsoft laywers to prevent meaningful push back from the copyright owners. They'll output verbatim copies of what was previously copyrighted code.
If it is true that software copyright can be cleaned away in such a fashion, maybe patenting the algorithm itself actually is necessary to avoid big tech companies like microsoft from forcibly strip mining the ideas of independent creators.