"Available for use" and "Automatically rewritten to work in your codebase fairly well" is very different, so copyright is probably not the blocker technically
China steals our r&d (both copyrighted and non) and gets a lot of theirs from state funding.
I don’t think I’d take China’s success as proof that the copyright system doesn’t work.
There is still much for them to steal.
Claude Code is $20 a month, and I get a lot of usage out of it. I don't see how cutting edge AI tools are only for the rich. The name OpenAI is often mocked, but they did succeed at bringing the cutting edge of AI to everyone, time and time again.
So much of programming is tedium.
The GP can free-ride uncredited on the collective work of open source at their leisure, but I'm sure Disney would string me up by my earlobes if I released a copywashed version of Toy Story 6.
You and anyone else could have avoided spending millions for programmer salaries, had you been allowed to reuse freely any of the many existing proprietary or open-source programs that solved the same or very similar problems.
I would have no problem with everyone being able to reuse any program, without restrictions, but with these AI programming tools the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while the poor remain constrained by them, as before.
The copyright for programs has caused a huge multiplication of the programming effort for many decades, with everyone rewriting again and again similar programs, in order for their employing company to own the "IP". Now LLMs are exposing what would have happened in an alternative timeline.
The LLMs have the additional advantage of fast and easy searching through a huge database of programs, but this advantage would not have been enough for a significant productivity increase over a competent programmer that would have searched the same database by traditional means, to find reusable code.