[bogwog]

> Ideas are always shared creations, by definition. If you have an “original idea”, all you really have is noise! If your idea means anything to anyone, then by definition it is built on other ideas, it is a shared creation.

Copyright doesn't protect "ideas" it protects "works". If an artist spends a decade of his life painting a masterpiece, and then some asshole sells it on printed T-shirts, then copyright law protects the artist.

Likewise, an engineer who writes code should not have to worry about some asshole (or some for-profit AI) copy and pasting it into other peoples' projects. No copyright protections for code will just disincentivize open source.

Software patents are completely bullshit though, because they monopolize ideas which 99.999% of the time are derived from the ideas other people freely contributed to society (aka "standing on the shoulders of giants"). Those have to go, and I do not feel bad at all about labeling all patent-holders greedy assholes.

But copyright is fine and very important. Nothing is perfect, but it does work very well.

[breck]

Copyrights are complete bullshit too though. In your 2 examples. First, the artist I assume is using paints and mediums developed arguably over thousands of years, at great cost. So just because she is assembling the leaf nodes of the tree, the far majority of the “work” was created by others. Shared creation.

Same goes for an engineer. Binary notation is at the root of all code, and in the intermediate nodes you have Boolean logic and microcode and ISAa and assembly and compilers and high level Lang’s and character sets. The engineer who assembles some leaf nodes that are copy and pasteable is by definition building a shared creation of which they’ve contributed the least.

[Jcowell]

The basis of copyright isn’t that the sum product is 100% original. That insane since nothing we do is ever original. It’ll always be a component ultimately of nature. The point is that your creation is protected for a set amount of time and then it too eventually becomes a component for future works.

[arp242]

> the artist I assume is using paints and mediums developed arguably over thousands of years, at great cost.

And they went to the store and paid money for those things.

[breck]

And they handed the cashier money and then got to do whatever they want with those things. Now they want to sell their painting to the cashier AND control what the cashier does with it for the rest of the cashier's life. They want to make a slave out of the cashier by a million masters.

[dylannorthrup]

Remind me when GitHub handed anyone any money for the code they used?