[csee]

This is how it always works, though. Moderna is standing on the shoulders of centuries of cumulative human knowledge without compensating all the sources of that knowledge. Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers.

This is where some modest taxation comes in. To reallocate a slice of the output of value creation to its actual source in a rough kind of way wherever more direct compensation isn't feasible.

[cycomanic]

> Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers.

You clearly don't know how copyright around sampling works. Yes rappers are paying shitloads to previous generation musicians for samples they use.

[csee]

Sure, if we're talking about sampling, which is analogous to co-pilot copy and pasting chunks of code verbatim (which we've seen happen). But the complaints about co-pilot go far deeper than that. Quoting from the tweet: "it just sells code other people wrote". Do musicians "just" copy from all the people they've been inspired by and learned from?

[cycomanic]

What does "inspired" mean in the context of a computer program?

[jacquesm]

Yes, but those humans are humans, not machines. With machines the scale changes dramatically. Which, incidentally is something copyright law has addressed explicitly: if you mechanically transform at best you end up with a derived work.

[csee]

I don't understand the difference between Co-Pilot on the one hand and Moderna (on the shoulders of medical research) or SpaceX (on the shoulders of physics knowledge and cumulative rocket engineering knowledge) on the other. They all heavily use technology, automation and machines. I don't see where the distinction is coming from, and if there is a technical legal distinction, is it an ethically important one?

[jacquesm]

The distinction is a legal one: intellectual property can not be re-used without permission of the rights holder, be it a patent or a chunk of source code.

And you can bet that SpaceX using physics knowledge and cumulative rocket engineering knowledge are very careful to either license the tech they use or be very explicit about documenting their own.

That you can't see the difference is entirely on you, going 'against the flow' of society sometimes leads to change but more often it simply results in friction and a lack of comprehension.

Keep in mind that open source is based on copyright law, and without copyright law the protections that open source offers would be gone.

To give an extreme example: if you had a chunk of software that was constructed in such a way that it would spit out a complete copy of 'the Gimp' without the license file if you started to write an image processing program that would be a very clear case of copyright violation.

If you then start breaking the Gimp down into smaller and smaller re-usable fractions at some point you might be able to argue that such a generic and oft used snippet should be free of copyright. But that only works as long as you then don't string together a whole pile of pieces that you each copied somewhere else, the whole idea is that your creation is an original one.

Medical research (which quite often leads to patents, which I don't believe should be possible, especially if that research was publicly funded) and physics knowledge are of a different kind than copyrighted program code. The latter would be better compared to universally present language constructs and constraints, such as 'memory management', 'data manipulation' etc. Once you make those explicit in an implementation copyright applies.

Or, to make another analogy: it's like comparing the skill of writing to the product of that skill. The skill isn't protected, but the output of the act of writing is.

[Xunjin]

An amazing argument and analogy, also I do agree about Medical research, being possible to patent a work which is publicly funded is an A*** move.

[meheleventyone]

There are thousands of novel decisions in the work of Moderna and SpaceX beyond their cultural starting points. Same thing with art. Copilot isn't inventing nor is DALLE-2 being artistic.

[lelanthran]

> I don't understand the difference between Co-Pilot on the one hand and Moderna (on the shoulders of medical research) or SpaceX (on the shoulders of physics knowledge and cumulative rocket engineering knowledge) on the other. They all heavily use technology, automation and machines. I don't see where the distinction is coming from, and if there is a technical legal distinction, is it an ethically important one?

They are all in compliance with intellectual property laws? Seriously, that's a bloody big difference.

Co-pilot is not in compliance with many of the source code it is using!

Whether you like it or not, compliance with the law is necessary.

[Ygg2]

> I don't see where the distinction is coming from

Humans use reasoning. Copilot just guesses the likeliest next word.

See the Quake's fast inverse sqrt code incident: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

[Dracophoenix]

> This is where some modest taxation comes in. To reallocate a slice of the output of value creation to its actual source in a rough kind of way wherever more direct compensation isn't feasible.

I was with you until this statement. The vast majority of society consumes, but doesn't create something new in the process. I'm bewildered as to why you think taxation is a solution rather than a disincentive towards creating. As far as compensating the giants upon whose shoulders most stand, there are plenty of vehicles for that: royalties, patents, copyrights, pensions, awards and prizes, paid fellowships, etc. These are relatively easy to calculate and write a contract for.