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by deciplex 712 days ago
> Sometimes the little guy is actually wrong.

He is, sometimes. Also sometimes, the moon passes exactly between the sun and Earth, a new star appears in the sky, the magnetic field of our planet reverses, a proton decays (jury is still out on that one, actually). Etc.

Tools like Copilot are plagiarism machines. We know the data they're being trained on, and a conclusion of "that's plagiarism" is not - or anyway should not be - controversial. I'm not terribly against the notion of a plagiarism machine but I am against the owners of such machines reaping profits from them to the exclusion of the people who provide the source material. This is theft.

More importantly, getting back to big guys and little guys: big guys gang up on little guys all the time. It's usually how they get to be big. They tend to be the ones who realize that working together against the rest of us is to their benefit. So, in the interest of pushing back on that a little, and recognizing that I am after all a fellow "little guy" (figuratively speaking anyway), I tend to support the "little guy" unless I have overwhelming evidence confirming that they are, in fact, both wrong and that supporting them anyway would be against my best interest. Neither is the case, here.

At any rate, the subtitle here references a pretty ubiquitous and, I'm happy to report, increasingly well-known and understood facet of our economic and social institutions, which is that they absolutely positively do not work for us or further our interests in any sense.

2 comments

> big guys gang up on little guys all the time

And obnoxious individuals gum up enterprises. It's lazy to the point of dismissal to conclude based on bigness.

Those poor corporations, however will they survive? I say we let them dump chemicals straight into our oceans, after all we don't want to gum them up from earning infinite profit!
You can't predict right or wrong based on bigness, but you can very often predict who will win.

EDIT: And by "win" I mean not who the judge will side with, but who will end up chugging along fine financially and who will end up broke.

> EDIT: And by "win" I mean not who the judge will side with, but who will end up chugging along fine financially and who will end up broke.

I can certainly agree with that sentence, but that is definitely not how the Register was referring to "win" (they clearly just meant the judicial outcome), so it's obnoxious to imply the legal ruling went Microsoft's way solely due to their greater resources.

Won't someone PLEASE think about microsoft???
Won't anyone think of the corporations? :(
One would think if these were "plagiarism machines", that one of the plaintiffs would have been able to produce even a single instance of the copying they alleged.