Post #4189021

2026-07-29 08:17 UTC

I’m constantly baffled by the copyright argument. Intellectual property isn’t even real property (exclusive power over a thing), it’s a licensed monopoly enforced by the state, which gives the copyright owner power over many many things, present and future, not actually owned by them. Books that are in my house, software that is on your phone. I don’t want to argue that intellectual property should be abolished, I’m not convinced that that would be beneficial. But I think we can all agree that the currently landscape of intellectual property legislation is utter nonsense, that it’s gotten completely out of hand, and that it mainly encourages concentration and gatekeeping. So yes, the model producers have blatantly disregarded copyright, and have gotten away with it in ways which are not available to us peasants. But we’re the copyleft people, we should be pointing at this and shouting that the emperor is finally naked, and that it’s time to curtail all that nonsense legislation once and for all, so that we can all be a little freer from the shackles of corporate monopoly. And instead, we (the copyleft guys!) are just sitting here clutching our copyright pearls while muttering “but… But… Copyright! It violates the precious copyright!”.

Replies (4)

@ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2026-07-29 08:27

Unknowingly uding potentially copyrighted code from an LLM in a FLOSS project opens us up to being attacked via being sued for infringement, which most small devs can’t afford to fight, especially in the US’s current extremely pro-corporate courts. It’s putting a target on your back for down the road when it becomes profitable for patent trolls to use AI to try to scan for copyrighted code on public codeb ases. Big tech could do the same to squash an open source competitor.

Open ##4189395
@hperrin@lemmy.ca 2026-07-29 18:35

I completely disagree with you. Copyright law is generally a good thing. For example, I made a video recently that went super viral (like, on international news), and I was able to make money off of it because I own the copyright. If copyright weren’t a thing, all of those news orgs could have just run the video without me seeing any benefit from it, even though I created it. Copyright law is good for most people, and especially good for creators. It can be abused, just like most laws, but overall, copyright law is good. That’s the main reason I don’t use AI to write code. If the AI wrote the code, I don’t own the copyright (in fact, no one does). Copyleft also very much depends on copyright law. Without copyright law, the GPL would be completely unenforceable. Anyone could take any open source code and do anything with it without giving anything back to the community.

Open ##4207883
@kibiz0r@midwest.social 2026-07-29 17:02

To be fair to the original commenter: They did bring up copyright in the context of “what makes this a different kind of tool”, which is an empirical claim and not a normative one.

Open ##4208854
@eleijeep@piefed.social 2026-07-30 13:47

You need to read about why RMS wrote the GPL in the first place. Yes obviously Imaginary Property is imaginary, but we have to exist within the legal system. RMS used the copyright system as a way to legally ensure the freedoms that copyright traditionally restricts, and that is why he calls it “copyleft”. Once you’ve reformed or repealed copyright law in some imaginary revolutionary future, you can use whatever code or material you want in your work and publish it freely as a derivative work, but until then you have to acknowledge the existence of the legal frameworks that we live in. If we start filling our own FLOSS-licensed codebases with code of unknown provenance we open ourselves to legal challenges, it makes the entire license unenforceable, and it destroys the share-alike ecosystem that we’ve built over the past 35 years.

Open ##4242340