alt Hacker News> The reason is that it is absolutely impossible to write any kind of program that is not a derivative of earlier programs.
And that's why copyright has exceptions for humans.
You're right copyright was the wrong tool for code but for the wrong reasons.
It shouldn't be binary. And the law should protect all work, not just creative. Either workers would come to a mutual agreement how much each contributed or the courts would decide based on estimates. Then there'd be rules about how much derivation is OK, how much requires progressively more compensation and how much the original author can plainly tell you what to do and not do with the derivative.
It's impossible to satisfy everyone but every person has a concept of fairness (it has been demonstrated even in toddlers). Many people probably even have an internally consistent theory of fairness. We should base laws on those.
> abusing the copyright laws and the patent laws have been the most significant blockers of technical progress during the last few decades
Can you give examples?
> copyrights on non-open-source programs are almost never owned by creators, but by their employers
Yes and that's another thing that's wrong with the system, employment is a form of abusive relationship because the parties are not equal. We should fix that instead of throwing out the whole system. Copyright which belongs to creators absolutely does give creators more leverage and negotiating power.
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>> abusing the copyright laws and the patent laws have been the most significant blockers of technical progress during the last few decades > Can you give examples?
This is a subject so vast that giving examples requires a book-length text. IIRC at least one or two books have actually been written about this, but I am too lazy to search now for their titles.
I am more familiar with what happened in cryptography, where many algorithms have begun to be used only after the 20 years or more required for their patents to expire, while as long as patents remained valid, inferior solutions were used, wasting energy and computing time.
Regarding copyrights, I know best my own activity, but I am pretty certain that this anecdotal experience is representative for many programmers.
During the first decades of computer programming, until the seventies, there have been a lot of discussions about software reuse as the main factor that can improve programming productivity, and about which features of the programming languages and of the available programming tools can increase the amount of reuse, like modularity.
However all those discussions were naive, because later the amount of reuse has remained much lower than predicted, but the causes were not technical, but the copyright laws. Open-source programs have become the main weapon against the copyright laws, which enable the reuse of software nowadays.
However the value of software reuse has never been understood by the management of many companies. In decades of working as a programmer, I have wasted a lot of time with writing programs in such a manner so that whoever was my employer could claim the copyright for them.
There were plenty of opportunities when I could have used open-source programs, but I could not use them as there was someone who insisted that the product must contain "software IP" owned by the company. Therefore I had to waste time by rewriting something equivalent with what I could have used instantaneously, but different enough to be copyrightable.
There were also other cases that were even more annoying, when I had to waste time by rewriting programs that I had already written in the past, but in a different way so that there will be no copyright infringement. Some times the old programs were written when being employed elsewhere, other times they were programs written for myself, during my own time and on my own computers. In such cases, I could not use my own programs, as the employer would then claim copyright on them, so I would lose ownership and I would not be able to use them in the future, for my own needs.
There are many projects where I have wasted more time avoiding copyrights than solving problems. I believe that there must be many others who must have had similar experiences.
So I welcome the copyright-washing AI coding assistants, which can be employed successfully in such cases in order to avoid the wasteful duplication of work.
> And that's why copyright has exceptions for humans.
Why would the exceptions be only for humans?
"Only human works can get copyright" makes plenty of sense. "Only humans can have fair use" doesn't make sense. Why would we disallow a monkey video having a clip of something as part of the monkey reviewing it? Why would we allow a human to caption something for accessibility but not a computer?
Grammar and idioms should be outside the realm of copyright entirely, not something you get an exception to use anyway.
> It's impossible to satisfy everyone but every person has a concept of fairness (it has been demonstrated even in toddlers). Many people probably even have an internally consistent theory of fairness. We should base laws on those.
A lot of people seem to default to thinking they should get permanent and total control over any idea they have, so I think it's a bad idea to rely on intuition here.