Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

Borland Quattro.

"I don't know when the extreme intellectual property viewpoint entered software engineering as a mainstream opinion because I have never before seen it expressed so strongly in this community"

It's not copyright maximalism, it's just bog-standard rationalization. I don't like what this company is doing, it looks like I can hit them with the "copyright" stick, so I will. One day later, I like playing abandonware games and that should be legal and copyright is stopping me so copyright bad, grrr argh.

At least, at the HN gestalt level. Individuals may say one or the other of those things from a principled perspective, but I perceive a lot of rationalization in these discussions overall.

There's not a lot people coming at this from any sort of principled position. I think one measure of that is that the modal principled position right now ought to be something fairly close to "I don't know". AI has kicked a lot of the foundation out from underneath copyright and I don't think anyone serious has more than a first draft of what the plan moving forward should be. Even if you can get two people to agree on the goals we should shoot for, which is already a tough ask even in a pre-AI era, getting them to agree on how to achieve those goals will be a long shot... and that's entirely separate from the question of whether the actions would in fact end up accomplishing the goal, which I don't trust anyone to have a good bead on right now.

Nominally, the principle of copyright has been to preserve creativity. Ten years ago we all had a reasonably similar idea what that meant, but we don't even have that now.

In that case no infringement was found though?

> Everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor.

Is it not? If I spend 10 years writing the greatest novel of all time, and you, a publishing company, make copies and sell 10 million copies, I feel entitled to some recompense.

My labor has value to me, but only the product of that labor has value to anyone else.

OpenAI/et al. selling an IP laundering service under the name 'max subscription' may force the world to accept the perspective that Intellectual Property isn't a thing. The business model of extracting value from creators via rent seeking IP may not be viable in a world where LLMs can generate anything on demand. We might be transitioning to the Lockean view that for something to be ownable as property, it must be a scarce resource, and information is not a scarce resource.

From that property rights perspective, the property that's created when new information is created is not the information itself, rather, it's the act of creation (claim to authorship) that's the scarce resource.

I don't know what a world looks like where the only form of IP is non-transferable and owned by the original creator. Maybe that new form of IP creates less value over all, and maybe that's ok if the creator is getting 100% of the smaller pie instead of crumbs from media labels. Companies like Red Hat could be an example of a viable business model if IP laws follow the current winds.

Companies like Corgi will need to rely on internal talent to ensure that their product is better than what someone looking at their product can vibe code a copy of, which from my perspective as a consumer, sounds like a better route than Corgi relying on an internal legal team to send a cease and desist letter.