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There is a strange psychology at play here.

Your first assumption is that your inventions are important enough to be of use to “bad people”.

The other is your assumption that you have the objective ability to determine good from bad uses of a benign invention.

I’m increasingly looking for the psychological reasons why these ML models and their outputs cause such an emotional reaction in certain individuals.

For example, the language of opponents of Copilot speaks in absolutes. And when presented with the history of copyright when applied to software the opponents seem to not register that copyright (logically) does not extend to the non-expressive parts of a work.

“In computer programs, concerns for efficiency may limit the possible ways to achieve a particular function, making a particular expression necessary to achieving the idea. In this case, the expression is not protected by copyright."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari...

This allows for verbatim copies if they are utilitarian in nature!

As for why we should allow verbatim copies of utilitarian features... First, let's preface this with the substantial similarity of the structure, sequence and organization as established in Whelan v. Jaslow which amongst other things says that you cannot merely change the variable names if the expressive structure of the code remains the same. Now let's imagine 10,000 software developers who all implement Dijkstra's algorithm in C and then run it through clang-format. Aside from variable names, isn't it safe to assume that many of the implementations are going to be exactly the same?

Now, this doesn’t mean that GitHub is not in violation of other copyright claims, such as clearly expressive parts like comments and more!



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