André Batista <[email protected]> writes: > sex 15 mai 2026 às 04:28:18 (1778830098), [email protected] enviou: > >> This claim may be true at first sight, but copyright is about stealing >> creativity and not just stealing code verbatim. […] > > I keep seeing people using the adversary's language to talk about copyright. > From where I come from, stealing is a word related to taking something away > from someone and GNU included it among the words to avoid when talking about > copyright. When someone copies copyrighted works they are not taking anything > away from copyright holders with or without license compliance.
I fully agree for code. Thank you for the reminder, André. It is copying, not stealing. Your essay’s perspective on licenses as hack is a worthy reminder. For the non-code works I’m not so sure of my mind and belief, though, because of how numerous we want them to be (journalism in particular); copyright is empowering authors; there I do believe there is “no other way of funding the development”, as some works could not have been financed without copyright. As for the essay: > […] > These discoursive battles need to be in the forefront of our > preocupations. If we are to convience large swaths of not technically > inclined people that freedom is at the same time ethicaly superior, > technically and economically feasible and desirable, we need to be facing > these beliefs head on. One way of doing it is by engaging with things > like Copilot not with the intent of protecting our current ground but > with the intent of conquering newer, larger ones. So instead of being > afraid that our current free software commons might be used here or > there without proper compliance to our copyleft licenses, we may be > better off focusing on the venues it opens up to us to once again talk > about user freedom and attack the prejudices that might hinder its > reception by a broader public. Instead of trying to condemn Copilot and > its useds, we may use them as an example of things that only became > possible because there was a free and open source software environment. > We may use them to educate the broader public on the collective > capabilities that only exist when people share their works instead of > employing techniques to hide them. We may teach them that 'git' itself > is a free software used by a whole lot of companies and that there is > no proprietary solution that trumps it. > > Notice then that these are not mutually exclusive paths. Either way we > can make it a victory to computing freedom: if their AI usage of GPL > code does not fall into a fair use exception, their customers found to > be copying GPL source code will thereby be liable for licensing all of > their code that relies on it by the GPL's terms and conditions and thus > FSF or the copyright holders may approach them in order to seek the > desired compliance, to educate them on the principles we stand by and > hopefully increase the amount of free software available to us and of > free software enthusiasts; on the other hand, if it is indeed deemed to > be a fair use of a copyright protected work, then the same reach of fair > use should be applicable to any free software which came to rely on > partial copies of otherwise nonfree code. In this later case, it is > worth remembering two common happenstances. The first is proprietary > source code which is released to the public without license - a > situation which is very common even on Github itself - or proprietary > source code which was leaked to the public. The other one is the > employees who are coerced to assign all their copyrights to their > employers. With a broader fair use exception, they may start to use > some functions, routines or maybe even small libraries to help the > development of software elsewhere without infringing the signed > agreements. I doubt either case is how the LLMs’ effect on copyright will be. Traditional copyright will likely be affirmed and extended. Especially since fair use is no concept in European copyright, where exceptions for non-commercial use are the alternative. > […] Our greatest obstacle right now lies in > making our ethics known to broder audience not in the threat that > some copyleft code might be used without compliance. Yes. Regards, Florian
