I disagree. I would say both are incomplete comparisons because code is special, it has limitations, it relies on underlying hardware support, and it’s implementing, generally, functionality not anything creative. I don’t have to present a good solution though in order to point out something is broken, I leave that for those more intelligent than I, but copyright is objectively a poor answer to code and is not comparable to an expressive artistic written work.
It’s honestly a bit of both. Creativity can be expressed in the intermediate steps in order to provide a subjectively superior approach (durably optimal until someone identifies a better approach), but fundamentally the design goal is “achieve X with minimal risk and waste”. That’s the part where I agree with you: gatekeeping an outcome is dumb. That said, the expressions of those intermediate steps genuinely land in the territory of creativity. That’s how we end up with new algorithms. Creativity is how we arrive at the optimal algorithms.
Even so, gatekeeping those intermediate techniques is bad for the same reasons as gatekeeping the end state. If they can be independently arrived at (like flourishes that personalize a recipe or alter it for particular food pairings), the end result is still stifling innovation and closing access to the tools everyone has access to.
Edit: Ultimately I think this means everyone should have access, unequivocally. The problem is that LLMs are financially gatekept and implemented at environmentally predatory scales, with unregulated supply chain bottlenecks that choke out the more environmentally friendly and consumer accessible tech that was in the pipeline.
Coding is a creative task, there are many many many solutions to any problem, and some problems are a lot more abstract to where even the problem can be different for different people. Like if there’s a problem with the users interacting with part of the software, you could try to make it easier to interact with, have a little tutorial, decorate it, make it look good, you know, a form of art, you could also try to make it more intuitive, also a form of art. It’s not typically what you’d think about, but coding is a rather creative task and everyone has different ways to go about problems, and those different ways are the different styles of programming people have.
Coding isn’t creative though. There’s an optimum solution to every problem, the layer above the code may be some form of art that needs protected but the code itself is just a recipe.
This is not an optimal solution to every problem lol. That’s like saying there’s an optimal way of telling someone stuff. There often is no optimal solution outside of very narrow scopes, as optimal isn’t a set thing lol. The code is itself expression that should be protected.
Neither is text until you combine enough of it together, code is rather expressive, when I work on codebases I can typically tell who wrote what due to their styles and whatnot. Sometimes that makes me dread working on that part as some of those people had ideas and didn’t finish them. But still, it is rather expressive. Like get two people to do the same task that lets say takes 1k lines to do, you’re going to get two very different programs, where the different programmers chose to do things as different levels of abstraction, where they decided what should and shouldn’t be functions, and how the programs literally read, as most programs can be read as english if you learn to ignore the syntax. And neither is necessarily better or worse than another, they’re just different like is it better to use a hash map instead of an array when there’s 1000 elements? Maybe, maybe not. What about all of the different data structures, or anything really. It is expressive, and a creative task, if but an atypical one.
It’s just not man. Maybe bad code has a style, but good code can always be be broken down to optimized implementations if done properly, and even if, you could then say the same thing about a sufficiently developed recipe, or meal, as you can generally tell the chef that made it or diner it came from in town, etc, etc in a lot of cases. I’m not saying it can’t be used to make something artistic at some level, but code itself is not deserving of copyright, and copyright itself is entirely busted anyway. The concept is unfit and untooled for modern society.
it just is man. Simple code may not have a style, but anything more complex, no, it has a style and has a lot of room for the how. Like think about it for a second, there are so many way of doing things, object oriented, functional, imperative, etc. And a programmer can mix and match those as much as they see fit. Deny it all you like, but code has a style, and is creative work. We should protect creative works.
A more fair comparison would be written works being copyright-able, which code is a written work, a large, expressive, written work
I disagree. I would say both are incomplete comparisons because code is special, it has limitations, it relies on underlying hardware support, and it’s implementing, generally, functionality not anything creative. I don’t have to present a good solution though in order to point out something is broken, I leave that for those more intelligent than I, but copyright is objectively a poor answer to code and is not comparable to an expressive artistic written work.
It’s honestly a bit of both. Creativity can be expressed in the intermediate steps in order to provide a subjectively superior approach (durably optimal until someone identifies a better approach), but fundamentally the design goal is “achieve X with minimal risk and waste”. That’s the part where I agree with you: gatekeeping an outcome is dumb. That said, the expressions of those intermediate steps genuinely land in the territory of creativity. That’s how we end up with new algorithms. Creativity is how we arrive at the optimal algorithms.
Even so, gatekeeping those intermediate techniques is bad for the same reasons as gatekeeping the end state. If they can be independently arrived at (like flourishes that personalize a recipe or alter it for particular food pairings), the end result is still stifling innovation and closing access to the tools everyone has access to.
Edit: Ultimately I think this means everyone should have access, unequivocally. The problem is that LLMs are financially gatekept and implemented at environmentally predatory scales, with unregulated supply chain bottlenecks that choke out the more environmentally friendly and consumer accessible tech that was in the pipeline.
Coding is a creative task, there are many many many solutions to any problem, and some problems are a lot more abstract to where even the problem can be different for different people. Like if there’s a problem with the users interacting with part of the software, you could try to make it easier to interact with, have a little tutorial, decorate it, make it look good, you know, a form of art, you could also try to make it more intuitive, also a form of art. It’s not typically what you’d think about, but coding is a rather creative task and everyone has different ways to go about problems, and those different ways are the different styles of programming people have.
Coding isn’t creative though. There’s an optimum solution to every problem, the layer above the code may be some form of art that needs protected but the code itself is just a recipe.
This is not an optimal solution to every problem lol. That’s like saying there’s an optimal way of telling someone stuff. There often is no optimal solution outside of very narrow scopes, as optimal isn’t a set thing lol. The code is itself expression that should be protected.
That’s just not true. There are optimal implementations in code and computer science. It’s not expressive art at the code level.
Neither is text until you combine enough of it together, code is rather expressive, when I work on codebases I can typically tell who wrote what due to their styles and whatnot. Sometimes that makes me dread working on that part as some of those people had ideas and didn’t finish them. But still, it is rather expressive. Like get two people to do the same task that lets say takes 1k lines to do, you’re going to get two very different programs, where the different programmers chose to do things as different levels of abstraction, where they decided what should and shouldn’t be functions, and how the programs literally read, as most programs can be read as english if you learn to ignore the syntax. And neither is necessarily better or worse than another, they’re just different like is it better to use a hash map instead of an array when there’s 1000 elements? Maybe, maybe not. What about all of the different data structures, or anything really. It is expressive, and a creative task, if but an atypical one.
It’s just not man. Maybe bad code has a style, but good code can always be be broken down to optimized implementations if done properly, and even if, you could then say the same thing about a sufficiently developed recipe, or meal, as you can generally tell the chef that made it or diner it came from in town, etc, etc in a lot of cases. I’m not saying it can’t be used to make something artistic at some level, but code itself is not deserving of copyright, and copyright itself is entirely busted anyway. The concept is unfit and untooled for modern society.
it just is man. Simple code may not have a style, but anything more complex, no, it has a style and has a lot of room for the how. Like think about it for a second, there are so many way of doing things, object oriented, functional, imperative, etc. And a programmer can mix and match those as much as they see fit. Deny it all you like, but code has a style, and is creative work. We should protect creative works.