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.
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.
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.
Should wine ban it though, it just encourages people to lie 3:
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.
A more fair comparison would be written works being copyright-able, which code is a written work, a large, expressive, written work
Copyleft is a form of copyright, if you’re against copyright that’s MIT/BSD 0 clause. Also languages aren’t typically copyrighted, it’s works created within those languages. Although I do agree copyright is kinda very broken, but creators of code do deserve protections, as code is very expressive. I am also a FOSS dev who loves copyleft, which only functions under copyright.
What about prohibiting people from looking at the leaked windows source code? It just encourages people to lie about it.
“wah, they dead in the water if they ban the slop theft machine!”
Code is rather expressive, it’s copyright-able for good reason, you can often tell who wrote what via the style and the way the code was written, and the methods used.
They’re gonna use AI for that too
"But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries. "
The US copyright office wrote up a pretty large paper pointing out it’s piracy.
Violation of copyright/piracy :P Among many many many other crimes. I’ll take the word of the US copyright office who says that it is not fair use over your word.
We are not a court of law. We can see crimes happening and call them crimes. If you think that ignoring evidence is fine, that’s up to you. I personally like to look at the evidence and make conclusions, like these crimes AI companies are doing, are crimes. Did the AI companies think about for 30 seconds about how doing crimes looks like doing crimes?
So in order to counter my point, you make a false equivalence. Cool. Try again.
you need schooling, this is like people who shout that others are breaking the first amendment not thinking that it only applies to the government. Courts determine if it’s a crime to a certain degree of certainty for the government, we are not the government. We are people who can use our eyes to see that people break the laws and have not been sued yet. it’s not magically not a crime if they aren’t sued over it.
Do we need to have a court case to say that all of the criminals in the files are criminals? of course not. We can see their actions, and the laws and say that they committed many many crimes.
Same way we always do? look at what happened, and see that a crime happened
And you’re wrong, it is a form of creative expression that has style and form.