If Edison goes over to Tesla’s house and looks at the latest invention on Tesla’s workbench, then goes to his factory and builds the same thing and sells it, th

If Edison goes over to Tesla’s house and looks at the latest invention on Tesla’s workbench, then goes to his factory and builds the same thing and sells it, then Edison has stolen and copied Tesla’s invention. If Edison breaks into Tesla’s house at night, takes* the invention off his workbench, goes to his factory and uses it as a reference to build and sell the same thing, then Edison has stolen and copied Tesla’s invention. In both cases we can say “stolen and copied”, but actual sequence of events and the legal recourse that Tesla has is different in each case. This difference matters because open source is like Tesla having his workbench in a public place where people are encouraged to watch him work, play around with the inventions, help him build, etc. In the “Tesla’s public workbench” situation, Tesla’s recourse is debatably impacted in the first scenario, but it is definitely unchanged in the second scenario. Arguing as though Copilot is doing “second scenario stealing and copying” rather than “first scenario stealing and copying” sidesteps that debate about whether open sourcing your code made it ‘up for grabs’ for natural and/or artificial intelligences to learn from and/or memorize. Now, it’s not clear what side will win that debate - I personally think “this has infringed intellectual property rights” has a decent chance of being the victor. But sidestepping that debate is setting off peoples’ “you’re trying to pull a fast one” alarm and making them unsympathetic. That’s what I’m getting at here. *: to avoid “steal vs copy depriving of property”-type discussions, postulate that Edison returns the invention to the workbench before Tesla notices As to the linked article, I would quote from the article itself: “[The paper] is dense with nuance that could potentially be molded to fit a particular narrative”. I could say more: both the article and the paper state there were zero byte-identical matches, and 203 direct or perceptual near matches out of 175 million generations (or out 160 million training images) is 0.0001%, which argues against this very strong claim of “factually and provably incorrect”. But I think the argument I will actually make is this: I said Copilot was synthesizing identical code from its knowledge base, which is completely compatible with the claim that it is outputting code from memory (in the human sense of memory). What it is not compatible with is the claim that it is outputting code from memory (in the computer sense of memory).