This shows how copyright is all screwed up. Let's say the code in question is based on a published algorithm, maybe Yuster and Zwick, (I did not check).
What exactly gives Davis a better claim to the copyright than the inventors of the algorithm? Yes, I know software is copyrightable while algorithms are not, but it is not at all clear to my why that should be the case. The effort of translating an algorithm into code is trivial compared to designing the algorithm in the first place, no?
To be honest, it would probably benefit all of humanity if we stopped rewriting the same code to then fix the same bugs in it, and instead just used each other's algorithms to do meaningful work.
I work for a large tech company whose lawyers definitely care that my code doesn't train an AI model somewhere much more than I do. On the contrary, I would really like to open source all of my work - it would make it more impactful and would demonstrate my skills. It makes me a bit sad that my life's work is going to be behind lock and key, visible to relatively few people. Not to mention that the hundreds of thousands of work hours, energy and effort that will be spent to replicate it all over my industry in all other lock-and-key companies makes the industry as a whole tremendously inefficient.
I hope that AI models like Copilot will finally show to the very litigious tech companies that their intellectual property has been all over the public domain from the start. And we can get over a lot of the petty algorithm IP suits that probably hold back all tech in aggregate. We should all be working together, not racing against each other in the pursuit of shareholder value.
Historically, mathematicians used to keep their solutions secret in the interest of employment in the middle ages. So there used to be mathematicians that could, for example, solve certain quadratic equations but it took centuries before all humanity could not benefit from this knowledge. I believe this is what is happening with algorithms now. And it is very counter-progress in my opinion.
True, copyright is screwed up and completely incompatible with the 21st century. We should abolish it so that these silly questions of data ownership become irrelevant.
However, until that happens, Microsoft and GitHub cannot get away with blatant copyright infringement like this. No one is interested in their poor excuses either. People get sued and DMCA'd out of existence for far lesser offenses, yet Microsoft gets away with violating the license of every free software and open source project out there? That's fucked up.
Algorithms cannot be copyrighted. What is copyrighted is the creative expression of an algorithm. The variable names, the comments, choosing a for loop vs a while loop, or a ternary operator over an “if”, the order of arguments to a function, architectural decisions, etc.
Copyright is formed when a human makes a choice about equivalent ways of implementing an algorithm.
Is there a jurisdiction that allows purely algorithms to be copyrighted? As far as I know, usually algorithms come under the umbrella of patents (in jurisdictions that allow software patents) rather than copyright.
For example, it would interfere with e.g. copyright of scientific/mathematical papers if algorithms were copyrightable, as mathematicians would not be able to extend another mathematician’s ideas without first gaining permission.
What exactly gives Davis a better claim to the copyright than the inventors of the algorithm? Yes, I know software is copyrightable while algorithms are not, but it is not at all clear to my why that should be the case. The effort of translating an algorithm into code is trivial compared to designing the algorithm in the first place, no?