this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Code should've never been copyrightable from the start. It's basically the compute equivalent of a recipe. That aside, almost all modern transformer models are trained on generated data by this point, how would we even apply traditional copyright to that? Whole thing needs tossed and retooled. Entire economic system with it tbh, just slows innovation, and despite what you might believe it doesn't protect the little guy, it just allows massive corporate conglomerates to buy up everything and control for what will be pretty much the extent of your lifetime.
algorithms and processes are not copyrightable. Code is an expression of algorithms, and thus is copyrightable. If anything, that's the stance that the entire movements of Free Software and Open Source are going with to function, so this sounds not a good idea even if it is a good ideal.
They're moving to this as it's the only defense against oppression, but copy left was intentionally designed to combat copyright because the core founders of open source disagreed with it and the oppression it was causing in the software development community. Imagine if a recipe for Chilli dogs was copyrightable, but not the concept of Chilli dogs. That's downright silly.
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.
I disagree wholeheartedly.
And you're wrong, it is a form of creative expression that has style and form.
Nah, you're wrong. Code is almost exclusively implementations with a final optimized form for a task akin to a recipe.
No, code is not, it's more akin to a written work.
That's not accurate.
It is
It is not. I can setup a automated reply if you continue to insist on.. Whatever this is, or we can agree to disagree which is fine, but I find your perspective twisted, ignorant, and incorrect. I'm not sure what you want from me beyond that other than to capitulate to your tantrum.
tantrum? Says that person who's doing this :P
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.
I disagree entirely. I grew up when the conversation around if code should even be copyrightable was happening, and at the time to an extent it made some sense, but the entire copy left movement was intended to combat the copyright of code in the name of open source because copy righting code is both stupid and baseless. Imagine if for loops were copyrighted? That's what you're essentially arguing unless there's some sort of vague subjective measure you're using to determine when something is copyrightable. The entire thing is just oppressive and does not help the people involved that actually deserve benefit and protection. I'm not saying to cut lose and allow rampant theft but copyright as currently designed and implemented is objectively broken and untooled to the tasks of today, stifling innovation and protecting corporate interests above creators and actual developers.
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.