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grondo4

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This is absolutely not the case, if you've spent much time in the Reddit ecosystem you would know that frequently mods go rogue and Reddit staff have to step in to appoint new mods and some times whole new mod teams.

They have a right to stop you from "learning" from their code.

They absolutely do not, and as pedantic as it may be I think it's very important that you and everyone else in this thread know what their rights are.

If you sign a contract / EULA that says you cannot decompile someone's code than yes you are liable for any damages promised in that contract for violating it.

But who says that I ever signed a EULA for the games I decompiled? Who says I didn't find a copy on a hard drive I bought at a yard sale or someone sent me the decompiled binary themselves?

Those people may have violated the contract but I did not.

There is no law preventing you from learning from code, art, film or any other copyrighted media. Nor is there any law (or should there be any law IMO) that stops an AI from learning from copyrighted media.

Learning from each other regardless of intellectual property law is how the human race advances itself. The fact that we've managed to that automate human progress is incredible, and it's very good that our laws are the way they are that we can allow that to happen.

i.e. the act of reading may cause accidental infringement when implementing the "things you learn"

Surely you know this isn't the case right? Maybe you're confused because we're talking about programming and not a different creative artform?

Great artists read, watch and consume copyrighted works of art all day, if they didn't they wouldn't be great artists. And yet the content they produce is entirely there own, free from the copyright of the works they learned from.

What's the difference then in programming? Why can an artist be trusted not to reproduce the copyrighted works that they learned from but not the programmer?

I didn't ask if can I use other people's proprietary closed source code, obviously they have the right to that code and how it's used.

I asked if I can learn from that code, which obviously I can. There is no license that says "You cannot learn from this code and take the things you learn to become a better programmer".

That's exactly what I do and it's exactly what AI do.

Is that a joke?

Yes you are allowed to read closed-source, proprietary code and become a better programmer for it.

I've decompiled games to learn how they structure their code to improve the structure of games that I program. I had no right to that code and I used it to become a better programmer just like AI do.

That's not copyright infringement. You have a right to stop me from using your code, not learning from it.

Yes, AI should be trained on every piece of information possible. Am I allowed to become a better programmer by looking at private, (illegally leaked) closed-source, proprietary code?

Does it have to better than an attentive driver or the average driver? I figure if the Tesla has less crashes per mile than the average driver than that's a success?

Even if the accidents a Tesla does get into are ones that a normal attentive driver wouldn't get into, if it avoids just as many accidents that a normal attentive driver would get into isn't that enough?