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Photoshop was a triumph of compounded design inputs over the course of its existence, which were very costly to work out and optimize. The purpose of IP law at least ideally is to encourage creative design by allowing designers to monopolize their abstract goods for some period of years and thus secure remuneration for their efforts. It is not equivalent to have prediction software clone a finished design-based good in order to avoid paying a fee or to alter minor aspects of it. It is not equivalent because it does not create the same utility as encouraging people to pour large amounts of creative effort into designing new products in the first place. What you are doing is trying to build a false equivalency between using know-how and techniques to build something from a principled standpoint of design and using predictive software to perform something more akin to a copy-paste function. AI does not put very good design thought into its outputs, that much is observable from said outputs (however opaque its internal workings may be).
You can't copyright an idea, this is basic fundamental IP law. You can protect designs yes, but only for a few years. Copyright over software only covers the exact source code itself and as the claimant you must prove the defendant copied from your source code to hold them liable. If they take 100% of the functionality of your code and make their own copy from observing just the functionality itself that's completely fine and you can't do a single iota of stuff about it.
From Pumfrey J back in the day:
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IP protection was never as broad as you're claiming it to be. If it was, all the Open Source clones of mainstream software would be illegal, and yet we have Gimp, Libre Office, and 7 zillion open source browsers that actually outcompeted their proprietary counterparts. What you are calling for is a complete abolition of all competition. Also, I will note, you never answered where is the "IP evasion" is taking place when the program being clones is open source to begin with.
I'm doing no such thing. First of all, I made no claim about whether AI is "building something from a principled standpoint", the only argument was about whether it can be used quickly and cheaply to catch up to the industry standard. Even if the underlying mechanism is akin to copy-pasting, the technology will have a massive disruptive impact on the industry.
Secondly, if you read my "Aldea" link, you'd see that I actually share many of your concerns about AI and the effects it will have on innovative thinking, or even thinking in general. It's definitely something I believe we'll need to address and mitigate, but the one thing that will do worse than nothing to address this problem is pretending that nothing changed since 2023.
I can agree with the former, I don't think it's putting thoughts into it at all. But if your argument was correct "not putting good thoughts into outputs" would mean that the outputs are of inferior quality, which in turn would mean they are of no threat the artisenally created software. Since they are, something in the logical chain between the first and second part of your sentence is broken.
I only want to contest part of your first point here. Maybe we just disagree on this or have radically different experiences but a lot of FOSS that I’ve used over the years is straight dogshit. Granted not all of it but a damn good amount of it. Libre Office in contrast with Microsoft? Yeah, you’ve lost me there. Both are adequate to the task for an ordinary dude who wants to quickly type up a document and get it printed. Building a resume? Creating something decorative? When I’m really stuck with the suite of tools I’m going to be forced to use, a lot of propriety software still hands down beats a lot of the comparable competitors you find in the open source community. Try going to the GrapheneOS support forums when you experience a boot error or compatibility issue or an update that breaks basic functionality of the device. It’s every bit as bad and dismissive as anything you’d find in customer support forum of a public tech company.
But my first point is that from a single glance at any of these programs is that they're obviously copying the design and functionality of commercial software. If his argument regarding IP was correct that would be straight up illegal, but it's perfectly allowed.
The second part of your point is part of what I'm driving at: it took the FOSS people years, sometimes literal decades, to come up with a version of the software that is a lot more cumbersome to use than the original. The fact that With AI someone has now been able produce superior work within a month, and do so for multiple programs in a suite is nuts. The original crappy FOSS was not done by dumb people, quite the opposite, so anyone trying to dismiss the recent clones as a nothingburger is high on copium.
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Software is protected by copyright, not patent, which means that while the term is longer, the protections aren't as strong. Copyright doesn't cover the software itself but the source code, which means you could develop a program with identical functionality to an existing program as long as you use different code. What this means in practice, however, is that you have to develop the product independent of the existing product, i.e. you can't just take the existing code base and make superficial changes. Courts generally require that the code itself be developed entirely independently. All the programs you listed (Gimp especially) aren't even clones of existing products, just products with similar functionality. Gimp wasn't developed by someone taking Photoshop's code base and modifying it. If what the AI is doing is taking the existing product and reverse-engineering or reverse-compiling or whatever it is to figure out what the code is, then as far as the law is concerned it's no different than if they copied and pasted the executable file. And no, it's not a strong defense that their versions don't have the account control features that verify that the user is a paying customer.
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