There is no equal sign between a person and a program.
There is also that thing called "scale" that is critical to the interpretation of the action.
Is eating meat fine? - maybe. Is eating all animals OK? - Hmm...
This argument is hardly less flawed than the one you are criticizing. And you statement that 'there is no equal sign ...' is also unconvincing, as we're not equating these two, but the process of learning, which is quite similar.
Thats the thing, there is no reason to think that they are similar.
It may well be so. I was arguing with respect to your previous post, in which you stated as a relevant difference merely the size of the job.
Ai/ml is not artificial general intelligence. It's a mathematical model.
1. People have certain rights, duties and prohibitions. Equating the right of George Lucas to use ideas he saw with rights of a machine to do that misses the point by the same measure as asserting that MS enslaves the copilot, but in the opposite direction.
2. Scale does matter. If I'm an ordinary person then the act of eating won't ruin the ecosystem. Now imagine a construct that operates under the same principle of eating, but its jaw, stomach and speed of eating is many magnitudes larger - do we apply same limitations to both, because the principle of eating is the same?
Also, since I'm spelling things out, the fact that I'm seeing the same argument many times over, and that it is so obviously flawed, makes me think that this is a symptom of astroturfing.
Hardly relevant, given that the machine has no rights, so no one is equating those with anything. The point is that the machine is doing automated learning on behalf of the developers who are training it, so what should be decided is whether those very human people have a right to train their model in that way.
And the thing is that the machine does not benefit from the same rights as a person, so we can't absolve MS from responsibility because "it does a similar thing to what people do".
So, to add one more point to spell out: the context matters! ;)
The question is whether a person is doing the same as Copilot for this particular case, i.e. reading source code to learn.
You have not really given any argument why this is not the case. Or maybe your reference to scale? So only because Copilot has read more code than a human possibly could, that makes it different? But why exactly is reading a bit of code fine w.r.t. copyright, but reading more code suddenly violates copyright?
Note that the reason why Copilot needs more code to learn is just because the learning currently is not as efficient as for humans.
In all fairness, the article mentions the Fair Use doctrine. You could make the argument that reading a bit of code is allowed, but doing it at a large scale would not be covered as an exemption to copyright.
Counting all the code I have read in my life, it's also quite a lot.