> Sometimes the little guy is actually wrong.

He is, sometimes. Also sometimes, the moon passes exactly between the sun and Earth, a new star appears in the sky, the magnetic field of our planet reverses, a proton decays (jury is still out on that one, actually). Etc.

Tools like Copilot are plagiarism machines. We know the data they're being trained on, and a conclusion of "that's plagiarism" is not - or anyway should not be - controversial. I'm not terribly against the notion of a plagiarism machine but I am against the owners of such machines reaping profits from them to the exclusion of the people who provide the source material. This is theft.

More importantly, getting back to big guys and little guys: big guys gang up on little guys all the time. It's usually how they get to be big. They tend to be the ones who realize that working together against the rest of us is to their benefit. So, in the interest of pushing back on that a little, and recognizing that I am after all a fellow "little guy" (figuratively speaking anyway), I tend to support the "little guy" unless I have overwhelming evidence confirming that they are, in fact, both wrong and that supporting them anyway would be against my best interest. Neither is the case, here.

At any rate, the subtitle here references a pretty ubiquitous and, I'm happy to report, increasingly well-known and understood facet of our economic and social institutions, which is that they absolutely positively do not work for us or further our interests in any sense.

> big guys gang up on little guys all the time

And obnoxious individuals gum up enterprises. It's lazy to the point of dismissal to conclude based on bigness.

Those poor corporations, however will they survive? I say we let them dump chemicals straight into our oceans, after all we don't want to gum them up from earning infinite profit!

You can't predict right or wrong based on bigness, but you can very often predict who will win.

EDIT: And by "win" I mean not who the judge will side with, but who will end up chugging along fine financially and who will end up broke.

> EDIT: And by "win" I mean not who the judge will side with, but who will end up chugging along fine financially and who will end up broke.

I can certainly agree with that sentence, but that is definitely not how the Register was referring to "win" (they clearly just meant the judicial outcome), so it's obnoxious to imply the legal ruling went Microsoft's way solely due to their greater resources.

Won't someone PLEASE think about microsoft???

Won't anyone think of the corporations? :(

It's The Register, they are always like this. Especially when Microsoft is involved.

I think you're misinterpreting the sentence.

I think it merely implies MS has more resources to throw at the legal case.

I strongly disagree. I don't see how you can interpret that sentence, especially given the "who did you think was going to win?" part, and ignore the implication that Microsoft won solely because of their size and money.

There is actually zero evidence that the judge issued his ruling based on Microsoft's superior legal team, so why even put that sentence in there anyway?

Maybe but lack of resources doesn't seem to be the main problem. A handful of devs claim copyright infringement, the Judge says show me and they can't. Maybe if they had millions of lawyers trying to get Copilot to produce their copyrighted code, their case would be stronger.

I don't think that's something you can take away from the little-guy big-guy narrative. Class actions are funded by courts awarding lawyers huge payouts if they win, not directly by the plaintiffs. There should be plenty of resources on both sides of this fight.

You are sorely underestimating the legal resources available to one of the most powerful companies on earth

I don't believe I am. To flush out my statement more fully there are diminishing returns on investing more money into a lawsuit, and both sides in a class action with this much money at stake should be sufficiently funded to be far beyond the point of diminishing returns.

I'm not claiming Microsoft doesn't have tons of resources, I'm claiming that the plaintiffs attorneys should be sufficiently funded that the difference in outcomes is negligible.

they also have more resources to ensure they covered their liability surface before any legal case materialized

aka the plaintiffs were wrong and had no idea what they were talking about