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.

Thats the thing, there is no reason to think that they are similar.