Hacker News Reader

Comment by karmasimida | Hacker News Reader

Well this would not be hard to verify though.

You can automate this process by providing existing GPL source code and see what CoPilot comes up next.

I am sure at some point it WILL produce exact the same code snippet from certain GPL project, provided that you have attempted enough times.

Not sure what the legal interpretation would be though, it is pretty gray-ish in that regard.

There would always be risk for CoPilot, had it digested certain PII information and people found it out...it would be much more interesting to see the outcome.

View on HN

As per some of the other twitter replies, Co-pilot has offered to fill in the GPL disclaimer in new files.

it doesn't have to be exact to be copyright infringement, see non-literal copying. basic idea behind it is if you copy paste code and rename variables that doesn't mean its new code.

Yeah, you'd have to assume they are parsing and normalizing this data in some way. There would still be some AST patterns or something similar you could look for in the same way, but it would be much trickier.

Plus considering this is a legal issue ... good luck with "there is a statistically significant similarity in AST outputs related to the most unique sections of this code base" type arguments in court. We're currently at the "what's an API" stage of legal tech understanding.

The real question is whether it constitutes derived work, though. And that is not a question of similarity so much so as provenance - if you start with a codebase that is GPL originally, and it gets gradually modified to the point where it doesn't really look anything like the original, it's still a derived work, and is still subject to the license.

Similarity can be used to prove derivation, but it's not the only way to do so. In this case, all the code that went into the model is (presumably) known, so you don't really need any sort of analysis to prove or disprove it. It is, rather, a legal question - whether the definition on the books applies here, or not.

Regarding PII, I think you have a very good point. I wouldn't be surprised to see working AWS_SECRET_KEY values appear in there. Indeed, given that copypaste programmers may not understand the code they're given, it's entirely possible that someone may run code which uses remote resources without the programmer even realising it.

This question about the amount of code required to be copyrightable starts to sound familiar to the copyright situation with music, where currently the bar seems to be set too low, legally, to prove plagiarism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com