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Comment by heurisko | Hacker News Reader

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heurisko

I have heard it mentioned before, but I wonder how long Copilot is banned from companies due to licensing issues.

I'm not a lawyer, but I can see the risk if code seems to be substantially copied from copyleft corpuses of code.

I'm reminded of the "9 lines of code" that was disputed in Oracle vs Google.

https://majadhondt.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/googles-9-lines/

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> due to licensing issues.

In my testing, given a portion of the GPL licence header, Copilot is quite happy to spit out the rest of it, so I would imagine copilot bans might happen quite fast.

Yes, thank you! As someone who has been through painful open source license audits at largish companies, whenever the topic of copy/pasting from StackOverflow comes up, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. When you copy/paste code from a web site, how do you know its license is compatible with your company's software, and you're not exposing your company to legal risk? This product seems to automate that carelessness, unless somehow the code that it produces is licensed in a way that's compatible with every other software license out there.

EDIT: Oh, and it looks like there was a whole previous discussion [1] about this yesterday!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27687450

In addition to the license concerns about Copilot’s suggestions, companies probably don’t want their proprietary code being sent off to GitHub servers. Will your code get logged somewhere? Will it be fed back into Copilot’s machine learning algorithms? What if the uploaded code includes some secret passwords?

BTW, it's not only copyleft code that is a problem. "Permissive" licenses also have compliance requirements, such as attribution or preserving the original license text. Only code under Public Domain/CC0-like licenses can be reused without care.

Even that isn't true, at least for pure public domain without a fallback like the CC0. Some jurisdictions (like Germany) don't allow authors to place their works into the public domain.

I imagine most such companies block by default. Copilot has so many sword-of-Damocles-level potential issues with it WRT licensing and the potential for the exposure of proprietary code that I can’t see a responsible closed source developer, let alone a CTO or CSO allowing it.

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