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Comment by bluewalt | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand all the yelling about this Copilot stuff.

1) It's not your code that is proposed by copilot, but a mix of thousands and thousands codes, that can not be linked to one specific person. It's like you take 1000 portrait photos and make a new one. How can you prove your photo has been used?

2) How what's done by Github is causing you any damage, directly or indirectly? If you want to sue someone, you'd better prove any damage to a judge.

3) Because of all of this yelling, I'm pretty sure Github will add a per-repository option to disable code scraping. But I still don't understand what you'll win.

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> 1) It's not your code that is proposed by copilot, but a mix of thousands and thousands codes, that can not be linked to one specific person. It's like you take 1000 portrait photos and make a new one. How can you prove your photo has been used?

Unfortunately, sometimes the "generated" snippet is just a verbatim copy of code someone else has authored.

And it's done without attribution or following other license requirements.

If code that is covered by the GPL is mixed with non-GPL by Copilot, what happens then? What license is the Copiloted code covered under?

It's not just training data going into the result, the user is responsible for prompting and picking correct formulations, or fixing or discarding. So it's still semi-manual work. It's just Copilot, not yet full Pilot. The copyright should belong to the human assuming they could have written the same code if they had access to search the internet for help. So it works like a search engine when it's replicating verbatim. Should be considered similar to coding with access to internet for answers.

Without using Copilot, I can search the Internet for help, find some source available code, take it verbatim and place it in my project. For most licenses, this is a violation if I ever externally ship a product from this code, and for some licenses, it is even a violation if I only expose it as a service over the Internet. A succinct way to rephrase this might be "theft".

Using Copilot, I can do the same (GitHub acknowledge that according to their testing, verbatim reproduction happens ~1/1000 times) and not even realize it. How am I as an end-user of Copilot supposed to vet its output to protect myself from unintentional but very real theft?

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