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Comment by joshgree88 | Hacker News Reader

But the legal opinion will be "your in completely new waters here, it's for us to guide the legal debate in our own favor" - a fundamental part of that will be to pretend no issues exist and to wait for the moves of other actors first

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My best guess is that they have a legal 'argument' which they have chosen not to disclose yet. I think it's unlikely that 'brazen it out' would have got the green light - especially for MS and GH which, lets face it, depend a lot on developer buy-in.

Oh yeah of course - I am sure they have multiple legal arguments and different ones will be deployed based on how they are legally challenged - I doubt very much they didn't see this coming - but at its heart I think MS are confident they can get away with it...

Like any criminal. The risk of getting caught and punished is balanced against the potential reward. They know the courts can be gamed long enough to make more money than it will cost them. This is the essential nature of business at their scale. Uber, AirBnb, and now Copilot: screw the law, there’s profit to be made.

You point out one of the bigger problems with the whole entire giant corporation situation we have today. What is even the point of enforcing laws against those who can simply ignore the law until it's enforced (making massive profits along the way), then pay up, and still come out the other side massively enriched from their crime?

As long as enforcement and punishment of corporate lawbreakers doesn't hurt them at all, they're gonna continue to find new ways to abuse the system and get away with it. Only way to change it is to make their crimes really hurt them when they're called to task over it.

Reading this chain of comments made me think: What if Copilot was a purely academic creation. Imagine a bunch of computer scientists from ETH Zürich created something identical. Would we be having the same debate? I'm not sure.

And yes, I do agree that some tech companies push the boundary of information and commercial law and wait to be tested by someone with deep pockets.

We absolutely would if their plan was then to produce a paid for product of the backs of all the people who unknowingly contributed - if say they were to release the model and the training corpus in its entirety then nope...

If they are legally challenged I should also add cos I don't think they will be...

Some of that GPL code could have come from firms with big legal departments and deep pockets so a challenge is perfectly possible.

This is a valid point. FSF is very particular about requiring people to reassign copyrights to FSF when you contribute to GNU software. (It is controversial!) They do this to strenghten their legal stance. They can more effectively defend their license and copyrighted code base if the copyright is fully owned by a single legal entity. I could imagine a legal challenge by FSF backed by legal resources from EFF. All we need to do is get Copilot to spit out some non-trivial code (including comments!) from some core GNU utilities. That should be enough to start a lawsuit.

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