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Comment by yunohn | Hacker News Reader

There is no groupthink, most companies have a legal department that does impartial due diligence, esp. FAANG like Microsoft.

I still don't understand how there's so much armchair quarterbacking around legality of Copilot, from people with zero legal skills and just anti-big-tech hot-takes.

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> There is no groupthink, most companies have a legal department that does impartial due diligence, esp. FAANG like Microsoft.

Because Microsoft's legal department (and the company itself) has a spotless reputation for ethical and legal compliance.

That is simply not the same thing as basic due diligence.

I don't actually see anyone suggesting that they haven't thought about the legal implications as you said it would be almost impossible for them not to have - but just because MS believes they are in the clear does not mean they are and more than that they may well be in the clear legally but that still dorles not mean they are doing the right thing...

Seriously? This thread is based on an article where a GitHub-competitor’s developer is arguing that Microsoft/GitHub have not thought through the legal implications. The comments section is another bunch of legal armchair speculation.

Regardless, if you’d rather discuss morals - I don’t believe what they’ve done is immoral or wrong either. I use Linux, and write FOSS code and contribute to the FOSS community quite regularly.

Have you ever worked at an org that size? Because many devs completely fail to even consider legal, let alone actually reach out to them before they implement something.

I currently do and have before actually, so I'm unsure if you have?

Devs can ignore legal for a very short time, but the moment you have a team working on it, you need legal approval to continue. And if there's going to be a public launch, you have an entire legal, data, and privacy team to vet it first.

Put simply, there is no universe wherein MS's legal team hasn't cleared Copilot before launch, and I'm disappointed HN groupthink believes otherwise.

I do work at a reasonably large one, yes. Less, then a month ago a new thing was announced, and among the comments, someone asked if legal was involved. The answer was: oh, right, we'll ask them.

Again, I’m not saying all large companies have that, clearly yours doesn’t.

I’m saying FAANG+MS definitely have this process, you can ask any employee how it works there.

This was announced by their CEO on their corporate blog.

There is 0% chance that this wasn't run past their legal team.

If it came from the CEO, it actually might have run _past_ legal.

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