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Comment by lukeplato | Hacker News Reader

Copilot is a commercial paid service that generates money for Microsoft

Yeah, that bit I realise but the point I was getting at is this: if I take someone else's code, use chunks of it in my app, say that it's mine and make money from it is that not illegal? Or, at least in violation of the license?

Superficially at least, Copilot (from my understanding) is "copying" code, letting me use it in my app, and making money from it.

I'm just trying to wrap my head around it.

Let's be clear, I am not a lawyer, but it seems... strange!

Also NAL, but I think there's far more of a case that users of Copilot might violate copyright rather than Copilot itself:

- Only a very small proportion of Copilot generated code is reproduced verbatim, so if you specifically built a product just from copied-verbatim code, your act of selecting and combining those pieces of copyrighted code would be creating a derivative work.

- GitHub is not selling the copyrighted code, they are selling the tool itself. Google is literally the same thing: you could theoretically create a product by googling for prefixes of copyrighted code and then copying the remainder straight out of the search results. It's you who would be violating copyright, not google.

I think there is an argument to be made that Copilot is producing derivative code, though. It may produce copies verbatim, and that's a violation, but far more often, it produces a mixture of things it was trained on, most of which probably have some sort of license requiring attribution at the very least.

Does copilot seem strange, or maybe the concept of intellectual property does?

Copilot isn't strange from a technical prespective.

The strange bit is how they are allowed to use other peoples code to create derivative works (this is how I see it from my non-legal perspective anyway).

Even if it's legal (to the letter of the law, not the spirit) it leaves a sour taste.

Both the Copy machine and VCR were found to be legal because they had substantial non infringing uses. As is I don't see how Copilot does. It could, if trained on public domain or attribution free code only, unfortunately there probably isn't enough code out there to train the model adequately under such rules.

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