Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

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>If I take your hard work that you clearly marked with a GPL license and then make money from it, not quite directly, but very closely, how is that fair use? Or legal?

You can wipe your ass with the GPL license if your use of the product falls within Fair Use.

You can actually take snippets from commercial movies and post them onto YouTube if your YouTube video is transformative enough for your usage to be considered fair use. Well, theoretically at least - in reality YouTube might automatically copyright strike it.

>Copying and storing a book isn't recreating another book from it.

That doesn't mean that GitHub has to redistribute Copilot under GPL. However, the end user could potentially have to if they use Copilot to generate new code that happens to copy GPL code verbatim.

> You can wipe your ass with the GPL license if your use of the product falls within Fair Use.

Is Copilot fair use? It's reading code, generating other code (some verbatim) and making money from it all while not having to release its source code to the world?

> That doesn't mean that GitHub has to redistribute Copilot under GPL

I wasn't saying that was the case: some of the code that Copilot used may not allow redistribution under GPL.

But let's say that all of the code it scanned was GPL for the sake of argument. Why would they not have to distribute their Copilot source yet, if I use it to generate some code, I'd have to distribute mine?

My spidey-sense it tingling at that one!

> Is Copilot fair use? It's reading code, generating other code (some verbatim) and making money from it all while not having to release its source code to the world?

Again, fair use is an exception to copyright protection. If something is fair use, the license does not apply. The fact that Copilot does not release its source code is related only to a specific term of a specific license, which does not apply if Copilot is indeed fair use.

Making money is irrelevant to fair use

Totally relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#1._Purpose_and_charac... .

Irrelevant to GPL maybe.

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