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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

Is it derivative work though? I don't think reading GPL code requires me to only write code under the GPL license.

No, simply reading GPL code doesn't poison you (though it does put you in an awkward position), but copy pasting gpl code straight into your codebase is a copyright violation unless you can prove fair use. And copy pasting GPL code is what Microsoft Copilot has been repeatedly shown to do.

First of all, none of this matters if the resulting code isn't distributed in some manner. For an internal app, for example, none of this matters.

Secondly, it's pretty much obvious that fairly trivial (and, frankly, probably not so trivial) code snippets are reused/reworked from various sources all the time. This makes it hard for me to see Copilot as this new and existentially harmful thing.

People use different licences, because they want different things, e.g. attribution, or that improvements be contributed back, or nothing.

It is harmful to open-source, because if these wishes are not respected, people will stop contributing and stop open-sourcing things.

For the GPL it matters even if it is distributed in binary form. For AGPL it matters if you make a service available.

AGPL projects will benefit from these huge coding models like everyone. This puts all code in an open position.

>> but copy pasting gpl code straight into your codebase is a copyright violation unless you can prove

This is not true. The copied code needs to be distinct and uncommon; a tiny snippet is very unlikely to meet this requirement.

That's true, but some of the copy pasting that Copilot indulges in would absolutely fulfill that requirement. See: copilot copy pasting quake's inverse square root function: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

Copy pasting a one-line snippet may be OK, but copy pasting a full function is already much more of a grey area.

The Quake case is a pretty non-central example, because that particular function has been copied verbatim into many code bases.

This fast inverse square root function is also getting old. If it was a software patent, which are not recognized in many places, it would have expired a few years ago.

We're discussing copyright though, not patents, which for better or worse, have terms of almost a century.

In the US, the copyright lapses 95 years from publication, or 120 years from creation, or 70 years from author death, whichever is shortest.

So the inverse square root function will stay copyrighted until 2100 (the source was published in 2005 I believe).

This is minor, but it's at least a bit older than that. Via Wikipedia I found a link to the code on a Chinese forum in 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20150702180504/http://bbs.csdn.n...

From what I can see it has only been "repeatedly shown to do" it when you explicitly try to force it to do it (e.g. adding those Quake specific comments to bring out the fast inverse square root code). I want to see a serious analysis of Microsoft's claim that it only happens 0.1% of the times. Has it actually been debunked?

Could the derived work be created without the source?

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