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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the examples people are giving of code Copilot filled in for them sound like what would be called plagiarism, and probably also copyright infringement.

Which I think was fairly predictable.

What wasn't predictable was that someone would ship this Copilot anyway, consequently exposing their company and their users' companies to liability.

Imagine if you hired an intern who was copy&pasting bits of GPL'd code throughout your system. This would not be a good job, it would be something that needed immediate attention from legal counsel and others, and mean reverting every commit the intern from heck made if you couldn't prove convincingly it wasn't tainted. Especially if you're a startup, who needs to assure investor due diligence in good faith that you actually own the IP.

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Wait til stackoverflow sues everyone into oblivion!

Letting your intern blindly commit to your code base seems like the bigger issue here. The entire purpose of an internship is to learn and to be guided by professionals, not to be treated as a cheap laborer. You don't hire interns, you train interns.

Have you used copilot or are you speculating?

If the analogy works better, imagine that you hired a developer who copy&pasted GPL'd code throughout your system.

(And people couldn't tell in code reviews, nor on other occasions to see the code, since it's not normal to recognize GPL'd code on sight; everyone just assumed the developer was productive.)

I think people should be a lot more concerned about the possibility of accidentally deriving your work on something with an AGPL license.

If the analogy works better, imagine that you hired a developer who copy&pasted whatever-license-your-company-is-most-afraid-of-and-is-highly-likely code throughout your system. :)

>The entire purpose of an internship is to learn and to be guided by professionals, not to be treated as a cheap laborer. You don't hire interns, you train interns.

This has not been my experience. I was dropped into the developer team and expected to know the entire tech stack and was not trained by anyone from the company at any point. Have I been bamboozled??

There’s a huge spectrum of “training”. At least you know you have an expected tech stack. Go learn it and ask questions if things are confusing. Don’t wait to get “trained”.

It helped that I was already semi-familiar with it, but the other engineer and team lead quit shortly after I joined, and I was left by myself to complete the tasks. It was brutal, and I'm looking for a different job to get away from this workplace for this reason.

Was anyone managing your task list or checking in at all? Did you have a manager?

We did and currently do have a manager type person. They are not code-savvy though, which is sometimes frustrating. We just recently hired another intern, a regular developer and a lead, so it's slightly less painful now, and I am still the one working on the primary applications. The others are working on separate things. Before the hiring, it was me and another developer, but he doesn't develop the main applications. The task list at that time was infrequently used, but it's become daily routine now.

I think it depends if you're getting paid. If they call you an intern because you're still in college or have no professional experience, but they're paying you fairly then it seems like a fine arrangement they ask you to do real work. On the other hand, if your compensation is primarily "experience" then I'd say you're being bamboozled.

I am being paid, although significantly less than my previous job. It's not that I can't do the work, but it feels like I'm being taken advantage of because I have no professional experience; although I have almost 10 years of personal experience. It might sound like I'm complaining about the work itself, but it's more than that to me.

It's not an internship if you have ten years of experience, you're just being exploited.

Stackoverflow content is generally creative commons not GPL unless I'm missing something.

(https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing)

I was just wondering this

CC-BY-SA, so Share-Alike; you have to share the derivative work produced (source code, in this case).

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