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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output.

Yeah, this feels like the same nonsense that scientific journal publishers pull. If your product only has value because of what we made, it's completely unfair to not pay us for our work and then to turn around and charge us to use the output.

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Also its users might be violating the GPL.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3627319/github-copilot-is-...

How can the user be violating the license, not the distributor? If I give you a binary that gives you a Disney movie, it's not you violating the copyright, it's me. The copilot itself is violating the copyright, not its users.

If you're making software just for your own use, you're right. But most people who make software do distribute it.

If the copilot users then distribute the source they got from it, they are at that point violating copyright.

E.g., if I take that Disney movie, incorporate it into my own movie, and distribute it, then I'm also violating copyright.

If you take the Disney movie the binary gives you and then pass it on, you're in violation even if the company distributing the binary is also in violation. You can sue them for damages that result from you being sued but good luck.

The user of Copilot is a developer - the distributor.

And you might argue that Copilot is also a distributor.

Where I live, copyright literally means the right to copy. Which means using a binary that gives/produces/generates a Disney movie when you do not have rights to that movie, you violate copyright by virtue of copying the IP into your computers memory and then onto the view buffer of your display. Also if the binary manages to do that without actually violating copyright itself it might even be legal. There's other laws that could be used though, I forgot what they got Napster on but they had something to shut it down, same for torrent sites like Piratebay.

"Your honor, I had no way of knowing that this mysterious device I purchased that manufactured shrinkwrapped Disney DVDs was violating copyright."

"Intent is not relevant to copyright infringement liability."

"But your honor, I heard on Hacker News that it was."

"I find you guilty."

"But your honor, copyright violation is usually a civil issue, and 'guilty' is a criminal trial concept."

"Well, I also get my legal training from Hacker News."

Yes. Even if it may be permitted under some licenses, training models off millions of developers' code and capitalizing on those models goes against the spirit of open source software. I'd expect nothing less from Microsoft.

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