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Comment by thdxr | Hacker News Reader

Whenever it comes to things like legal issues or regulations, people take such pride in being someone who understands their intricacies that the larger picture is missed. We should think about what outcome we actually want.

While technically any snippet of code can claim a copyright, it's sort of ridiculous to suggest the snippets that Copilot generates has any protectable value.

Practically Copilot is saving you the labor of writing fairly trivial but tedious code. I work on open source full time, there's no random snippet of code that I've written I'd feel upset about if someone copied.

Licenses on software are mostly performative.

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> Licenses on software are mostly performative.

I seriously doubt you actually believe this, at least in an equal way. The code to Windows XP is available on the 'net, but I can't just go and compile that and start giving out copies without serious legal repercussions.

Copilot is "copyright for me but not for thee" and it's bullshit.

Copilot isn't automagically going to give you the windows XP source code tho, or anything even remotely close to a full project, it seems that even a full working/compiling function is asking too much.

It generates what a intern code monkey would generate after reading a few stack overflow posts and a few github repos.

Yep. But if it regurgitates more than a few words, that's still plagarism and probably a violation of copyright - or at least it would be if we did it with MS's code.

Again, its copyright for them, but no protections for us.

> Copilot isn't automagically going to give you the windows XP source code tho

I mean, it might. That's the whole concern. It's scraping random bits of code from all over the place.

> Windows XP [...] I can't just go and [...] start giving out copies without serious legal repercussions

1 month ago, HN front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31458635

Nice, TIL. Thanks!

From the about page:

"Q: Why is nothing from the Windows XP source code leak added?

A: Even though Microsoft has only taken down a few Windows modifications, they will most definitely take Windows XP Delta Edition down if there is a reference to the source code inside it. The Windows XP source code is illegal to download, fork, and redistribute, so nothing from it will ever be added."

I think "performative" and "random snippet" are key here.

But let's think of an example that may push the line. What would happen if someone wrote a closed source "Linux" kernel using the Linux kernel interface as a stub, and filled in the code using copilot. You'd expect some of the generated code to come from Linux, since that's the best code for the stub. Linux's use of GPL is not performative and this could create multiple instances of copied code.

But for everyone else who isn't building a closed source replacement of GPL software, I have a hard time thinking you'd be impacted.

The 'inverse square root' carmack trick is hardly trivial.

so luckily no one owns the idea that you can use both newtons method, and floating point bit-hacking, to produce a good estimate of a square root.

So if a similarly non-trivial piece of code was in a non-public-domain codebase and copilot copied that wholesale, then you'd have a problem with it?

So your position is that you don't respect copyright in the first place, but your argument is that Copilot is effectively a case for free use.

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