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Comment by markdeloura | Hacker News Reader

CoPilot didn't "learn how to program", it is reproducing blocks of code from other projects, some of which explicitly state that using their code requires attribution or other forms of acknowledgement. It is facilitating infringement of their licenses.

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The line-by-line nature of CoPilot may make that difficult to establish.

You can open a sidebar (in both Rider and VSCode) which displays full blocks of code

That's a good point, but until it drops in whole blocks, I think the liability might lie more with the user. Kinda like all of Tesla's non-alpha driver assistance features where to use them the user has to opt-in and agree they will maintain full control of the car even when using these features.

> some of which explicitly state that using their code requires attribution or other forms of acknowledgement

US Copyright law states that fair use and derivative work are not infringing - and said law supersedes licensing.

> US Copyright law states that […] derivative work are not infringing

It says no such thing:

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106

This is only partially correct.

Since I have two free complimentary months I decided to sign up even though I'm not super thrilled with it (see previous comments). I was given two options:

1. allow code from public repositories 2. allow copilot to learn from my code

I disabled both of these options. Presumably I am now using an AI model which learns and suggests based on the context of my project.

It would be interesting to start verbatim copying some open source GitHub projects with these setting disabled and see if it magically knows what comes next (ie it does have prior knowledge of published code even with this turned off)

I'm not sure why my comment is getting downvoted.

I just gave it a test run. I have a function with this code:

  if (!card.IsFaceUp && !card.IsBlocked)
  {
    FlipTableauCard(card);
    card.SetIsBlocked(false);
    break;
  }

I then added this comment afterwards:

  // if the card is face up, flip it

And this is what copilot produced:

  if (card.IsFaceUp)
  {
    FlipTableauCard(card);
    card.SetIsBlocked(false);
  }

I'm pretty positive that is code generated based on my comment and the surrounding code.

> Presumably I am now using an AI model which learns and suggests based on the context of my project.

The "allow code from public repositories" doesn't do what you think it does. All it does is add an extra filtering step to avoid producing code found in it's training set verbatim. The model you are using was still trained on those repositories, it's not limited to your project.

Thank you, I am aware it was trained on those repositories. I am not OK with this business model.

But my comment still stands. You can turn off the verbatim copying feature that people keep talking about and the "AI model" will generate code based on your own codebase.

When I'm using it with Unity or a JS project that has NPM modules, does it use those as context to fill in some code as well? No clue.

Was it trained on open source code and is that ethically and legally shady? Yes.

Is it copying verbatim at this point? No.

Does it help me be a better programmer and will I pay for it? No and only if I forget to cancel my trial subscription.

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