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Comment by dcdc123 | Hacker News Reader

Did you know that the first of the two configuration options for Copilot is an option to allow or disallow it to suggest samples that match public code?

https://imgur.com/D2DDuY8

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I did not. That is a curious option to place, given how it would seem to weaken the fair use argument (since they’re providing a way of consciously allowing probable copyright infringement, rather than just treating the issue as inherent in the nature of learning, or a temporary bug that they’re steadily fixing). But still, to defend my earlier parenthetical claim that Copilot can’t tell whether it’s reproducing copyrightable chunks of code: this option is consistent with what I intended to convey in the paragraph as a whole, since they are developing extra bits around the edges to mitigate the issue, but it’s not possible for them to do it completely—it’s more like a game of whack-a-mole, fixing this class of undesirable reproduction here, that instance there, without causing too much damage to the perceived-legitimate output.

> since they’re providing a way of consciously allowing probable copyright infringement

I think the claim that it's "probable copyright infringement" is nowhere near proven.

GitHub likely gave that option to satisfy user's lawyers who might have a higher threshold for "clean room" implementations or "no open source". Not as any kind of implication of copyright infringement.

Fair use works as an argument to the usability of Copilot.

Derivative works, per US Copyright law, are not infringement, either.

I’m talking in the context of verbatim reproduction, which “suggestions matching public code” sounds an awful lot like. At that point, I think “probable copyright infringement” is a fair description.

Your work as a whole may be innovative.

is 'if err != nil {' your original work? Or is it 'commonly accepted knowledge' as a Go programmer?

It looks like that filter does an exact comparison ignoring whitespace. To be more effective it would need to ignore things like variable renames and trivial transformations (for(;;) becoming while(true) or whatever).

In other words we're getting into cheat-detection software territory, which sounds difficult to get right in general.

It seems like the configuration option offered should be "allow/disallow other users to copy my code without attribution" rather than "allow/disallow me to copy other users' code without attribution"

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