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Comment by haskellandchill | Hacker News Reader

> First, my comment is that GitHub claims the right to use any public code on the Internet, not just GitHub. This means that they claim the right to mine code on Sourcehut, or in my case, on my personal Gitea instance. I'm not sure your suggestion 1 covers that. I think it should.

People are allowed to read code on the internet and then write code themselves based on their experiences of the code that is publicly available. Why can't a software tool do the same? Everybody is being ridiculous about this.

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No, people are not allowed to just read code on the Internet and then write code themselves. It depends on what the code is that they write and how similar it is to the code they read and how creative the original code is.

For example, I'm developing an algorithm to merge two binary files of the same type, a completely new algorithm. Say someone reads the code for that algorithm when I am done and implements the same thing using the same algorithm, but refuses to put the AGPL on it (because that will be the license). Are they infringing? Absolutely.

This has, in fact, happened with the Fast Inverse Square Root algorithm, whose code is under the GPL. Copilot reproduced it verbatim, including swearing comments. [1]

People are not being ridiculous about this because it has already happened!

EDIT: Fixed a small mistake.

[1]: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

'Fast Inverse Square Root algorithm, which is under the GPL'

The algorithm isn't under GPL, the code is. John took the algorithm itself from code which was written earlier.

Even if I play your dumb games the tool just suggests code the user can then choose to infringe or not.

The user has no idea about the provenance of the code they receive, so they can't know it they are infringing or not. If that is the case, then suggesting that users should merely choose to not infringe is equivalent to suggesting that users should not use Copilot at all.

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