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Comment by sammax | Hacker News Reader

Don’t most licenses require at least attribution? I don’t believe GitHub is restricting themselves to only licenses that don’t. In fact the only software licenses I can think of that don’t require attribution are 0BSD, WTFPL, CC0, MIT-0 and Unlicense, and they all aren’t super popular. Also in some countries creators have inalienable moral rights which can be enforced regardless of the license. For example in Germany it is impossible to relinquish certain rights you have as the creator of a work, including the right to attribution.

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This is an important and overlooked point. Even common permissive licenses (ISC / MIT / Apache-2.0) require attribution

Just as a mind experiment: couldn't CoPilot just publish a list of every github user and attribute the work to all of them?

CoPilot is a black box at the moment. Microsoft claims they used the public corpus on GitHub. There are plenty of GPL, AGPL, and "source available" projects in the public corpus. So what exactly is the licensing?

The argument may make sense if they limited themselves to public-domain (CC0) works, but that is not what happened here. If CoPilot attributed something to an AGPL project, does it mean the "virality" applies to all projects that use code from CoPilot?

There's also a good amount of commercial and leaked source code on GitHub, including MS's own leaked Windows XP source. I haven't played around with Copilot yet, but if I ever do I plan on copy/pasting some win32 API definitions to see if I can get it to spit out any of the leaked source.

> if I ever do I plan on copy/pasting some win32 API definitions to see if I can get it to spit out any of the leaked source.

If that works, then I can't wait for that to be a boon for Wine and ReactOS: "Microsoft itself provided this code and allowed us to use it, so therefore it's totally legal. Neener neener."

Some trivia: CC0 is a public domain declaration.. at least in the US. There is no process by which an author can make their works public domain, CC0 is just a (weak) promise that the copyright holder will treat the work as if it were public domain.

This feels like a tool that can easily be destroyed by a lawsuit, I can't imagine a TOS can force you to give away your copy rights (especially if they allow and encourage you to post your own copyright).

If it can't then Wikipedia is doomed; its entire licensing status rests on the notion that editors grant such a license as part of their clickwrap ToS.

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