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Comment by chlorion | Hacker News Reader

>I want to know what stuff you guys are putting in public GitHub FOSS repos that you don't want replicated in any way...

Nobody has claimed that they want this. People just want derived work to adhere to the license they chose for their project.

>I also want to know why people think their code is so special that no one else could have ever come up with it independently. Each and every opponent of Copilot is the best developer ever, I guess?

Would you feel the same way about ripping off game assets, or music?

I think you just have an axe to grind with free software in general based on your messages and the general tone. Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean that the ideas are invalid.

I am also curious why copyright laws should protect proprietary software, music, games, writing, etc but not apply to my software, even if it isn't the highest quality work?

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At one point does AI recreating patterns it has seen from reading source code count as a derived work? What if a human learns to code by reading only GPLed code, does all the code they write fall under GPL as a derived work now?

Some interesting reading:

https://felixreda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringin...

https://fossa.com/blog/analyzing-legal-implications-github-c...

There's one thing I'm missing from all these discussions and posts: is the generated code even copyrightable? IANAL, but code snippets often fall under the "scènes à faire" doctrine (everybody would do it in a similar way), in which case it's not. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire

GitHub seems to think it is copyrightable, personally I doubt it is, simply because a human didn't create it and the process it was created by was automatic with no creativity.

Well, if the entire thing was generated, then no (according to the first link I posted above), since it was not produced by a human. However, no useful program is going to be entirely written by an AI, so any real program would have quite a lot of user input (I regularly will take what copilot suggests and then tweak it to what I specifically want). And then, yeah, it's copyrightable.

Also, there's no way for anyone to know what portion of code that I commit was hand written vs. generated, so you kind of have to treat it all as written by the committer anyway.

Though this does bring up interesting questions about what happens with things like automated PRs that fix bugs / update dependencies... are those then non-copyrightable? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's the kicker: your modified code snippet may still not be copyrightable if it's generic enough that everyone would do it in a similar manner.

Just as much as a hero riding off into the sunset is not copyrightable in a movie script. However, a hero riding off into the sunset with bananas in the pistol holsters would be.

This is what I would want to hear more about when discussing if Copilot violates copyright.

> “If you look at the GitHub Terms of Service, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features,” [Kate] Downing, [an IP lawyer specializing in FOSS compliance] says. “So with respect to code that’s already on GitHub, I think the answer to the question of copyright infringement is fairly straightforward.”

This has some interesting implications – for example, it means I can't mirror somebody else's (open source) code on GitHub without their explicit agreement.

How so? I'm not seeing any language in there that implies exclusivity...

Presumably because you don't have the right to grant github those permissions, only the copyright owner does.

So GitHub should immediately take down (and remove from their Copilot learning model!) all *GPL code uploaded by anyone but the ("primary"?) copyright holder.

> > “If you look at the GitHub Terms of Service, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features,” [Kate] Downing, [an IP lawyer specializing in FOSS compliance] says. “So with respect to code that’s already on GitHub, I think the answer to the question of copyright infringement is fairly straightforward.”

So any code uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder renders someone liable to be sued for copyright infringement, AFAICS. The only question is whom it makes liable -- the uploader, GitHub (=Microsoft!), or both?

I can see arguments either way: The uploader is clearly infringing by giving away a right that isn't theirs to give. But so is GitHub / Microsoft, for using a "right" they haven't been properly given. So I'm provisionally leaning towards "both".

> I can't mirror somebody else's (open source) code on GitHub without their explicit agreement.

Who is doing the "mirroring" -- you, in uploading the code, or GitHub / Microsoft in actually hosting it, keeping it available for download from their "mirror"[1] site?

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[1]: Is that even the correct terminology nowadays, when AIUI for lots of projects GitHub is their primary code repository?

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