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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder if they should make a special open source license, that disallows use of the source code for the purpose of training something like Copilot.

Since Microsoft uses material for copilot outside of licensing on the basis that it is Fair Use, that would probably have no effect in practice on whether or not the material is used in training something like Copilot. For that to matter, you’d first have to win a lawsuit on the basis that training something like Copilot requires permission of the copyright owner of the training material, to invalidate the premise of Microsoft’s action.

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I don't care about all the handwaving here, it comes down to this.

The moment a fragment of code from a GPL'd or AGPL'd project shows up almost verbatim in someone's closed source or non-copylefted, etc. project, and someone proves it, sparks are going to fly.

And it's probably already happening, just people haven't discovered it yet.

How many years did the Oracle/Google lawsuit go on for? And in the end about a handful of a lines of code only tangentially related to the issue at hand?

Part of the lesson from that must be: employers should be telling their workers to say TF away from Copilot or things like it. And be careful in general when browsing source. License literacy is critical.

I don't touch it because I need to feed my kids. I don't need my career exploded. Overcautious? Maybe. I'll let someone else find out. I make a living in and around open source software.

> The moment a fragment of code from a GPL'd or AGPL'd project shows up almost verbatim in someone's closed source or non-copylefted, etc. project, and someone proves it, sparks are going to fly.

I'm hoarding popcorn and can't wait for that, honestly.

> License literacy is critical.

It's beyond critical, but most people I have talked says that they see the right to copy and use any code they see online. They don't care.

Building this open source corpus was not easy, and we need to defend it too. This is a culture.

Didn't it already happen that it spat out a function from Quake? And they then dealt with that by banning the particular function.

ISTR that Amazon's version of copilot has licensing info output too.

> Since Microsoft uses material for copilot outside of licensing on the basis that it is Fair Use, that would probably have no effect in practice

i think that any formal violation of an open source license would be very bad in terms of public relations - even if they can claim fair use.

They got it covered. Passed the responsibility to user in their official documentation.

It's not really an issue when you're a large software corporation; you already have mechanisms in place to check for license compliance in everything that ships, including F/OSS plagiarism checks.

I think that's the part that people who don't think it's worth the money aren't getting. This kind of system is godsend for the likes of Infosys, TCS etc. So the immediate threat is to the jobs there - but the side effect is that it'll make it all even cheaper, so we'll see more "outsourcing to the cloud", so to speak. Often to the obvious detriment of quality, but that doesn't seem to matter in this market.

Of note, a non-human cannot hold a copyright.

Anything generated by copilot, which if it is a derivative work, is not something that copilot can hold the copyright on.

From the auditor's perspective it doesn't matter if you copied it out of stack overflow, from some GitHub search, or copilot. You, the human, didn't check the license / plagiarism detecter. It is you, the human, claiming copyright on the work you are creating which may incorporate material from other sources.

Copilot isn't claiming fair use.

You could argue that the model that copilot runs from is a derivative work (and this is going to be interesting when it gets to the courts, because, frankly no one will come out the 'winner' on this when trying to explain it to a judge) - but that's not the code that a human is claiming to be their creative work and is ultimately the license violation.

Personally, I (not a lawyer), believe that copilot is on ok ground - but anyone using it needs to do their due diligence in verifying that the code that they've incorporated is licensed appropriately - just as if they've copied something from Stack Overflow - who knows where that copied was copied from.

I have less concerns with identifiable code from copilot than humans not caring about the licenses of their source material in creating human generated content.

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