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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

That's hardly a new thing! For instance, Google search makes billions of dollars by indexing content that other people make.

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Google Search links to the original content. Copilot doesn't.

When you ask it a question, it will often simply construct an answer from the pages it indexed, so people don't have to click. Sure, it links it, but for what? Thankfully, the answers are almost always useless.

As I responded to someone else, this isn't always true. Google "when was George Washington born".

George Washington's birthday is hardly copyrightable.

So are most of your functions and methods.

Maybe but it also uses those index cards that show a summary of information so you don't need to navigate to the actual website that contain the original content, there might be a link there but it's usually small and practically unnoticeable.

If Copilot provided a “small and practically unnoticeable” attribution to the code used, it would definitely improve the situation, especially for licenses like MIT that require attribution and nothing else.

It should be noted that some juristictions are starting to restrict this (e.g. Australia). Also I would argue if Google would randomly display content of full websites and never post links to the original content it would be in a lot more legal trouble.

> Also I would argue if Google would randomly display content of full websites and never post links to the original content

Google does do this though. Just Google for an easy to answer question, like “when was George Washington born”

The answer to a factual question is not copyrightable, so while you may have moral problems with that, there is no legal argument.

The same applies to all realistic use-cases for copilot by the way. Whatever is produces is not copyrightable.

> The answer to a factual question is not copyrightable, so while you may have moral problems with that, there is no legal argument.

Correct.

>The same applies to all realistic use-cases for copilot by the way. Whatever is produces is not copyrightable.

That's a pretty bold statement to make. How do you know how people use copilot? Also IIRC Oracle vs Google essentially determined 3 lines of code can be copyrightable. So I think you statement fails on two points, you can't really predict how people use copilot and you cannot predict what a court would decide is copyrightable (this is much less straight forward than statement of facts).

Google helps you find someone's content. Copilot helps you rip off someone's content.

My guess is the act of production that is passed as original content tends to have more avenues to harm producers than consumption.

Alarm bells of this magnitude haven't been rung about people torrenting films for decades; it's a given that some people are just going to do it and there's little that can be done to stop it.

Producing new data from original data of questionable lineage makes the questionable acts visible. Copilot and the like actively encourage this creation.

If it were possible to peek into the rooms of everyone who downloaded a torrent to admonish them then maybe pirating would have been made a modicum more taboo. But those consumers never intended to leave their rooms. Copilot forces them to leave their rooms if they want their derivative work to be used.

That's true, and when Google started extracting information from web pages and displaying it in results pages without driving any traffic to the original websites, the authors of those pages were justifiably upset.

Google Search is ethically acceptable because for the most part website creators like being in search results and are "compensated" in the form of more visitors, and if they don't like it they can easily exclude themselves. Website creators famously do NOT like it when Google indexes their content and then serves it up independently.

Google makes money from ads. When you strip those away, purely indexing the web and offering a search engine is probably costing them money, not earning.

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