Your argument just disallows discussing the problem while doing absolutely nothing about it.
If you train your dog to NOT attack random passersby and it still does, that dog is euthanized no matter your intentions.
Of course, but you will not face manslaughter charges in that case.
So, following the same logic, if you train your copilot NOT to infringe on other people's copyright and it still does, it should be destroyed no matter your intentions. But at least you won't be charged with copyright violation yourself.
That said, I don't believe Microsoft's actions to be benign. I think this copyright whitewashing scheme is fully in line with their old MO, purposefully creating a legal quagmire surrounding all open source code.
- whether there are any damages - what the big deal is
In my mind, the entire thread identified a lot of those, but I think someone already said that it will likely be tested in court ( and I have zero idea, which way it will turn ).
For the record, I personally think Copilot is a cool tool ( frankly, it is not that different from automated stack exchange in terms of results ). If I worry about anything, it is that the overall standards will decline even further.
There is plenty of space here to discuss developing tools to check for unintentional infringement. I would guess, though, that such tools would sweep up a whoooole lot of non-copilot human usage and make it much harder to deploy anything new.
So, maybe a better discussion to have here is how to make the animal safer, not the total outlawing of the animal. Single-line completions (the majority of co-pilot usage) aren't infringing. Probably true for almost-any few line completion. So, capping the amount of consecutive auto-completed code might be a reasonable 'muzzle' on the model to keep it reasonably safe.
Now my software has been assimilated into a proprietary blob. Had that blob been free, like my software within it, I would have accepted it, but it's not. It's controlled exclusively by Microsoft and OpenAI, two entities which I place no trust in.
For me the dog has already bitten. The free software I extended to an audience I believe would show the same generosity has instead been made into a proprietary product.
The "copyright" question for me is not a question of "fairness" or ability of Microsoft or anyone else to make a product. For me it's a tool to protect my contribution from proprietary business.
Basically. I dont want the animal safer, I want it free (according to the FSF freedoms).
That's exactly my complaint about Copilot. And since all code hosted on GitHub is now subject to this land-grab, my only recourse is not to use GitHub any more if I want to publish a project of mine.
Your code isn't being run by Copilot, as such; it's been categorized in a way that allows partial retrieval without the license or attribution. This might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it's kind for a ship-of-theseus problem; probably nobody is running any of your programs in their entirety, but it's very possible that bits of your code have found your way into other people's programs. How do you distinguish between contributions that are uniquely yours, and those which are just helper functions or cobbled together from other example code, eg in documentation or from a book or Q&A website?
With copilot, you are not acting with knowledge of the source and not with intent to copy, in fact I'm sure the users would have a reasonable expectation of the tool not copy-pasting existing code verbatim.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that intent matters a lot.
Popcorn time was also just a tool to allow you to stream data from torrents. That didn't seem to help them put up a legal defence (nor should it have, because the intent was pretty clear on that one).
And seriously, if cases exist, where the only thing a tool does (albeit via a VERY complex implementation path) is to strip a license from a piece of code and serve that code up via an API, then that really does sound like the creators of the tool are at fault.
I think the important thing to note in both dog attack scenarios presented is that the owner is responsible in both cases. Either they purposefully created an unsafe situation or they were negligent in protecting the public from their property. Whether the dog is euthanized is about preventing it from happening again. Preventing it from happening in the first place is done by making the owner liable to disincentivize it.
Personally, i don't care about the end users. If you want to read my source i welcome that. I just want the CoPilot model and system open, since it was based (in part) on my work. Otherwise they are free to remove my work.
What was your plan when someone eventually infringed on your work?
If you want people to abide by your license, you have to enforce it yourself.
If you took a bunch of copyrighted and non-copyrighted books, cut them into pieces, shuffled them all together, then picked a passage at random from a hat; "not knowing" what you are going to get doesn't mean you aren't violating copyright.
That's essentially what copilot is doing: it's taking a bunch of code - some of it copyrighted without license - and using it as a dataset. The ML algorithm then tries to pattern match against that data to provide the user with something they want. That's just copyright violation lottery with extra steps.