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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Note that the author, Michael Weinberg, is "Executive Director of NYU Law School's Engelberg Center for Innovation Law and Policy" as well as "President of the Board of the Open Source Hardware Association." He is an actual lawyer (who also knows about open source) unlike most people I see who comment online about Copilot, and whether something is fair use or not.

I'm not going to comment on whether he's right or wrong, lest I fall into the same trap I just outlined, as I'm also not a lawyer, but, unrelated to this particular case, I see this kind of thing often on the internet (as well as real life), where people who have no knowledge or experience about a particular topic go on to comment as if they were an authority on the subject. I see it on /r/legaladvice and other subreddits, and on HN here in many cases, including on certain lab leak theories. It reminds me of the Gell-Man Amnesia Effect.

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Most of the comments I've seen on HN have been personal opinions or legal questions rather than legal opinions. Copilot may be 100% legal - that doesn't make it 100% ethical (depending on your personal ethics).

Eating bananas may not be ethical. That is very subjective.

Of course it is subjective. There are at least two parties involved. One party wants this. The other party wants that.

The existence of every law begins with something subjective. Just because something isn't illegal doesn't mean it shouldn't be. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it should be.

A huge portion of the comments are specifically about licenses and Copilot as license laundering to access GPLed code.

I see this kind of fallacy all of the time. People LOVE to smuggle in what (they think) the law says on a moral question, ignoring the fact that 1) legal and moral aren’t the same thing 2) laws change over time 3) laws differ from place to place and 4) when talking about what the law should be, what the law currently says is entirely irrelevant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_law

Meh, this blog post is mostly just random ramblings and no legal analysis. For example the ToS obviously does not save Microsoft. The code they have trained Copilot on includes code written by authors who did not upload anything to GitHub themselves. Some of them may even have died before GitHub was founded.

FWIW, I would claim that the lawyer--who admits to not being a software developer and is thereby in some sense also speaking out of place (as is almost everyone, which to me undermines your concern a bit ;P)--to me entirely misunderstands the reason why people try to use these licenses in the first place.

Sure, however I would trust a lawyer's words on legal matters (which the article he references is making it out to be, not merely a technical software engineering matter) more than non-lawyers, just as I'd trust a doctor's words than a non-doctor's on medical matters.

But the issue at hand usually isn't "is Copilot legal under current law" but "should it be"; the article even admits this, touching on the legality but merely on its way to eventually tackle the question of whether it is "a problem", something that isn't (to me) much of a question of law, but instead either a question of ethics or, maybe (if one tries to be completely dispassionate on the matter), economics (which seems to be the approach used in the analysis by this lawyer).

Great. He has a president title (presumably with a salary) on the backs of thousands of people who actually write hundreds of thousands of lines of open source for free.

I don't care at all about his view on ethics, in this case I'd prefer a Disney lawyer.

He may understand law well, but not code and AI. I didn't see the author address that licensed code could be spit out, in large unedited chunks, by Copilot. I would expect that to be brought up as well as discussion about how much code needs to be copied to become a license violation. Also, while most of the article was pretty digestible by a layman, he only mentioned "fair use" but didn't give a definition of it. And while something may be "fair use" for copilot, what about the user who then uses that code? His comparison to Google getting sued for scanning books to provide search didn't really fit well.

Licensed unedited code can be spit out by a google search too.

Literally nobody claims that googled code can be used without agreement from the author.

Google Books also shows verbatim passages of text, sometimes entire pages much longer than what Copilot typically emits, yet Google Books was deemed to be fair use by the courts.

I've edited my comment above to show that he's also president of the Open Source Hardware Association so I think he knows how open source code works.

Google Books tells you what book the passage comes from so you can give proper attribution if you use it. GitHub Copilot doesn't do that.

The examples I've seen of this involve basically writing the attribution in the prompt, making the question moot...

Ok, he is a lawyer so he knows what the law currently is. And he should also know that the law is always lagging behind, especially in technology. However, being a lawyer doesn't mean that you know how the law should work.

> people who have no knowledge or experience about a particular topic go on to comment as if they were affected by the subject

FTFY

And that includes the author of this blog post. He does not seem to understand GitHub and how code ens up there.

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