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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

This is demonstrably false. It is a system outputting character-for-character repository code.[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33457517

If I use Photoshop to create an image that is identical to a registered trademark, is the rights violation my fault or Adobe’s fault?

Photoshop can't produce copyrighted images on its own.

To play devil's advocate: Co-Pilot can't reproduce copyrighted work without appropriate user input.

Just trying to demonstrate a point- this analogy seems flawed.

If I draw some eyes in Photoshop, it won't automatically draw the Mona Lisa around it for me.

Until you sprinkle a bit of Stable Diffusion V2 or 3 on it, or perhaps some GaN.

The more I think about it, the more this all seems like another dimension of Jack and the Magic Beanstalk crossed with The Matrix.

If you Google Mona Lisa the result is the Mona Lisa. If you query Copilot for a common piece of code you get that code.

Google doesn't sell its search feature as a product that you can just plagiarize the results from and they're yours. Microsoft does that with Copilot.

Copilot is as much of a search engine as Stable Diffusion or DALL-e are, which is to say they aren't at all. If you want to compare it to a search engine, despite it being a tortured metaphor, the most apt comparison is not to Google, but to The Pirate Bay if TPB stored all of their copyrighted content and served it up themselves.

With Copilot it's your responsibility not to use it as a search engine to copy-paste code. It's completely obvious when it's being used as a search engine so it's not a problem at all.

Stable Diffusion works on completely different principles and they can't exactly replicate a pixels from their training data.

So the problem you have with it is the UI?

No because that's not a trademark violation in anyway. Using GPL code in a non GPL project is a violation of copyright law though.

Ok, cool. Presumably that is because it’s smart enough to know that there is only one (public) solution to the constraints you set (like asking it to reproduce licensed code).

Now, while you may be able to get it to reproduce one function. One file, and definitely the whole repository seems extremely unlikely.

It can be modified to not do that (example: mutating the code to a "synonym" that is functionally but not visually identical).

It can also be modified to be opt-in-only (only peoples' code that they permit to be learned on, can use the product)

Perhaps you are right, and it could be so modified.

Could be, but isn’t. And that matters.

plagiarism with some words swapped is still plagiarism

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