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There's also another risk, which is that copilot generated code may not be copyrightable[1]. I'm not sure how that would play out as part of a large codebase, but something to watch closely.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-copyright-office-says-so...

> The office reiterated Wednesday that copyright protection depends on the amount of human creativity involved, and that the most popular AI systems likely do not create copyrightable work.

In the UK, AI's operator gets copyright instead.

Isn’t software copyrighted as a whole, not line-by-line?

As the linked article describe it:

"the office said copyright protection depends on whether AI's contributions are "the result of mechanical reproduction," such as in response to text prompts, or if they reflect the author's "own mental conception.""

So if we take that into software development, the text input that the developer gave copilot may be protected under copyright but the output of copilot may not.

If the developer arrange or modify the output, then those arrangements and modifications can also be protected under copyright.

To me that means that during copyright cases there will be a much bigger burden on the plaintiff to prove that they own copyright in any specific situation, and that the infringement is done on those parts that is covered by copyright and not just the output of the copilot algorithm. Simply claiming authorship to all the code will no longer be enough.

I don't think there's any precedent for copyright to be applied partially, with some of a work covered and some not. Are you proposing that copyright will change to be line-by-lien, with each one covered (or not) depending on how it was generated?

What the copyright office describe was AI generated images, and a book where such images was included. Those images can't be copyrighted, but the prompt that produced the images may, and the arrangement inside the book may also be copyrighted. People can however take out those images from the book and reproduce them, since those images themselves are not covered under copyright.

So if we apply that to software development, some portions of the code could be copyrightable while other portions will not, and the arrangement of the whole thing can be covered under copyright.

So let say you write a piece of software and I copy a portion of that code into my software. Is that portion that I copied covered under copyright? Maybe, maybe not. It will depend, and depending on how the legal precedence fall it may be up to the author to prove that they really are the author.

If I apply this in an fictional game developer, we could image them ask an AI to generate the image assets for a wooden table. Then they ask the AI to create the 3d mesh of a wooden table. Then they ask the AI to write a function that places the table with image assets onto a 3d plane. Each step here would produce content that historically would be copyrightable independently, but which is not copyrightable if done through an AI. The big unanswered question is at what time the work becomes copyrightable, and what happens if someone takes assets and portions of that work and uses that in something else.

> They say in very clear terms: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS.

I really hope they get reamed in court over this. When Microsoft's servers running Microsoft's AI transmit somebody else's code covered under GPL (or any other FOSS license with attribution, like BSD) to a third party without replicating the license statement or even providing proper attribution, Microsoft has absolutely violated the GPL. They can't get around that by waving a paper that the third party signed.

This reminds me of those dump trucks you see with stickers saying that the owner will not pay for damage caused by falling debris. Absolutely laughable attempt at dodging legal responsibility for an act that they are absolutely responsible for.

I'm glad execs like you are taking this seriously instead of going along with M$' flagrant disregard for FOSS licenses. I hope there's a lot more corporate pushback for trying to sell a tool that can poison their customers' codebase with code stolen from copyleft projects.

As an aside, I find it very telling that they trained this on other peoples' code instead of their flagship products like Windows, Office, VS, etc. I also remember seeing a few years ago an article on HN about M$ not allowing its employees to use github internally because they were worried about accidental IP leaks; I wonder if this is because they were already planning copilot?

>* I read the terms of service, and they do not actually grant license to the code. They say in very clear terms: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS.*

That doesn't exactly mean they don't grant licensing in the sense that they retain the license to use the code they produce.

That means there's no licensing, and any issue others have with your code infringing on third party licenses is on you.

Do you also disallow your employees from reading github, stack overflow, or other sources of code?

I disallow copying of copyrighted code into our product repositories unless the license is clear, I have even reached out to people to directly license copyrighted software, or for them to relicense their public AGPL/GPL license (for a fee).

To answer your statement directly:

1) StackOverflow submissions are CC-BY-SA, so if a person copies' code from there, even if it's copyrighted you can consider it good faith and remove the offending code from your product. This is actually a licensing nightmare but the current situation is the same as when the music industry accidentally uses an unlicensed sample and there's no current reason to consider it otherwise.

2) Github has a neat repository licensing feature (LICENSE) so you can easily tell what repo has what, not having a license file means the repository is fully copyrighted by default by the way; if we bundle GPL code then we would have to open source our game, which is not going to happen, so no you're not allowed to just copy code, but you can take inspiration; which is what Copilot is saying you should do in their terms *NOT COPY CODE VERBATIM*.

Ultimately: Software licensing is a joke to you because it doesn't really concern you, however it concerns me as it is quite literally part of my job to protect the company from being sued over doing something wrong here.

What if someone copied a GPL code to stackoverflow? It wouldn't even be hard to look for examples like this.

In situations like this, my opinion is to just assume that license will first bite big guy, so I am willing to play by the fire if someone who is 10x bigger than me are doing the same.

Right. So it's up to you to educate your developers to not copy code from sources that have licenses incompatible with your project. Much the same as educating the same developers that "YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS" from copilot. I do not see any difference here.

It's an extremely personal attack to claim software licencing is a joke to me. You have zero context on the work I do professionally and as open source. I'd appreciate it if you could limit your arguments to not include personal insults.

Reading Stack Overflow doesn't send my code to Stack Overflow.