If Codeium doesn't produce these when producing "verbatim enough" snippets, how is this actually better, besides avoiding a GPL boogeyman?
I get that there have been fewer (if any? I'm not aware of any) MIT/Apache2.0/MPL2.0 license violations that have gone to court than GPL violations, but this still feels like an "address the symptoms" and not "address the cause" difference.
it's not
if they've trained on MIT/Apache 2.0/... then they're just as liable as people that have trained on GPL
they would be limited to training on licenses that don't require attribution (BSD2, public domain, etc)
which I suspect limits the size of the training set so much that the output would be useless
Codium here is unintentionally making an argument that undermines legal confidence in their own product
interesting choice!
{Of course, if someone figures out an algorithm that does that, people could use the same algorithm to identify missing attributions and plagiarism in other projects and throw lawsuits around. (Sigh)
Of course, the entire basis for LLMs being legal is that they use work collectively to know how code/language works and how to write it in relation to the given context. In this case, the legal defense is that the tool is like a human that learned how to code by looking at CC-BY-SA and other licensed publicly-available code and assimilating it into their own fleshy human neural network.
This only becomes shaky once you add in regurgitating code verbatim, but humans do this too, so the solution there is the copilot setting that tries to detect and revert any verbatim generated code snippets.
They want to have it both ways: they want you to think the LLM is like a human because it’s “learning” (which in ML is the same word but completely different idea) so that you let them ignore copyright, but it’s not like a human of course because it can’t think, no sir (so you do not make them grant it human rights, because then they can’t exploit it like they do anymore).
Why should it not be legal? Doesn't that make copyright equally powerful with patents? Copyright should restrict only replication of expression not replication of ideas.