Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

This is the same website that rejoiced when Oracle v Google resulted in a Google victory, despite Google arguably doing similar. They did so with 11,000 lines of Oracle's code, but it was decided to be fair use. If that's the case... I don't think a regurgitation of 12 lines of GPL code by accident here and there will be a strong argument against fair use.

Adding to that: How many people here actually abide by the StackOverflow contribution license of CC-BY-SA when copying and pasting code from there? ;)

View on HN

11,000 lines of _declaring_ code-- the API signatures.

The API signatures were arguably the only thing that mattered.

The API signatures were arguably the only part that was copyrightable.

Code that is purely utilitarian (see “useful articles doctrine”) isn’t a work of human expression that is copyrightable.

Defining the “what” is just as much a part of the intellectual property as defining the “how”. Both things are hard to do well IMHO

> Both things are hard to do well IMHO

That's not really a factor in determining what's eligible for copyright protection.

Indeed. They’re both eligible.

I do think this is relevant to the conversation.

I don’t copy/paste code from SO but there is sometimes inevitable duplication because sometimes there is only one right way to do something! Copyright can stray into the case of the ridiculous pretty quickly.

Is an interface declaration inherently different from, say, a merge sort implementation? It’s all code. But they also serve very different purposes. I do not think prior to Google v Oracle there was much case law to distinguish between different types of code, but in the industry we recognize all kinds of nuance.

>How many people here actually abide by the StackOverflow contribution license of CC-BY-SA when copying and pasting code from there?

I always thought that code snippets that small are not considered by the Courts to be eligible for 'copyright protection'.

I always include a comment with the SO URL (though I haven't copied any code from SO in quite some time—it's not nearly as useful as it used to be).

In that case, is Copilot regurgitating 25 or so lines of GPL code, less than 1% of the time, eligible for copyright protection?

Why do you think it would only be 25 lines?

Because that is about, so far, the longest piece of clearly, demonstrably unique code that has ever been shown to have been copied. The longest you’d ever be able to clearly convince a court with, at least.

https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554/pho...

I'm not HN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com