> reproduction doesn't usually happen unless you go to extra lengths to make it.
And who is to say that people who want to copy your code without adhering to your license terms or pay won't go to extra lengths? or am I missing something here?
And who is to say that people who want to copy your code without adhering to your license terms or pay won't go to extra lengths? or am I missing something here?
It seems like they could just download your code from Github and violate your license like that so.. unclear why they'd bother doing it via copilot.
If it were my GPLed code being copied, it doesn't seem to make any difference whether I press copyright claims or not. It won't help me compete against this dev's company. They'd use Copilot to rewrite the code differently. The speed of improvement in code-writing tools doesn't give me much hope that my code is uniquely clever.
Why would specifically prompting the LLM to generate similarly copyrighted code be any different? That's what's being discussed here - that people will "go the extra lengths" to intentionally copy your code.
The "It wasn't me, it was the tool, even though I directed the tool quite specifically to do the thing that happened" is not a new defense in the legal systems of the world. We are already generally are able to deal with these without significant issue.
Only expressive software is protected by copyright and sometimes that interpretation should be handled by a jury.
AFAIK but IANAL, I can go look at a solution in a GPLed library and then code that solution in my proprietary code base. As in, "oh, I see, the used a hash map for that and a list of this, and locked at this point. I'll code up something similar". As along as you don't "copy the code" you're fine.
Am I wrong?
Is it just a matter of scale? (hey there LLM, re-write all of OpenOffice into ClosedOffice).
Because humans are human. We are rewarded extra super duper rights that inanimate things, such as a computer program, are not rewarded.
I think we should therefore work to demonstrate this is not the case, which is very hard to do. No idea why we would work under the absolutely insane, never-before-seen assumption that computer programs deserve human rights. I don't know where this line of reasoning started, or why, but at it's core it's so unbelievably preposterous (and against the very wellbeing of mankind).
And again, I have to ask: why? Why would you think that putting tons of time and effort into tricking the model into repeating memorized code is going to be a better investment than just using it normally to implement the functionality you want?