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Comment by paweladamczuk | Hacker News Reader

I was recently running Copilot CLI in a sandbox on autopilot mode and it kept overriding git config to put only "GitHub Copilot" as commit author instead of my name. Strongly worded instructions weren't helping, I had to resort to the permission system to change this behavior.

I wonder if this is consistent with their terms of service. I mean, maybe they DO take all the responsibility for the code I generate and push in this manner?

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It's possible they are safeguarding for possible future changes of copyright law that would give Microsoft copyright over all Copilot contributions. This may sound paranoid but, as far as I know, exactly who counts as an "AI operator", how much authorship an "AI operator" has, and who gets copyright, or whether AI contributions are even in the public domain, are legally untested and unclear issues.

The US Copyright Office has said that AI output from human prompting is not copyrightable. There are caveats, but iterating on prompts results in output that's nobody's IP.

Because it's nobody's IP, Microsoft is already in a position where they could just use, remix and/or distribute that output however they want to today.

This is a wild misinterpretation of that ruling.

tough luck for MS or other "AI" providers claiming any ownership, since if they can claim ownership, then it opens up the discussion of what license the AI output really is under, since it was trained on GPL licensed data.

It's a setting that causes an extra prompt to be placed into the system prompt.

No it's just that those commits aren't copyrightable and they probably want to reuse them in the future.

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