this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2021
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 years ago (4 children)

GitHub’s current CEO said that from their point of view, they see this as a part of “fair use”

Of course they will argue that, otherwise they would have to scrap the whole project. But it doesnt matter what they say, I think only the authors of the code can answer it. So far it looks mainly like a way to get around open source licenses, and use the code in proprietary projects. At the very least, they should make it opt in for devs to have their code analyzed.

However, there is nothing that prevents anyone from doing the same for free.

Absolutely not true, it takes some very specific knowledge and a team of developers to implement this. Something which can only be done by large companies.

Is anyone actually planning to sue them? I would definitely support that, because my own code is likely affected.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 years ago (3 children)

I completely agree. The opt-in thing will be the way if you want to do that, but they know that the participation will be insanely lower than just using the wohle code.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Well, they could've included only permissively-licensed source code. They generally have that information.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

You really mean seeing the project as a derivative of the code used to train the bot, right? In that case, even permissive licenses usually require citing the author. In fact, in Europe, even if not stated in the license, the author can never loses their right to attribution.

I guess to refine your solution, every work built with the help of copilot should credit "copilot contributors" à la OSM

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

Yeah, good point. To really get it right, they would have to paste each snippet with a full copyright+license header attached. If the dev then removes that information, they're not at fault.

But yeah, it really feels more and more stupid, the more I think about it, to build a commercial tool that algorithmically reproduces copyrighted works with the copyright information removed.