If you have a piano that plays copyrighted music when you press a single key, isn’t that the piano maker’s fault?

Edit - googling, the history of player pianos vs copyright is interesting

https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/white-smith-music-case-...

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/18325210185.shtml

It could end up being tried as being both the piano maker’s and player’s fault.

The former for making and selling it, the latter for buying and using it.

Just like counterfeit goods.

No?

Depends, I think. Generally, I think accidental copyright infringement by an unsuspecting person who plays the song believing they bought it legally would not be held accountable. But if they knew the song was copyrighted and not legally licensed by the piano manufacturer, and they assembled a bunch of friends to listen to the songs, or resold them for money, then yeah perhaps. Most importantly in context, though, the piano will almost certainly not be fined or taken to court. ;)

Even if hypothetically there was such a strange bug in your piano and you decided to exploit it by recording copyrighted music and redistributing it, you would be accountable for it, not a piano.

This analogy train went too far, don't you think? All examples that I've seen on Twitter require quite an intentional manipulation by human for Copilot to produce something copyrighted. It does not recite Linux code by pressing 1 key.

If you have an electronic piano that requires a complex series of button pushes to produce copyrighted music - that's still a copyright violation. Copyright law has no notion that the difficulty of reproducing copyrighted content effects the fact of a violation.

> an electronic piano that requires a complex series of button pushes to produce copyrighted music

Surely a judge presented with the "complex series of button pushes," otherwise known as playing an instrument, would hold the player accountable for any infringement and not the piano?

These analogies have gone so far off the rails that I can't tell which side this thread is arguing for by now ;)

I think the whole swirling discussion is a little confused because there are potentially two "ends" where infringement could happen, and different people are talking about each. And the article covers both.

One end is GitHub's, at the input: Copilot's "database" was initialized from code that GitHub does not have copyright to. The contention at this end is that they are ignoring the licenses that would grant them the right to use that code.* The article, GitHub, and others assert that there's no copyright issue for creating a database of this kind (a machine learning model).

The other end is the the developer taking Copilot's output. The article seems to take the (absurd IMO) position that there's also no copyright implications here, because the output is not copyrightable at all.

*And personally this is the side that concerns me most.