Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code?

Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by jazzyjackson on Thursday June 23, 2022 @11:47AM (#31850775)

of course it's not intelligent, but we still have to decide how the law applies to the actions of software, or otherwise re-frame the whole thing to include the co-pilot developers doing the copyright infringement when they trained the model - not the current discussion which gives agency to the IDE plug-in "choosing" a code snippet to paste.

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Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by jhugo on Thursday June 23, 2022 @12:39PM (#31851601)

I don't see how the way the software was built is particularly relevant.

It's just a tool used by the developer; the onus is on the developer to ensure they don't infringe the licenses of the source code they incorporate in their software. Since Copilot makes it impossible to know where it's barfing code up from and what license that code is under, a developer who cares about not getting sued probably needs to avoid using Copilot.

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Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by jazzyjackson on Thursday June 23, 2022 @01:05PM (#31852053)

Eh, the law is about making a copy. If my IDE plug-in fills in some code, the question is, did I copy the code, did the robot copy the code, or did the developers that wrote "cp github.db ~/trainingset" copy the code?

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Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by ycombobreaker on Thursday June 23, 2022 @06:04PM (#31855688)

The authors of the tool created something that can be used for copyright infringement.

The tool itself lacks agency, it did what it was programmed to do.

If you took the tool's suggestions and proceeded to published a derivative work, you may have infringed.

This really doesn't feel any different from P2P filesharing services. Rightsholders have targeted tool publishers in the past, because they are the largest single target and not anonymous; but ultimately the infringement is performed by the end user.

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Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by jhugo on Thursday June 23, 2022 @09:17PM (#31856903)

This isn't complicated at all. You copied the code, which isn't an issue until you then go on to do something which infringes the license (e.g. publish under a different license, publish binaries without publishing source, publish without attribution, whatever it is that the license requires).

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