It’s not illegal, it’s at worst a fancy code search tool that Github has the right to show you the results via the license you grant them when you upload and make public code on Github which is way stronger than other search engines like Sourcegraph have to show public code.

It doesn’t mean you have the right to use any of the code it generates but Copilot itself isn’t illegal in any meaningful sense.

This is definitely not true. When your license requires you bundle said license with any reproductions of the code, and Copilot spits out said code sans license, they are breaking the law.

> We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.

I don’t think it’s accidental that this product is specifically Github Copilot.

But even then I think this is legal overkill. If you use the search box on Github they will display snippets of code from public repositories without the license. Same as what Sourcegraph does same as Copilot does. Nobody here is arguing ripgrep is violating the license by displaying matches without the corresponding license.

The violations are when that code is incorporated into your own codebase, which is happening in none of those examples. If you copy GPL'd code from GH search with a non-compatible license you are still in violation.

Yes but that’s your problem as a user of the tool. It doesn’t make Copilot itself illegal which is what the person I originally replied to was saying.

Yes if you use a tool to violate copyright it’s copyright infringement. If you prod Midjourney into outputting near exact Starry Night that’s on you too.

So far no one has made a compelling case that Copilot itself is violating copyright.

Code search may show snippets, but it's clearly not separated from the rest of its code base, including the license. It may be your problem as a user of that tool if you pirate snippets out of the search results without honoring its license, but GitHub at least didn't distribute it without its license. A human judge would surely determine that a search result page showing a snippet and linking back to the project wouldn't constitute distributing the code without attribution. Copilot is a different matter. There is no way to know where the code came from, whether it's novel or verbatim copy of someone's copyrighted work. Microsoft _is_ distributing code snippets here sans its license.

Codesearch at least provides users the ability to hunt down any licensing concerns. Unless Copilot start spitting out citations (this snippet was generated based on repositories x, y, z, here are links) the users of the tool have no way to verify if they are in any way in violation of the licenses.

We can test this!

Go and write some code, license it to require attribution and license reproduction.

Send me a link to it - and see if you can stop me from using it under fair use.

Is there any evidence that the PostgreSQL or MariaDB solution will though?