Now my software has been assimilated into a proprietary blob. Had that blob been free, like my software within it, I would have accepted it, but it's not. It's controlled exclusively by Microsoft and OpenAI, two entities which I place no trust in.
For me the dog has already bitten. The free software I extended to an audience I believe would show the same generosity has instead been made into a proprietary product.
The "copyright" question for me is not a question of "fairness" or ability of Microsoft or anyone else to make a product. For me it's a tool to protect my contribution from proprietary business.
Basically. I dont want the animal safer, I want it free (according to the FSF freedoms).
That's exactly my complaint about Copilot. And since all code hosted on GitHub is now subject to this land-grab, my only recourse is not to use GitHub any more if I want to publish a project of mine.
Your code isn't being run by Copilot, as such; it's been categorized in a way that allows partial retrieval without the license or attribution. This might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it's kind for a ship-of-theseus problem; probably nobody is running any of your programs in their entirety, but it's very possible that bits of your code have found your way into other people's programs. How do you distinguish between contributions that are uniquely yours, and those which are just helper functions or cobbled together from other example code, eg in documentation or from a book or Q&A website?
With copilot, you are not acting with knowledge of the source and not with intent to copy, in fact I'm sure the users would have a reasonable expectation of the tool not copy-pasting existing code verbatim.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that intent matters a lot.
Popcorn time was also just a tool to allow you to stream data from torrents. That didn't seem to help them put up a legal defence (nor should it have, because the intent was pretty clear on that one).
And seriously, if cases exist, where the only thing a tool does (albeit via a VERY complex implementation path) is to strip a license from a piece of code and serve that code up via an API, then that really does sound like the creators of the tool are at fault.
There is plenty of space here to discuss developing tools to check for unintentional infringement. I would guess, though, that such tools would sweep up a whoooole lot of non-copilot human usage and make it much harder to deploy anything new.
So, maybe a better discussion to have here is how to make the animal safer, not the total outlawing of the animal. Single-line completions (the majority of co-pilot usage) aren't infringing. Probably true for almost-any few line completion. So, capping the amount of consecutive auto-completed code might be a reasonable 'muzzle' on the model to keep it reasonably safe.