Re:GitHub Copilot investigation
by thomastjeffery on Tuesday October 18, 2022 @11:34AM
(#33248930)
"Not knowing" doesn't free you from responsibility.
If you took a bunch of copyrighted and non-copyrighted books, cut them into pieces, shuffled them all together, then picked a passage at random from a hat; "not knowing" what you are going to get doesn't mean you aren't violating copyright.
That's essentially what copilot is doing: it's taking a bunch of code - some of it copyrighted without license - and using it as a dataset. The ML algorithm then tries to pattern match against that data to provide the user with something they want. That's just copyright violation lottery with extra steps.
If you took a bunch of copyrighted and non-copyrighted books, cut them into pieces, shuffled them all together, then picked a passage at random from a hat; "not knowing" what you are going to get doesn't mean you aren't violating copyright.
That's essentially what copilot is doing: it's taking a bunch of code - some of it copyrighted without license - and using it as a dataset. The ML algorithm then tries to pattern match against that data to provide the user with something they want. That's just copyright violation lottery with extra steps.