Copilot under fire as dev claims it emits 'large chunks of my copyrighted code'

Re:Copilot under fire as dev claims it emits 'large chunks o... by naillo on Thursday October 20, 2022 @08:05AM (#33273389)

I agree it's tricky. I think it should be put to the same standards as we would if e.g. some game source code was leaked onto github and some guy decided to just rename all the variables changed the whitespace. If that guy did it most people and the courts would probably agree that he can't just sell that modified piece of code as 'halo leaked edition'. But currently if copilot performs the same action it seems the authors are arguing he should.

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Re:Copilot under fire as dev claims it emits 'large chunks o... by alexcosan on Thursday October 20, 2022 @08:20AM (#33273527)

I believe that's a bit of a strawman comparison. Not taking any sides, but in your example, the resulting system would be the same - artwork aside - you would end up with the same set of algorithms put together to create the exact same game.

Copilot, as far as I know, tend to be used to generate snippets and small algorithms that, by themselves, are not a full system/product/game.

There still may be some merit to your argument, but I believe the opposite side should be a bit steelman'ed beforehand.

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Re:Copilot under fire as dev claims it emits 'large chunks o... by xbfjvusb6 on Thursday October 20, 2022 @08:34AM (#33273662)

My license isn't "you can take a bit but not the whole bit".

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Re:Copilot under fire as dev claims it emits 'large chunks o... by alexcosan on Thursday October 20, 2022 @08:51AM (#33273901)

I did not argue against that, I was talking about the argument. I don't think it's a straight comparison or even one that holds water. I don't think the parent comment mentioned licenses at all. I clearly mentioned that you can make an argument claiming that it's not ok to copy a snippet - I just don't think the argument to absurdity I replied to, in this case, is the best or most appropriate one.

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Re:Copilot under fire as dev claims it emits 'large chunks o... by xbfjvusb6 on Thursday October 20, 2022 @09:34AM (#33274467)

You're right. It's a few orders of magnitude worse than that.

It's not just one snippet, it's thousands of them, every day being slurped up and copied across code bases everywhere license free.

If the pirate bay can get jail time for facilitating mass copyright infringement, maybe Microsoft needs a little jail time too.

It's been said in this thread already:

Either licenses matter or they don't. Pick one.

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Re:Copilot under fire as dev claims it emits 'large chunks o... by alexcosan on Thursday October 20, 2022 @12:48PM (#33277373)

For some reason, you keep presenting arguments as if I have taken any sides. I don't agree with arguments even if I would agree with the end result.

I disagree that comparing Copilot with Pirate Bay is a good argument to make your case (maybe Dall-e is a closer comparison if resulting artwork could contain licensed artwork from the training set). You'd probably have other fronts to use and present a stronger argument.

And let me remind you that I have not argumented on behalf of any side, so I do not think this thread requires arguments against arguments I have never brought forward (it feels a bit more emotional than constructive).

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Re:Copilot under fire as dev claims it emits 'large chunks o... by jimbokun on Thursday October 20, 2022 @08:47AM (#33273824)

There are a lot of existing legal precedents about what constitutes fair use vs infringement. This isn’t a new question.

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Re:Copilot under fire as dev claims it emits 'large chunks o... by chii on Thursday October 20, 2022 @09:57AM (#33274769)

https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/copyright-and-the-digita...

so if your work is transformative, it can be exempt as fair use. But i'm not sure what degree counts as transformative - i do think that training an AI model with millions of repos worth of code is transformative.

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