We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

Re:We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot by krono on Thursday November 03, 2022 @06:01PM (#33458429)

Farmers plant their crops out in the open too. Should Boston Dynamics be allowed to have their robots rob those fields empty and sell the produce without having to at least pay the farmer? They'd be walking and plucking just like any human would be.

Some source code might be published but not open source licensed. At least some such code has been taken with complete disregard of their licenses and/or other legal protections, and it's impossible to find and properly map out any similar violations for the purposes of a legal response.

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Re:We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot by blackbrokkoli on Thursday November 03, 2022 @07:31PM (#33459449)

This is literally the "you wouldn't steal a car" meme.

To spell it out: No, this analogy does not hold. "Stealing" data does not deprive the owner of anything, so it should not be treated remotely the same as physical stealing (usually not even of potential revenue, as piracy studies show).

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Re:We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot by krono on Thursday November 03, 2022 @08:27PM (#33460017)

I partially have to concede on that point. The anology could have been better, and I should have put greater emphasis on the massive scale and the lack of recourse for those affected.

Nevertheless, stealing remains illegal so at the very least they have deprived the source code owners of their rights.

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Re:We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot by YoshiRulz on Thursday November 03, 2022 @10:34PM (#33461266)

While there might not be damages in the literal sense to the owners of the scraped repos, MS is making money from Copilot subscriptions, so what they're doing is closer to selling bootleg copies of a film than giving away pirated copies.

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