Re:We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
by teddyh on Friday November 04, 2022 @08:54AM
(#33465757)
The question was basically settled with music sampling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)#Legal_and_eth...
I.e. any use without permission is illegal.
Consider every repo on github to be a movie. Copilot is taking individual frames out of every movie on github and composting them into a new film.
I think most of us would agree that individually, each frame is copyrighted. But what if you take one frame from a million different movies and put them in an order that produces a new coherent movie?
The core question we need to settle in court is: does the new movie become its own copyrightable work, or is it plagiarism?