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A comment on Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot by fooster on Saturday November 05, 2022 @11:59PM (#33488787)
That is absolutely not my experience at all and wish people would stop with the hysterical hyperbole. The tool typically produces code that would only make sense in my codebase because it uses internal types which only make sense in my code base. That is not and cannot be copyright infringement.
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Re:Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot by dleslie on Sunday November 06, 2022 @12:17AM (#33488928)
Sure, it's clever enough to swap identifiers correctly, but the shape of the code and techniques it uses were familiar to me from elsewhere, at times.

It's not unlike copying code from stack overflow and swapping the identifiers around.

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Re:Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot by nl on Sunday November 06, 2022 @12:48AM (#33489090)
> the shape of the code and techniques it uses were familiar to me from elsewhere.

Isn't this exactly what you'd expect an AI coder to do?

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Re:Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot by dleslie on Sunday November 06, 2022 @12:51AM (#33489113)
That's precisely the problem with it. AI, as it is, can be considered a lossy compression technique with multiple document recovery, convolution and interpolation ability.
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Re:Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot by nl on Monday November 07, 2022 @06:13PM (#33513865)
Can't humans be considered a lossy compression technique with multiple document recovery, convolution and interpolation ability?

What is the specific difference?

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Re:Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot by rolisz on Sunday November 06, 2022 @02:26AM (#33490091)
How did you learn the shape of the code and techniques that you recognized? By looking at other code? Are you violating copyright when you are writing similar code yourself?
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Re:Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot by hakre on Sunday November 06, 2022 @04:52AM (#33490891)
> By looking at other code? Are you violating copyright when you are writing similar code yourself?

In that order likely a violation, but it depends on the concrete case, always.

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Re:Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot by dleslie on Sunday November 06, 2022 @07:49AM (#33492015)
From decades of looking at interesting code.

I take care to attempt to not duplicate code; it's why don't use copilot.

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Re:Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot by int_19h on Sunday November 06, 2022 @09:49PM (#33500520)
> By looking at other code? Are you violating copyright when you are writing similar code yourself?

It's certainly possible. Back when Phoenix reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS using published sources with a restrictive license, they did it by having one team read the sources and write a very detailed specification of everything that happens there, and then another team used that spec to write new code from scratch. They did it that way because if the first team were to write the code themselves, it is quite likely that the result would be legally considered derived work.

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Re:Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot by veilrap on Sunday November 06, 2022 @12:10AM (#33488879)
100% agree. This matches my actual usage of github copilot. All the drama around it seems to just be mostly for headlines to fuel the outrage machine.
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