361–370 of 545 posts
Has this ever been used as an argument in a legal case?
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> As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs - you can't become a wine contributor if it can be shown you ever read Windows source code and most likely conversely. Likewise, you can't ever write GPL VST 2 audio plug-ins if you ever had access to the official Steinberg VST2 SDK. Etc etc... Did people fo…
> Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied. Those projects could hire people familiar with competitor code and assign them to competing projects if they wanted. The contributors could, in theory, write new code with…
I mean, if you used CoPilot on one computer, stared at it intensely for 1 hour, closed that computer, and then typed out code in the other computer that you were contributing from, you technically didn't use it for the contribution, you just used CoPilot for your education only.
Intellectual property is itself a flawed concept in many ways. It's like asking someone to do physics research but forbidding them from using anything that Einstein wrote.
Feels like everyone is missing the point: Copilot will ultimately serve to weaken the arguments in support of software patents and copyright. That can only be a good thing for society (though perhaps not for rent seekers).
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Sorry, but you're not recalling correctly. :) The Supreme Court decided Google v. Oracle was fair use. It was 3 months ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... That's the highest form of precedent, the question has now been effectively settled (unless Congress ever changes the law). Edit: added a dummy hash to end of URL so HN parses it correctly (thanks @thewakalix below)
The fair use was about Googled API reimplementation. It becomes a whole different case with a 1:1 copy of code. And don't forget fair use works in the US, not necessarily in the rest of the world. But I'm happy about all the new GPL programs created by Copilot
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If all copilot output was automatically GPL, I would think it’s fantastic. As it stands, it seems to undermine GPL the most.
They should really have trained models based on the license, so a GPL-2.0-only model, 2+, 3+, 3 only LGPL 2.1(+), CDDL, MIT, et cetera. As it stands, the combined inputs leaves the model in the most murky of gray areas.
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The license you have chosen requires attribution. You may not care[1] but the other party still most likely will be in violation if Copilot reproduces a significant chunk of your code. [1] I also MIT license my public code on Github, and also wouldn’t care that much.
I don't care about attribution. The only reason I use MIT, is so some knucklehead doesn't try to sue me, because they cheezed up my code.
What if you published a subtle proof of concept that takes out nuclear plants, and then some knucklehead deployed it because Copilot suggested it?
Feels like everyone is missing the point: Copilot will ultimately serve to weaken the arguments in support of software patents and copyright. That can only be a good thing for society (though perhaps not for rent seekers).
The arguments are already weak. The judicial precedent, however, is strong. Microsoft will continue to publish proprietary ML models and profit off them, at the expense of the corpus authors (us lowly laborers).
I really hope this weakens copyright. We can live without it.
Copyright doesn't just benefit huge corporations. For instance, without it, independent artists who rely on copying for distribution (authors, musicians, etc.) would find it much more difficult to make money off their work, mostly (IMO) because large corporate entities with large investments made in publication and distribution systems could simply take content and sell it themselves with zero obligation to the origi…
Gaming things out, I don't think copyright is really helping any of those artists or society as a whole. If it didn't exist, you'd still have breakout artists who make money through endorsements, live shows, and selling original copies of their work.
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Your recollection is off, majorly. I'd recommend looking up the origins of the FSF/GPL/Copyleft. The entire movement essentially got started because Stallman gave Symbolics his (public domain) Lisp interpreter, then Symbolics improved it but refused to share the improvements. "No restrictions" has never been the goal and to claim that they're egoistic hypocrites who are just scared for their own livelihood because of…
Stallman did not gave Symbolics his Lisp interpreter. Symbolics had a license for MIT's Lisp system.
Anyway, that still wouldn't change that the FSF and Copyleft are explicitly anti-proprietary, not intending to be 'no restrictions'.