I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

You sure about that? You aren't allowed to read it outside of the license attached to it. Downloading pirated source code, reading it, and then typing it out from memory doesn't magically give you a right to use it in any way. I would argue the licenses attached to most copyrighted code are being violated the moment the code is scraped and replicated without permission.

I see lots of comments blaming MS about this turn of events. I think this project has been going on pre-MS.

But what did we expect from GitHub....MS or not? This was an obvious survival mechanism for GitHub sans MS. All that coding data there? Let's turn machine learning or AI onto that and make something.

And if MS were treating GitHub as an "at arms length" corporate entity so as to NOT to upset the opensource/free software community (because MS) then the blame lies fair and square with the management of GitHub.

Ah right, I honestly did not know!

Still, if you come across some published source code that does not appear to be licensed and does not specifically define itself as being "Open Source" as defined by the "Open Source Initiative", copyright law applies and you're not allowed to just take it and use it.

GitHub specifically uses the words "source code from publicly available sources" when talking about what they used to train their model on.

As far as I'm aware public code repos aren't by default "Open Source" as defined by the "Open Source Initiative".

> As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. An AI should be allowed to do the same thing.

This is a non-sequitur. Why should it?

> And nobody cares if my ten-line "how to invert a binary tree" snippet is the same as someone else's.

Are you going to make up a rule for every length and type of code? What about twenty line? If ten lines are fine then surely twenty would be? How about pictures? If some code is then surely a picture or two wouldn't hurt? Let's just tweak the AI slightly so it regurgitates more code verbatim -- or do courts have to examine any change made to the AI and okay them?

> Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet.

The Windows source code can be found on the internet. As a human you're allowed to read that if you have it. Try making an AI that copies bits of that into your code and release that on the internet.

To avoid copyright issues could we do to do it how humans do it - with "clean-room design"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

E.g.

1. Train one ML implementation to produce "specification text" in a way that they're agreed to be free from copyright claims. E.g. train to avoid any direct quoting, possibly via a different human, programming or custom specification language.

2. Train a separate ML implementation to produce code from the specifications.

3. Hook them together and you've got a pipeline for generating learned, but copyright-free, code.

Kind of reminds me a bit of some of the machine translation work with human languages.

Note: this is how the GNU project itself sometimes clones the functionality of copyright-free way, so I'm pretty sure it would be safe to use this on GPL-licensed code.