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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google did not scan those books and use it to build new books with different titles. The comparison doesn't hold up at all.
> Google did not scan those books and use it to build new books with different titles. The comparison doesn't hold up at all. Not sure if you meant to reply to me but I agree with you: you can't compare what Google did to what Copilot does.
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No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…
I think this is the correct answer. IANAL but the copilot code vs the copilot training data are different things and licensing for one shouldn’t affect the other, right? And the fact that training data happens to also be code is incidental.
So playing devil's advocate. What if the courts just don't care, and rule that copying code verbatim is not a crime because you didn't copy it, and copilot is not a human so it can't commit crimes. What's the net effect of a system that draws upon all public code repos? It sounds... net beneficial to society? On the plus side, a large body of work effectively becomes public domain. On the negative side, copyleft lice…
Would that mean I can start sampling songs if they get fed through a neutral network? It'll be fine if I train it on whatever is playing on the radio right? Doing the same for poems?
I'm a programmer and also studied law for some time. These stories make me - once more - realize the old adage: "Possession is nine tenths of the law." Don't host that code in the cloud (or a better term, someone else's dirty bucket). What happened to developers hosting stuff on their own website!?
Devs were hoping for stars and network effects rather than listening to those of us feeling uncomfortable taking all traffic to gh. Something like Copilot or even a coding bot was predicted two years ago already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…
I think this is the correct answer. IANAL but the copilot code vs the copilot training data are different things and licensing for one shouldn’t affect the other, right? And the fact that training data happens to also be code is incidental.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…
> Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. For commercial use and derivative works? Authors won't incorporate snippets of books into new works unless they're reviews. Copilot is different.
If anything, the ways in which Copilot is different aid Microsoft/GitHub's argument for fair use. Because Copilot creates novel new works, that gives them a strong argument their system is more transformative than Google Books, which just presents verbatim copies of books.
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I've edited my comment with examples and a clarification. Fair use is an exception to copyright and, by definition, copyright licenses.
I understand the concept of fair use (I think) but I can't see how it applies to Copilot. Google didn't create new books from the contents of existing ones (whether you agree that they should have been allowed to store the books or not) but Copilot is creating new code/apps from existing ones. Edit: I guess my understanding of fair use was wrong. I stand corrected.
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Has Microsoft just killed source code copyright? That would definitely be a win.
it would be a win for Microsoft that don't distribute their source code whereas for open source it's a disaster
If the training set contains verbatim (A)GPL code does this mean that Copilot also should be distributed by Microsoft under GPL? Because without it Copilot (as it is distributed by Microsoft) couldn't be built, wouldn't it make it a derivative work of GPL'd code (and obviously every other license)? I see a lot of people comparing human learning to machine learning in the comments, but there is a huge difference - we…
No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…
If Github had a service that automatically mirrored public repositories on Gitlab, that would be equivalent to the example you gave.
But Github is taking content under specific licenses to build something new for commercial use.
I'm not sure if what Github does falls under Fair Use, but I don't know that it matters. I can read fifty books and then write my own, which would certainly rely—consciously or not—on what I had read. Is that a copyright violation? It doesn't seem like it is but maybe it is and until now has been impossible to prosecute?