All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

> It'd be a nice gesture to reach out to the creators of the training data, like is usual with web scrapers.

I don’t think this is practical. And who notifies people of scraping content? I would’ve annoyed if I got spam from sites that scraped my content.

I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. It seems like before the twitter thread on it went viral, the only people who cared about programmers copying (verbatim!) short snippets of code like this would be lawyers and executives. Suddenly everyone is coming out of the woodworks as copyright maximalists?

I know HN loves a good "well actually" and Microsoft is always suspect, but let's leave the idea of code laundering to the Oracle lawyers. Let hackers continue to play and solve interesting problems.

Copilot should be inspiring people to figure out how to do better than it, not making hackers get up in arms trying to slap it down.

>I still don't see any problem with that. If it's larger sections (e.g. entire NON-TRIVIAL function bodies), those can be filtered or correctly attributed after inference. So that's just a technicality.

Today copilot does what it does.

I've never heard Microsoft defend anyone running afoul of some of their licensing details with "they can fix it later, it is just a technicality".

I think this should go both ways? No?

> Smaller snippets and trivial or mechanical implementations (generated code, API calls, API access patterns) aren't subject to any kind of protection anyway.

  int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {

> Lines like that hold no intellectual value and can be found in GPL'ed code. It can be argued that that's a verbatim reproduction, yet it's not a violation of any kind in any reasonable context.

Totally agree. Edit: otherwise we'd all be in serious trouble.

> Where do you draw the line and how would you be able to - automatically even! - decide what does and does not represent a significant verbatim reproduction?

I am not a lawyer but I guess many can agree that somewhere before copying functions verbatim, comments literally copied as well for good measure, somewhere before that point there is a line.

On the other hand: if there was significant evidence that the AI was doing creative work, not just (or partially just) copying then I think I would say it was OK even if it arrived at that knowledge by reading copyrighted works.

Edit: how could we know if it was doing creative work? First because it wouldn't be literally the same. Literal copying is liter copying regardless of if it is done using Xerox, paid writers, infinite monkeys om infinite typewriters, "AI" or actual strong AI.

After that it becomes a bit more fuzzy as more possibilities open up:

- for student works I look at how well adapted it is to the question at hand: a good answer from Stackoverflow, attributed properly and adapted to the coding style of the code base? Absolutely OK. Copying together a bunch of stuff from examples in the frameworks website? Fine. Reading through all the docs and look at how a number of high profile projects have done it in their open source solution, updating the README.md with info on why this solution was chosen? Now you are looking for a top grade in my class.

(of course IBM will probably not want you to work on their compiler though if you admit that you've studied OpenJDKs, or so I have heard.)

Public and public domain are not the same thing. This code is public in the same way that Google indexes publicly available information on the internet.

Please don't get mad at me but my question is genuinely: so what? Why does it matter? Can't you violate licenses in a tedious manner just by Googling + copy pasting blindly already? Genuinely looking to understand the consensus here