Why are there no antitrust claims vs. GitHub Copilot, when there is a precedent?

What a ridiculous article. Copilot does not violate antitrust law. GitHub is not a monopoly just because open source devs choose to host there. Devs are free to use GitLab or whatever.

Comparing this to Google Books is silly. Google stole copyrighted books. Copilot uses freely shared open source code. No copyright issue.

The article claims "Open source code on GitHub might be thought of as 'open and freely accessible' but it is not." Lol what? The MIT and Apache licenses explicitly allow reuse. Copilot can absolutely use open source data.

This is typical hype and FUD. No evidence Copilot even used all of GitHub's data or violated any licenses. Baseless speculation.

There's no real antitrust argument here. Nothing to see, move along. yawn

Well, I certainly had some expectations that are covered in the license. I.e that derivative work is a subject of some constraints and that copyrights are not removed from the code.

There certainly are other spaces where open source code is hosted and available, but the default for most is GitHub. I think it's in a similar position to Google 10 years ago. Sure there are other search engines, but Google is by and large the standard one.

That does put Microsoft in the unique position to have direct unfettered access to any and all open source code on GitHub without restrictions. Unless you or I get the same kind of direct access without rate limiting and antibot protection, then they do dominate and have an advantage over everyone else.

Obligatory, “Was this article written by chatgpt?”

It’s not antitrust because GitHub isn’t a monopoly. And copilot only scanned public repos, so anyone could train, if they like.

Also this isn’t like the Google Books case because Google made the books available, violating copyright. GitHub has not made the code available. So these cases aren’t similar and aren’t antitrust.

Although comically, by using GitHub I grant them copyright to publish my public repo so I suppose they could republish my repo in other ways without any additional permission. It would be interesting if their license allows them to rebounder and publish my repos in a book or something.

"Wow, that's horrible. I didn't know that sampling and mashups required an explicit license."

The conclusion essentially boils down to "remixing is not fair use". Today's hip-hop is a direct result of that decision because sampling became prohibitively expensive.