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No, you cannot charge GitHub for using your code in Copilot. It's the same as you cannot charge all humans that read your code for reading it. You are free to m

by lacker 5y ago

No, you cannot charge GitHub for using your code in Copilot. It's the same as you cannot charge all humans that read your code for reading it. You are free to make your code private, and charge people who want to read it. But you can't make your code public and hope to charge money to people who do "fair use" things with it. It doesn't matter how your code is licensed.

booi 5y ago
… what. Usage restrictions, especially for profit, can absolutely be in your code’s license. I don’t see how regurgitating code verbatim can be considered fair use. Github is likely only using appropriately licensed code.
- lacker 5y ago
  You can restrict some activities, but not all. In particular you can't restrict using code as an AI training set. To be fair the law isn't totally clear here though. For example see https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2020/02/27/copyrights-in-the-era-of-ai.html https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2020/02/27/copyrights-in-t... Several cases – most notably the litigation surrounding Google Books – suggest that using copyrighted works for the non-expressive purpose of training AI models amounts to fair use. So Copilot itself is not infringing when it trains these models. Individual people using Copilot are probably safe as well since small accidental copyright infringements are usually okay, but perhaps some cases it would run into trouble. You can tell Copilot is using code under fair use, not according to a license, because almost all licenses require you to maintain the license and attribution and Copilot doesn't do that.
jimmygrapes 5y ago
Kind of a tangent but this made me think: is there a market for (or reason why it isn't common to) selling access to source code? I assume the primary barrier is the assumption of "piracy" or redistributing the code once somebody has purchased access, but is there anything else I'm missing?

by lacker 5y ago

booi 5y ago

… what. Usage restrictions, especially for profit, can absolutely be in your code’s license. I don’t see how regurgitating code verbatim can be considered fair use. Github is likely only using appropriately licensed code.

lacker 5y ago
You can restrict some activities, but not all. In particular you can't restrict using code as an AI training set. To be fair the law isn't totally clear here though. For example see https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2020/02/27/copyrights-in-the-era-of-ai.html https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2020/02/27/copyrights-in-t... Several cases – most notably the litigation surrounding Google Books – suggest that using copyrighted works for the non-expressive purpose of training AI models amounts to fair use. So Copilot itself is not infringing when it trains these models. Individual people using Copilot are probably safe as well since small accidental copyright infringements are usually okay, but perhaps some cases it would run into trouble. You can tell Copilot is using code under fair use, not according to a license, because almost all licenses require you to maintain the license and attribution and Copilot doesn't do that.

jimmygrapes 5y ago

Kind of a tangent but this made me think: is there a market for (or reason why it isn't common to) selling access to source code? I assume the primary barrier is the assumption of "piracy" or redistributing the code once somebody has purchased access, but is there anything else I'm missing?