4 ms·
Whether Copilot infringes copyright is a muddy area. I personally would like to think that the world where machines can be trained on any data is easier to live
by alkonaut 5y ago
Whether Copilot infringes copyright is a muddy area. I personally would like to think that the world where machines can be trained on any data is easier to live in than one where trained machines are tainted by the licens of input.
The interesting question however isn't whether Copilot infringes copyrights, but whether those that use copilot do.
- Rapzid 5y agoOne of the points being made is that in the worst-case scenario of getting Copilot to repeat back verbatim chunks of code from projects, something that's not its primary use case, it would be a situation similar to a copy machine. You can copy a page out of a book, or the whole book, and be covered under fair use. But you can't sell your copy on Amazon. And if you did, the copy machine nor Xerox ran afoul of copyright law. You could also use a copy machine to copy fragments of the Linux kernel source out of a book about the Linux source and use them to construct an entirely original work that's not considered derivative. The devil's in the details, but GitHub talks at some length about the plagiarization issue and their plans to detect and link back to where verbatim chunks exist in the training data to let the operator decide what to do soo.. IDK.