5 ms·

Copyright is not an indefinite ability to control a work. You can't for instance stop me from lending or leasing my rightfully acquired copies of your works, no

by wbl 5y ago

Copyright is not an indefinite ability to control a work. You can't for instance stop me from lending or leasing my rightfully acquired copies of your works, nor from making short quotations for criticism, nor teaching a class about it, etc. Particularly in the context of the occasional, unintentional reproduction of short snippets that likely need adaption to the rest of the code they are inserted into I suspect courts are unlikely to find more than de minimis, unactionable, infringement.

Spivak 5y ago
> You can't for instance stop me from lending or leasing my rightfully acquired copies… I mean in this specific example can’t I though? Yes the first sale doctrine applies to certain kinds of works but not every work and specifically not software. I absolutely can grant you a single non-transferable license to use my software.
Uehreka 5y ago
Right, but Copilot is not creating a piece of critical media about the code it is ingesting (IANAL, but my understanding is that this gets interpreted pretty strictly). I don’t think the normal Fair Use classes apply here. Even if the code isn’t being copied verbatim, it feels like the spirit of these licenses is being violated, although I don’t know if that’s enough to get anywhere in court. But if the code is in fact being copied (like that Quake example) then the license is definitely being violated. But I feel like there’s too much analysis in these comments of whether a current law is being broken, and not enough thought about what will happen if licenses like the GPL can no longer keep intellectual property free. Open source licenses are part of the foundation of this community, and we’ll be much worse off without them. We really need a way to prevent this kind of IP laundering, and if current laws won’t do it, then we need new ones.

by wbl 5y ago

Spivak 5y ago

> You can't for instance stop me from lending or leasing my rightfully acquired copies… I mean in this specific example can’t I though? Yes the first sale doctrine applies to certain kinds of works but not every work and specifically not software. I absolutely can grant you a single non-transferable license to use my software.

Uehreka 5y ago

Right, but Copilot is not creating a piece of critical media about the code it is ingesting (IANAL, but my understanding is that this gets interpreted pretty strictly). I don’t think the normal Fair Use classes apply here. Even if the code isn’t being copied verbatim, it feels like the spirit of these licenses is being violated, although I don’t know if that’s enough to get anywhere in court. But if the code is in fact being copied (like that Quake example) then the license is definitely being violated. But I feel like there’s too much analysis in these comments of whether a current law is being broken, and not enough thought about what will happen if licenses like the GPL can no longer keep intellectual property free. Open source licenses are part of the foundation of this community, and we’ll be much worse off without them. We really need a way to prevent this kind of IP laundering, and if current laws won’t do it, then we need new ones.