4 ms·
It's interesting how the community that used to fervently argue that, say, the sampling of a few seconds of a musical composition is so obviously fair use doesn
by IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
It's interesting how the community that used to fervently argue that, say, the sampling of a few seconds of a musical composition is so obviously fair use doesn't extend the same attitude when it comes to snippets of source code.
Indeed I don't remember any of these complaints ever being made about, for example, AI-generated music or images, even though they work exactly the same and were trained on datasets of copyrighted works, both commercial and CC-licensed.
Compared to the manual sampling that DJs and other musicians do, the AI process almost certainly produces only fairly generic code snippets, since they always need a multitude of examples. Some loop-through-file python snippet is a legal risk but five seconds of a Disney song don't reach the level of creativity needed for copyright to matter? That seems strange to me...
- ShroudedNight 5y agoWhile I think there is some room for retrospective humility, It seems perfectly consistent to believe that, morally, de minimis use of copyrighted material should be considered fair-use while acknowledging that there are practical legal and professional risks for doing so (especially blindly), and that encouraging people to engage in that behaviour in an uncritical manner (especially in the context of engineering) is sociologically reckless.
- _ph_ 5y agoThe problem is, we don't know what Copilot is going to do. Sometimes it reproduces entire files in verbatim. That is certainly a copyright violation. Sometimes it produces whole functions which are more or less taking verbatim from a copyrighted file. The user cannot see the level to which they are "verbatim" and there are also no clear legal guidelines to what is considered violating copyrights and what not.