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I don't think releasing a commercial product that copies people's code without complying with the license is anywhere near fair use. Also, the open source comm

I don't think releasing a commercial product that copies people's code without complying with the license is anywhere near fair use. Also, the open source community has far less leverage to apply pressure to Google than it does to GitHub. We may be able to do something about this.

CrazyStat 4y ago
> I don't think releasing a commercial product that copies people's code without complying with the license is anywhere near fair use. The whole point of fair use is that the license doesn't matter. You can have a license that says I'm not allowed to use what you wrote for any purpose ever and I can still use it under fair use.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  Yes but among the four factors that are used to evaluate fair use claims are whether it is being used commercially (it is) and how it affects the market for the thing that was copied (it clearly would since one way code is used is being imported by other code, if Copilot didn't insert my code into the new app, they might very well use my open source project that provides the same code).
  - CrazyStat 4y ago
    I wasn't staking a position on whether Copilot is fair use, just pointing out that fair use doesn't care about license. That said, copilot itself is not a replacement for your open source project that it was trained on. The code it generates may or may not be, but that's probably not Github's problem as far as copyright law is concerned.
- Longlius 4y ago
  IANAL but fair use is primarily about the public interest. What public interest is served by allowing proprietary software vendors to copy GPL code that's reserved for the commons? I don't really think this argument passes muster.
pmarreck 4y ago
> I don't think releasing a commercial product that copies people's code without complying with the license is anywhere near fair use. It's just automating the copying and pasting (and slight reworking) of boilerplate code that would normally take me much longer to do, especially when I am working with a language I'm less familiar with but is necessary for my stack. I've literally never seen it suggest code that is more or less almost exactly what I would have come up with given a lot more time. In essence, it eliminates tedium- exactly the point of all of programming: Work elimination.
RHSeeger 4y ago
It seems fairly similar, at least to me, to a search engine copying snippets of other people's web sites and displaying them on a page. Admittedly, there's still some discussion as to whether or not _that_ is fair use, but I think enough of the population think it is (with many news organizations disagreeing).

CrazyStat 4y ago

> I don't think releasing a commercial product that copies people's code without complying with the license is anywhere near fair use. The whole point of fair use is that the license doesn't matter. You can have a license that says I'm not allowed to use what you wrote for any purpose ever and I can still use it under fair use.

jrumbut 4y ago
Yes but among the four factors that are used to evaluate fair use claims are whether it is being used commercially (it is) and how it affects the market for the thing that was copied (it clearly would since one way code is used is being imported by other code, if Copilot didn't insert my code into the new app, they might very well use my open source project that provides the same code).
- CrazyStat 4y ago
  I wasn't staking a position on whether Copilot is fair use, just pointing out that fair use doesn't care about license. That said, copilot itself is not a replacement for your open source project that it was trained on. The code it generates may or may not be, but that's probably not Github's problem as far as copyright law is concerned.
Longlius 4y ago
IANAL but fair use is primarily about the public interest. What public interest is served by allowing proprietary software vendors to copy GPL code that's reserved for the commons? I don't really think this argument passes muster.

pmarreck 4y ago

> I don't think releasing a commercial product that copies people's code without complying with the license is anywhere near fair use. It's just automating the copying and pasting (and slight reworking) of boilerplate code that would normally take me much longer to do, especially when I am working with a language I'm less familiar with but is necessary for my stack. I've literally never seen it suggest code that is more or less almost exactly what I would have come up with given a lot more time. In essence, it eliminates tedium- exactly the point of all of programming: Work elimination.

RHSeeger 4y ago

It seems fairly similar, at least to me, to a search engine copying snippets of other people's web sites and displaying them on a page. Admittedly, there's still some discussion as to whether or not _that_ is fair use, but I think enough of the population think it is (with many news organizations disagreeing).