4 ms·
> If you were to write all those ideas and idioms down and pass them to someone who had not seen the Linux source code, who then used it to reimplement similar
by BeefWellington 4y ago
> If you were to write all those ideas and idioms down and pass them to someone who had not seen the Linux source code, who then used it to reimplement similar functionality, neither of you would probably be guilty of copyright infringement. (there are still patents of course). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
This response doesn't relate to the example provided by CameronNemo, as it's a different scenario.
At any rate, there is no clean room because copilot has "seen" the literal source. It is not comparable to clean room implementation in any fashion.
- jazzyjackson 4y agoa training program reads source code and produces a model the software running the model does not have access to source code as the parent said, it depends how you characterize it, which is why this will be decided by whoever can afford the best lawyers.
- BeefWellington 4y agoWell, the problem is with that characterization is that it's shown to be false already. Copilot has reproduced entire functions from existing codebases, which invalidates the idea it doesn't have access to source code.
- jazzyjackson 4y agoI would have to better understand language transform models to back up my argument, but my impression is that copilot is not sitting ontop of a SQL database ripping the most likely line of code out of a row of a table, rather, it is a lossy compression that happens to be able to reconstruct some data better than others