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GitHub claims their use of code for Copilot is fair use (i.e. license wouldn't matter). Nobody has challenged this in court yet to my knowledge.
by cmeacham98 4y ago
GitHub claims their use of code for Copilot is fair use (i.e. license wouldn't matter).
Nobody has challenged this in court yet to my knowledge.
- littlestymaar 4y agoI'm pretty sure they are right, but that doesn't mean that using code generated by copilot is though. Like fair use allows Google to index images and expose them in Google Image, but using an image found there elsewhere is almost always copyright infringement (unless you're lucky and the image was in the public domain). Not a lawyer though.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoindexing has robots.txt to define fine grained rules for what you want to be indexable, github repos only have public or private. So I think there needs to be some way of determining it. If they think it's fair use that also means they wouldn't think it was wrong to train it on public repos in gitlab, etc. Do they already train on repos outside Github?
- littlestymaar 4y agoI don't think you can opt out of fair use in jurisdictions where the concept exist (that would ruin the concept pretty quickly). And robot.txt is merely netiquette, it isn't enforceable in court AFAIK. That being said, by using only github-hosted code, they sidestepped the question of whether this is actually fair use, because it's part of there ToS. And there is no way to opt out someone's ToS either, unless you delete your account altogether.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoOk well if you have a permissive license, then I guess the fair use won't even need to adjudicated.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]