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It doesn't void anything. If you use Copilot to copy some licensed code illegally, you are the person in breach, not the tool. People using Copilot are possibly

It doesn't void anything. If you use Copilot to copy some licensed code illegally, you are the person in breach, not the tool. People using Copilot are possibly littering their code-base with future copyright liabilities, and they'd have no idea about it. Until someone writes an AI to find infringing software and automatically sue them...

cowtools 4y ago
Yes, that's the other outcome, which is the industry getting GPL'd to death for using this. But I don't think there is an established precedent when it comes to this. I don't know much about AI/SL but I think the logical outcome is that using a transformer to generate source code is going to result in an over-trained system that produces sections of code verbatim because of the relative size of the space of all valid programs vs the space of all possible programs. It's not like art where you get soft failure if a single pixel or word is wrong: the inclusion, exclusion, or replacement of a single instruction or symbol is enough to introduce fatal bugs into a computer program. If the system doesn't have the capacity to understand programs generally (which it probably won't if it's just a transformer), then you're going to end up with a system that spits out samples from training data that do work.
nickstinemates 4y ago
A lot of M&A activity use tools like Blackduck software that does exactly this. It flags partials.
Aeolun 4y ago
It’s fairly obvious if Copilot is regurgitating entire blocks of code that someone else wrote. In 999 out of a 1000 cases it’s just spitting out boilerplate though.
- gfodor 4y ago
  Yep - it would be useful if more people had literacy of using the tool for these conversations. I don't blame them, that shouldn't be expected or required, but there is a large gap between how bad this looks and how materially bad it is when you take into account the actual way Copilot is usually used.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Yes but if you have a large team you'll be using it hundreds of times a day. I will not be surprised if Copilot indemnity insurance is a thing in M&A in a five years.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  If you told the legal team at any mid-sized or larger company "we're pretty sure only 1 in 1000 lines of code our developers write breaches someone else's copyright" there'd be some serious hell to pay.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    No, no. 1 out of every 1000 lines of code has the potential to breach some form of license. If someone is motivated to search through our entire (proprietary, private) codebase. They match it with repositories that are freely available. They’re properly motivated to make a problem out of it (some twitter randos?), and most importantly they gain some benefit out of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars engaging with our legal team. By the time you satisfy all the conditions required for it to be an issue you are talking nation-state actors.
mmgutz 4y ago
> to copy some licensed [anything] illegally, you are the person in breach, not the tool ahem napster, pirate bay ...

cowtools 4y ago

Yes, that's the other outcome, which is the industry getting GPL'd to death for using this. But I don't think there is an established precedent when it comes to this. I don't know much about AI/SL but I think the logical outcome is that using a transformer to generate source code is going to result in an over-trained system that produces sections of code verbatim because of the relative size of the space of all valid programs vs the space of all possible programs. It's not like art where you get soft failure if a single pixel or word is wrong: the inclusion, exclusion, or replacement of a single instruction or symbol is enough to introduce fatal bugs into a computer program. If the system doesn't have the capacity to understand programs generally (which it probably won't if it's just a transformer), then you're going to end up with a system that spits out samples from training data that do work.

nickstinemates 4y ago

A lot of M&A activity use tools like Blackduck software that does exactly this. It flags partials.

Aeolun 4y ago

It’s fairly obvious if Copilot is regurgitating entire blocks of code that someone else wrote. In 999 out of a 1000 cases it’s just spitting out boilerplate though.

gfodor 4y ago
Yep - it would be useful if more people had literacy of using the tool for these conversations. I don't blame them, that shouldn't be expected or required, but there is a large gap between how bad this looks and how materially bad it is when you take into account the actual way Copilot is usually used.
jeremyjh 4y ago
Yes but if you have a large team you'll be using it hundreds of times a day. I will not be surprised if Copilot indemnity insurance is a thing in M&A in a five years.
BeefWellington 4y ago
If you told the legal team at any mid-sized or larger company "we're pretty sure only 1 in 1000 lines of code our developers write breaches someone else's copyright" there'd be some serious hell to pay.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  No, no. 1 out of every 1000 lines of code has the potential to breach some form of license. If someone is motivated to search through our entire (proprietary, private) codebase. They match it with repositories that are freely available. They’re properly motivated to make a problem out of it (some twitter randos?), and most importantly they gain some benefit out of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars engaging with our legal team. By the time you satisfy all the conditions required for it to be an issue you are talking nation-state actors.

mmgutz 4y ago

> to copy some licensed [anything] illegally, you are the person in breach, not the tool ahem napster, pirate bay ...