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> The idea is that it allows you to INTENTIONALLY void any copyright you want. It doesn't void copyright. Anyone that uses code that Copilot spits out which i
by lamontcg 4y ago
> The idea is that it allows you to INTENTIONALLY void any copyright you want.
It doesn't void copyright.
Anyone that uses code that Copilot spits out which infringes on someone else's copyright is still liable. There's no requirement for intent. That may be a mitigating factor in terms of remediation, but it cannot void the copyright itself.
It can, however, produce a plague of completely ignorant copyright infringement, and since the user of Copilot has no idea where the code is coming from, there's no way to check if it was trained on infringing code.
If I used Copilot I would be real worried about the legal implications for me and that I could easily be accused of copyright infringement or plagiarism[*]. Of course people seem to not really care these days if they can cheat to get ahead so this is probably a feature, and 99.9% of user won't have their reputations ruined by using it.
[*] Although I'm personally more worried about the fact that most of the code will be wikipedia/blogs-quality and filled with bugs, edge cases and performance issues.
- anon2020dot00 4y agoBuggy code can easily come from copying Stack Overflow or even from Github open-source repos so I doubt CoPilot would contribute to it anymore than it already is.
- int_19h 4y agoLarge companies don't worry about this because they already have tooling that scans code and matches it against other public code out there (to avoid legal troubles if some dev quietly copies some GPL'd code or something like that). Everybody else basically has to manually check every snippet produced, which makes all the supposed convenience moot. Between that and the typical quality of Copilot snippets, it's pretty obvious who the real beneficiary of this technology is: large sweatshops like Infosys.