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My immediate thought is a human plagiarized the code, changed some variable names and white space up, and then uploaded it to GitHub without a license, or witho
by carlgreene 4y ago
My immediate thought is a human plagiarized the code, changed some variable names and white space up, and then uploaded it to GitHub without a license, or without a copyright license and that is where Co-Pilot got it from.
I could be totally wrong, but I have a hard time believing GitHub didn’t pay attention to licenses when training CP. I would put my money on some random person not respecting a license (like me, many times) and putting it up without thinking about the downstream effects.
- a3w 4y agoGithub text search is pretty comprehensive. Should be findable, if it is in a public repository. Are private repos treated as copyrighted by the "only copyright free code" case?
- highwaylights 4y agoEven in this instance though, I’m not sure that this really falls at the feet of the person that uploaded it. IANAL, but if someone naively uploads my copyrighted code and just checks the MIT License box without knowing better, I’m not about to sue them over it. I’m not sure “but this 13 year old kid learning to code for the first time uploaded it under a permissive license and it got gobbled up by our crawler so it’s not our fault your honour” would be an effective defence in court, either. That all said, I’ve largely just described any modern search engine which has been working in this way for years. So.. shrug? Will no doubt be litigated at some point down the road.