I think if this is successful it will be very bad for the open world. Large platforms like github will just stick blanket agreements into the TOS which grant t

I think if this is successful it will be very bad for the open world. Large platforms like github will just stick blanket agreements into the TOS which grant them permission (and require you indemnify them for any third party code you submit). By doing so they'll gain a monopoly on comprehensively trained AI, and the open world that doesn't have the lever of a TOS will not at all be able to compete with that. Copilot has seemed to have some outright copying problems, presumably because its a bit over-fit. (perhaps to work at all it must be because its just failing to generalize enough at the current state of development) --- but I'm doubtful that this litigation could distinguish the outright copying from training in a way that doesn't substantially infringe any copyright protected right (e.g. where the AI learns the 'ideas' rather than verbatim reproducing their exact expressions). The same goes for many other initiatives around AI training material-- e.g. people not wanting their own pictures being used to train facial recognition. Litigating won't be able to stop it but it will be able to hand the few largest quasi-monopolisits like facebook, google, and microsoft a near monopoly over new AI tools when they're the only ones that can overcome the defaults set by legislation or litigation. It's particularly bad because the spectacular data requirements and training costs already create big centralization pressures in the control of the technology. We will not be better off if we amplify these pressures further with bad legal precedents.