18 ms·

GitHub Copilot isn't worth the risk

• tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  People are way to attached to single function examples. I'm struggling to find any example that actually rise up to the requested "originality, creativity, and fixation" for copyright to apply. Just because something looks similar or is even identical doesn't mean copyright applies.
  • shakna 4y ago
    You might want to take a look at some of the pieces of code examined in Google vs Oracle before you decide small and obvious cannot bear copyright in the way that you think it does. That horrifying back and forth showed that lawyers can consider very small and obvious fragments of code to be absolutely copyrightable. And that it went on for nearly a decade, should tell you that none of this is simple.
    • reidjs 4y ago
      Can you give an example? Are they trademarking `for` loops or something?
      • jpollock 4y ago
        https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=791114&p=5747565 https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=791114&p=5747565 "Google also copied the nine-line rangeCheck function in its implementing code" Comparison between the two, discussed back in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940683
    • int_19h 4y ago
      Google v. Oracle did not decide whether such code is copyrightable. The decision says that it doesn't matter because it would be fair use if it were copyrightable.
  • Jaygles 4y ago
    Whether or not a court would ultimately decide an instance of CoPilot code is copyright infringement or not isn't the main issue in my opinion. The creating opportunities for other people to sue you will be much more damaging. Lawsuits that you win will also be very expensive and its not guaranteed you'll get lawyers fees paid for by the losing party.
  • naikrovek 4y ago
    courts have repeatedly upheld that only humans can own copyright. nothing an AI generates is considered a "work" in copyright law, so they can't be violating works or derivative works. the onus falls on the copilot operator (one might say "the pilot") for purposes of copyright.
• powera 4y ago
  This feels like another drama in the style of SCO v. Linux. Lots of FUD, little to nothing for end-users to actually worry about.
  • tevon 4y ago
    Yup. There is no chance in hell of them coming after USERS of copilot.
    • falcolas 4y ago
      If a company's code is audited (internally or externally), and GPL code is found, you can bet your ass the dev who committed that GPLed code will get a stern talking too, and the company will have to re-write that code. And that's just for GPL code. Code not under an OSS license could get way worse.
• ianlevesque 4y ago
  The structural completions are way more useful than the entire function completions, even in IntelliJ, where autocomplete is already extremely high quality. The part that I find unsettling when using Copilot is the risk that credentials or secrets embedded in the code, or being edited in (.gitignore'd) config files, are being sent off to Microsoft for AI-munging and possible human review for improvements to the model.
  • patmorgan23 4y ago
    You shouldn't have any credentials in your git repos anyway. GitHub will already scan your repos and alert you if it thinks there are any credentials in their.
    • ianlevesque 4y ago
      You've never temporarily put a key into a file while testing? Or accidentally pasted one for a second then deleted it? Can you say the same for your entire team or company? Since Copilot is constantly making new suggestions, a momentary entry is all it takes.
      • PartiallyTyped 4y ago
        Copilot doesn't retrain on data generated by you in the moment; so I don't see why this is an issue unless you push the files - with the keys - to github.
        • ianlevesque 4y ago
          The model is evaluated on the server, using the content of your files.
      • ehutch79 4y ago
        credentials should never be committed. By the time you're ready to commit code, you should be reading from the environment or a config outside of the codebase, or at least .gitignore'd Once that key is in your git history, it's in the history. You might be able to edit it, but it's going to be a nightmare to do it.
• bugfix-66 4y ago
  It's interesting to consider how you might prevent training using a license without being too restrictive. Here is an example of a license that attempts to directly prohibit training. The problem is that you can imagine such software can't be used in any part of a system that might be used for training or inference (in the OS, for example). Somehow you need to additionally specify that the software is used directly... But how, what does that mean? This is left as an exercise for the reader and I hope someone can write something better: The No-AI 3-Clause License This is the BSD 2-Clause License, unmodified except for the addition of a third clause. The intention of the third clause is to prohibit, e.g., use in the training of language models. The intention of the third clause is also to prohibit, e.g., use during language model inference. Such language models are used commercially to aggregate and interpolate intellectual property. This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, no attribution or citation. In effect, the intellectual property used to train such models becomes anonymous common property. The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined. License Text: https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304facc51cdacbba3f99654652bf428 https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304fa...
  • EMIRELADERO 4y ago
    What about fair use? (both in the copying made for training itself and the resulting output from the service)
    • bugfix-66 4y ago
      We are witnessing a monstrous perversion of "fair use" and the greatest theft of intellectual property in human history.
      • EMIRELADERO 4y ago
        Do you measure IP's value using the amount of work/effort that was put into creating it, or only the end result? Currently US copyright law only cares about the end result. Effort has no meaning or bearing in any legal analysis of copyright matters.
• tevon 4y ago
  Seems this article completely misses the benefits of copilot. Its a massive step forward in productivity. For me, its about suggesting proper syntax across the various libraries we use. It really does cut time by 10s of percent. I don't buy the argument that the risk of a yet-to-be-litigated case against a different company, who will certainly fight this hard; is greater than the productivity gain of using copilot. Additionally, the security argument feels ridiculous to me. We lift code examples from gists and stackoverflow ALL THE TIME! But any good dev doesn't just paste it in and go, instead we review the code snippet to ensure its secure. Same thing with copilot, of course its going to write buggy/insecure code, but instead of going to stackoverflow for a snippet its suggested in my IDE and with my current context.
  • lelandfe 4y ago
    > I don't buy the argument that the risk... is greater than the productivity gain of using copilot. How does your company's general counsel feel? This article is written at CTOs, not engineers.
    • jzelinskie 4y ago
      I suspect prohibiting Copilot will just become another checkbox on compliance security questionnaires. The fact that Kolide can detect it and that Kolide can feed compliance suites like Vanta or SecureFrame means the infrastructure is already there. It's not only your lawyers that want these guarantees, it's often your customers.
    • tevon 4y ago
      We don't have GC (too small), so caveat my take with the fact that I'm writing from a smaller companies perspective. May be different for a larger, value-preserving company who would face more scrutiny. That being said, I still find it extremely unlikely that there would be legal ramifications from using a product being pushed by one of the largest software companies in the world. Why go for a user and not Microsoft themselves?
      • fuckstick 4y ago
• no_butterscotch 4y ago
  It isn't worth price, I was in the beta and thought it was good. But I'm hoping a better alternative that's cheaper comes about.
  • eloff 4y ago
    Do you make less than minimum wage? Because even at minimum wage it saves me enough time a month to pay for itself. In my opinion it has a positive ROI after a single day.
• samiam_iam 4y ago
  • paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Why?
• mring33621 4y ago
  1) Starting off, I support AI/ML-based code generation/completion. I would be very happy for the day when I can figuratively wave my hand and get 80-90% of what I need. 2) It might be fair to allow authors to submit repos, along with some sort of 'proof of ownership' to Copilot, in order to exclude them from the training set. There might have to be an documented (agreed-upon?) schedule for 'retraining', in order for the exclusion list to take effect in a timely manner. 3) Or just allow authors to add a robots.txt to their repos, which specifies rules for training. Just a few thoughts...
  • VBprogrammer 4y ago
    Pushing the responsibility onto copyright owners rather than GitHub / Microsoft / Copilot seems unreasonable. I'm all for AI being used like this but it also needs to come with some checks and balances to ensure it's not just regurgitation copyright code.
    • mring33621 4y ago
      OK, then just use existing copyright licensing: If a permissive, biz-friendly license (Apache 2.0, maybe others) is found in a given Repo, then it can be used in training set Otherwise, the repo cannot be used in a training set
      • mbreese 4y ago
        And then every snippet ever created with that trained data would have to include an acknowledgement for every repository included in the training set. The LICENSE file would be longer than the rest of the code. (FWIW, I agree with you theoretically, but practically it's hard to get your head around what the ramifications of that would mean)
      • leni536 4y ago
        Many permissive licenses (including Apache 2.0) require attribution.
      • coredog64 4y ago
• freefaler 4y ago
  There is some legal risk, but what percent of code you write is potentialy affected by audits before you sell it? So you're trading as a single developer real productivity gain and as a company lower costs for a potential "liability" when you're selling your company. Looks like a good bet. A lot of code will be thrown out or never be sold to anyone.
• A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  There is a risk, but the legal risk to individual users is yet to be decided. What I think is more concerning is that copilot is an extension of effectively automatic copying stuff from stack overflow with even lesser understanding of what the code does by the prompt writer. Do not get me wrong. I absolutely see the benefits, but the risk listed in the article seems less material than a further general decline in code quality. "Built by a human" may need to end up being a thing same way "organic" became a part of daily vocabulary.
  • nottorp 4y ago
    The problem is, all those people supporting Copilot in this thread can actually write said code without Copilot's help. Namely, they know what they're doing and the tool just saves them some typing. What happens when this extends to the "specialists" that blindly copy code off Stack Overflow? What happens when this becomes part of learning to program? Will it be as useful for producing working, efficient code when used by people who don't know what they're doing?
• everyone 4y ago
  I have not used it, but I don't understand how copilot could be useful. As a game programmer I don't spend much time actually writing final code. Most of my time is spent working stuff out on paper or writing little tests which I will discard. In general I want to write as little code as possible as more code = more problems. The code I do write I want to put great care and craft into in order to keep it maintainable. Giving up any of my agency in this critical area seems like a terrible idea to me. Something that will help me write more code, or write code faster is of no benefit to me.
  • timojeajea 4y ago
    I think you need to try it if you want to understand how it can be useful. I also tend to write as little code as possible. Since I started using Copilot, I don't write more code nor less code. I write the exact same code I would have written without Copilot, I'm just 25% more productive with it.
    • everyone 4y ago
      Are you a webdev? Cus I have been purely a game dev my whole career. I never wrote a single web-app until very recently when I learned some web frameworks to make simple backends for hobby projects of mine in my spare time.. I was kinda shocked how much boilerplate there is and how proscriptive the web frameworks are (I have done some node.js and asp.net) Also for non typed or compiled langauges like javascript the IDE support and autocomplete seems almost non-existent compared to what I am used to. I would imagine something like autopilot would be more useful in that context.
  • goosesanta 4y ago
    I'm in the same boat exactly. Some people are saying they're more productive with it but all I can ask is 'howwww!?' What's odd is that I'm noticing almost every single report of it being useful is from someone who is anti code licenses. Or rather, not that they're philosophically opposed, but they disregard licenses altogether because it benefits them and they can't be stopped. I've seen so few reports of usefulness coupled with legal or moral skepticism.
• thwayunion 4y ago
  Context: Kolide just launched a "GitHub Copilot Check" which you can get (along with other features) for $7/device/month. The article is marketing -- an attempt to induce demand among CTOs for an already developed product. That said: I generally agree with the assessment. Github should at the very least be telling users when it is generating code that they trained on. Until it does that, it's kind of dangerous to use. The security stuff is imo more of a red herring. But the more important point is that you can just wait a year and hire a consultant to build a better product (for you) at pretty low cost. Within a year, any organization with a non-trivial number of developers will have the option of hosting their own model trained on The Stack (all permissively licensed) and fine-tuning it on their internal code or their chosen stack. That's probably the best path forward for most organizations. If you can afford $7/dev/month for Slack-integrated nannybots you can definitely afford to pay a consultant/contractor to setup a custom model and get the best of both worlds -- not giving MSFT your company's IP while also improving your dev's productivity and happiness beyond what a generic product could deliver.
  • cdolan 4y ago
    I usually complain about "thought pieces" that push a product at the end. But now I realize I like that a lot more than being aware that the article I'm reading is going to push me to take an action (start a discussion with my team) and a probable outcome is "enforce no Co Pilot on company machines". Sneaky! Good catch. Article should have a disclaimer at the bottom
• ugh123 4y ago
  I'm really getting tired of lawyers, and collectively our "inner-lawyer", poo-pooing this merely for licensing and GPL issues, neither of which have any practical implication on anything a software engineer does. All this "controversy" around Copilot just reeks of a kind of technological "social justice" that most people didn't sign up for but seem happy to sit, watch, and commiserate on.
  • goosesanta 4y ago
    I very much assert that the legal, economic, and social context in which a programmer operates has a great impact on what the programmer produces. We established the licenses we have for good reasons. Licenses alter all of the above variables. We are not simply code production machines. We make code for reasons. You are free to view yourself as a code production machine, where what you produce is independent of the situation before and after you make anything, but many of us would like to take ownership and action on the legal, economic, and social planes with our work.
  • GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
    > poo-pooing this merely for licensing and GPL issues People want to use it, but are extremely worried about getting in hot water for using it. Thats no idle concern. It’s very reasonable to ban its use within a company given the legal limbo.
    • ugh123 4y ago
      >given the legal limbo Exactly.
• plgonzalezrx8 4y ago
  How to make it to the front page in any tech forum: Step 1: "GitHub Copilot Bad.... amirite!>" Snark aside, most of these articles miss the mark to the point where they seem like the author is tech illiterate and is just parroting soundbites from others' opinions.
  • paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Can you point to any specific examples that make you doubt the tech literacy of the author or similar articles? Perhaps some discrepancies among their points or unsupported conclusions?
• TacticalCoder 4y ago
  I saw there was some (unofficial) package for Emacs, reusing some vim Copilot integration. Anyone here tried Emacs+Copilot yet? Is it working fine? Out of curiosity I'd like to try it and, who knows... Also: does Copilot work for Clojure and is it any useful for Clojure?
• slashdev 4y ago
  Please don't use copilot, decide it's not worth the risk for your company. In the great competition that is the labor market, copilot is giving me a leg up on everyone who isn't using it. It's the biggest single tool based improvement to my productivity since JetBrains.
  • smcleod 4y ago
    I was sort of thinking the same thing - it's been such a positive impact on my productivity and time. If other people don't want to use it - don't, but you're not going to stop me and it's only going to get better as more competition arises and we finally have decent on-device options.
    • paulryanrogers 4y ago
      > ... but you're not going to stop me Take care making public statements like this if your work is highly attributable / traceable.
  • paulryanrogers 4y ago
    What do you think of folks who secretly outsource their programming work? It certainly gives them a leg up in the market.
    • eloff 4y ago
      I don't think it does. The people who are doing that are probably not that good to begin with. The people they outsource to are not that good. And then you have to communicate requirements to them, and manage them. I wouldn't be more productive doing that unless I had a whole team behind me, and then I'd be a manager, not a programmer anymore. I think I'm deliberately ignoring the tortured argument you're trying to make that copliot is similarly unethical - which is just ridiculous. It deserves to be ignored.
• iio7 4y ago
  There is a major difference between the help you can get from an IDE or editor with a language server running in the background, and then GitHub Copilot stealing away other peoples code. I sincerely hope Microsoft looses this law suit.
  • tester756 4y ago
    I'd rather have some "middle-ground" solution instead of losing such a tool I don't see anything wrong with "stealing" code that was meant to be public Banning it brings no value in compare to those tools. Also, how is that different from Google's scraping whole internet?
    • paulryanrogers 4y ago
      What if the "meant to be public" was decided because there could be strings attached, even if only to require attribution?
    • ColonelPhantom 4y ago
      > Also, how is that different from Google's scraping whole internet? Many reasons: Google Search provides sources, it links to your website. Copilot only gives the content. Google also doesn't suggest including its search results in your product verbatim.
      • tester756 4y ago
        Thus, if Copilot showed original link to the code, then it'd be fine?
        • ColonelPhantom 4y ago
          Sure; companies would expect their employees to check the license. Remember that a lot of them consider GPL (especially AGPL) software "radioactive", so it will still effectively dissuade them. However, it is likely that many engineers will skip checking their sources. I guess for this to work Copilot should include the attribution automatically in a comment. The real problem is that doing this is not possible for Copilot, because the tool itself does not know the source.
• charcircuit 4y ago
  This article makes a big mistake. It assumes copyright infringement is extremely bad and would never be worth doing. In practice when have people been sued over misusing open source software? You most likely won't be caught. And even if you are you can rewrite the code / give attribution then. Even if you do end up having to pay damages, the productivity increase for your company using copilot may be worth the damages.
  • paulryanrogers 4y ago
    After Google vs Oracle damages could easily have two or three commas.
    • charcircuit 4y ago
      I don't understand what you mean. In Google vs Oracle the copyright infringement for the copied code was settled for $0. Open source projects are not as sue happy as Oracle is.
      • paulryanrogers 4y ago
        Last I heard it was tens of millions. I'll have to look again. > Open source projects are not as sue happy as Oracle is. Comes across as punching down. Like it's OK to steal from the mom and pop stores, they're too poor and overworked to do anything about it.
        • charcircuit 4y ago
          >Like it's OK to steal from the mom and pop stores, they're too poor and overworked to do anything about it. An action that is worth the risk is not neccesarily morally or ethically correct. The article only cared about money and security. Feeling good about your actions wasn't a concern.
• abelaer 4y ago
  I have been writing my PhD thesis in VSCode with copilot enabled, and it it absurdly good at suggestions in Latex, from generating tables to writing whole paragraphs of text in the discussion.
  • consumer451 4y ago
    I wonder if that could trigger any plagiarism checkers. Not that I have any idea what I'm talking about as far as standard operating procedures in academia.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  I'm going to keep using it. You won't stop me. You won't catch me. And I just need to read the next five tokens to know whether it's right.
• rattlesnakedave 4y ago
  Reading about FOSS copyright is so exhausting. I find no meaningful distinction between reading code and learning from it, vs feeding it into a model. I’ve heard the “it spits out foss code verbatim” argument, and I really don’t buy that. I’ve never seen it. AI assisted software tooling is so powerful we really should consider the social benefits ahead of what is part of our existing legal framework.
  • paulryanrogers 4y ago
    > X is so powerful we really should consider the social benefits ahead of what is part of our existing legal framework. Laws can be slow to catch up, that's a feature. The legislature and courts exist for a reason. You can argue they're moving so slow it's better to ignore them. But that introduces a very real liability, at least until you can convince a court or elect representatives.
• dpedu 4y ago
  Like many folks here, I can write and read a variety of different programming languages. Some I've been using for a long time and know very well and some I seldom use but retain the basics. I don't use Copilot when writing languages I am very comfortable with because I'd rather write code that I completely understand. Or at least, understand to the best of my ability. I find it easier to consider edge cases and side effects when writing original code. Or at least, compared to reading someone else's that was ripped from a project you don't even know the goals of. I don't buy that Copilot improves productivity for this reason as well. I also avoid using Copilot when writing in languages I am unfamiliar with because I feel like it's robbing me of a learning experience. Or robbing me of repetition that improves my memory of how to do various things in the language. I don't know. Copilot is certainly impressive but there are too many questions - what I've mentioned and the legal ones in the OP. But perhaps that is a good thing? It is a new angle on copyright that we're going to have to answer one way or another. In programming and other fields.
  • torben-friis 4y ago
    Just to give you my two cents, for me it improves productivity massively because, while suggestions for actual code are very hit and miss, it is able to get me 90% of the way there writing tests with just the name of the test and context as prompts. This might not be that big a percentage of my actual work, but in terms of motivation it enables me to work using TDD without the friction of writing boilerplate, which in turn makes programming much more fun. Also, and this is a big one, you can directly ask questions and it replies. I find that fascinating. This morning I asked him “why didn’t you test for [specific thing]?” And it replied “because I don’t know how to properly mock [name of a library I was using]”. Yesterday, while bored in a meeting, I asked copilot whether a coworker’s proposal for an OKR was good and it replied “it’s ok, but keep in mind that it’s a lagging metric”. It’s scary.
    • dpedu 4y ago
      > Also, and this is a big one, you can directly ask questions and it replies. Now that I didn't know!
• haolez 4y ago
  I haven't used it yet. I believe when people say that it's the future of development and that every dev will have to use it or be left behind, but I can't fathom how people are comfortable sending every iteration of their code to a big tech corporation. I can't wait to see the day where we can run such solutions in our personal computers (or personal cloud servers), but I feel that, in 2022, this type of tool is not yet worth the risk. I hope this is just a temporary obstacle in our way to our future AI-assisted programming.
  • PUSH_AX 4y ago
    > but I can't fathom how people are comfortable sending every iteration of their code to a big tech corporation. I assume you only ever use self hosted source control then? And then where is it hosted?
    • TillE 4y ago
      For private business code, yes? Of course. It's very easy to host your own GitLab server if you need a fancy web interface, and even easier to just put Git anywhere if you don't.
    • haolez 4y ago
      Version control is probably the easiest thing to self host for both individuals and enterprises, but that's still very different from Copilot. A Git service provider will have access only to what I choose to push, but Copilot gets access to what I'm TYPING. It's scary, at least for me.
• endisneigh 4y ago
  If copilot is fine, then software licenses are meaningless imo
• donatj 4y ago
  A couple days ago I wrote a new class. Went to write a unit test, it wrote several hundred lines of functioning unit test for me. It's worth it.
• hipsterstal1n 4y ago
  Programmer: Uploads code to Github for the public to see / use Github: Uses code uploaded by programmers to learn and make other code better Programmer: NO FAIR! My code can only be used the way I want it to be and my code is absolutely unique and no one else has coded something like it
  • Acen 4y ago
    I think it kind of flows into two trains of thought in the against category. First off, that some people are worried about copywrited, private stuff being included in the training data. I've not read up on copilot recently, so not sure if this is a reasonable thing to be worried about or not. The other, is that people might be using Github to share stuff they've come up with other developers, but having an AI parse that information means that there's a disconnect between giver and receiver. It removes a chunk of the feedback loop being possible, which makes it so rather than it being a community of developers, it becomes something more akin to content creators and lurkers. That's not necessarily a bad thing, due to it opening up the sheer number of possible usages that end up using something. But it would minimize community feedback.
  • ColonelPhantom 4y ago
    Many FOSS developers use copyleft licenses to ensure that only FOSS benefits from their code. Copilot suggesting it for inclusion into proprietary codebases is then effectively whitewashing that GPL code. Copilot also does not provide attribution, which is a legal requirement of tons of permissive licenses, including MIT and BSD.
• khiqxj 4y ago
  you still on about copyright? what about the fact that it will just add vulns and bugs to your code? or is the industry so bad at this point that a gimmicky AI tool can do better
• Kiro 4y ago
  I would say the risk is minimal. You need to bait Copilot really hard for it to produce anything coherent from existing code. That's simply not how you use it. Regardless, the risk need to be really big for me to stop using it. It's such an essential tool for me now that I get shocked how crippled I feel when internet stops working and I realize how much I depend on it.
  • paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Then perhaps it's better not to depend on such a tool.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • Kiro 4y ago
      No way. I would rather stop programming altogether than go back to life before Copilot. You've already lost this one.
      • paulryanrogers 4y ago
        What about the tool is so intoxicating you'd give up a lucrative career if you lost it?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ralph84 4y ago
  "You might get sued if you use this software you paid for" is already covered via an indemnification clause in any reasonable enterprise software license agreement. I'm sure Microsoft/GitHub will be no different in indemnifying their customers who purchase Copilot.
  • paulryanrogers 4y ago
    > You are responsible for the code you write with GitHub Copilot’s help. We recommend that you carefully test, review, and vet the code before pushing it to production, as you would with any code you write that incorporates material you did not independently originate. Looks like Microsoft says burden is on CoPilot users to 'vet' the code.
    • ralph84 4y ago
      That's them saying you can't sue them if the code Copilot suggested doesn't work. Regarding someone else suing you because you used Copilot, their terms say: > GitHub will defend Customer against any claim brought by an unaffiliated third party to the extent it alleges Customer’s authorized use of the Service infringes a copyright, patent, or trademark or misappropriates a trade secret of an unaffiliated third party.
      • int_19h 4y ago
        For CoPilot, the "use" would be asking it to give you completions, not shipping the product that contains those completions. Also, the ToS for "additional products", which specifically covers CoPilot, has this to say: "The code, functions, and other output returned to you by GitHub Copilot are called “Suggestions.” GitHub does not claim any rights in Suggestions, and you retain ownership of and responsibility for Your Code, including Suggestions you include in Your Code."
• naikrovek 4y ago
  I seem to recall a recent copyright office decision [0] where it was decided that an AI does not own copyright of its own work, because the output is not the effort of an entity which used intellectual effort to create the output. only a human can own copyright, according to that (US-only) copyright office decision. this means the output of an AI isn't even considered "work" in the eyes of copyright law, if I am understanding. if the output of copilot is not a "work" then the output of copilot cannot be a "derivative work," and cannot violate copyright. Courts have repeatedly found that only stuff humans create can be copyrighted. If GitHub Copilot can't produce a work, it can't violate copyright; only human operators can do that. This makes the recent GitHub announcement about coming Copilot features make much more sense legally: features which show the origin of the suggestion and which allows a user to select which code licenses to use suggestions from. previously these seemed like things to appease critics, but they're tools to help paying copilot users know what code they're actually using. Nice. IANAL. anyway, this lawsuit is gonna fail so effin' hard. lol [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off...
  • paulryanrogers 4y ago
    No one is going to take the AI to court. Just like no one is going to sue the Ctrl+V keys on a keyboard. They're going to sue users of Copilot and or human producers of it.
    • naikrovek 4y ago
      the humans at GitHub have created software which by definition cannot create copyrighted works. if the AI cannot create copyrighted works, it cannot violate copyright. Humans can create copyrighted works, and therefore can violate copyright. Given these things, I fail to see how anyone at GitHub could get into any trouble, legally. Thus, the suit against GitHub/Microsoft will fail, which was the point that I apparently failed to communicate clearly enough. If anyone is liability-adjacent here, it is copilot users, who must always be mindful of what they write anyway.