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I'm curious how they get around licenses. For example, I have repos that show up in The Stack. Some have licenses that require inclusion of the copyright in any

I'm curious how they get around licenses. For example, I have repos that show up in The Stack. Some have licenses that require inclusion of the copyright in any source re-use or redistribution. IANAL, but it seems like inclusion in the data set and subsequent distribution without the copyright notice would be a violation.

xyst 3y ago
Probably some obscure GH legal clause stating “we own your data. Ownership is implied and we may do anything with it. Private vs public is a concept of accessibility over the internet. Not necessarily means it’s not accessible via intranet or other non-public means” It’s the similar legal clauses used for decades on social and video hosting platforms.
- angst_ridden 3y ago
  I don't think that gets around the code licenses. They may use it as if it does, but I'm not convinced that would hold up if soemone were wealthy enough to make a court case.
- ADeerAppeared 3y ago
  GH interestingly doesn't grant themselves nor others that many rights. --- You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video. This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program. --- Any User-Generated Content you post publicly, including issues, comments, and contributions to other Users' repositories, may be viewed by others. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and "fork" your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your repositories in repositories they control). If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking). --- They don't even include training for copilot (though a dodgy lawyer will likely try to include that as "part of providing the service). 3rd parties only get a license to fork your repo, seemingly not even a license to do anything with that repo. (And hot take: Github should just let people disable the fork button already.)
  - bionhoward 3y ago
    What if we include the Microsoft Services Agreement? GitHub Copilot is a Microsoft AI Service
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
In The Stack FAQ, they claim that they are doing minimal analysis of the LICENSE file and SPDX tags. I'd bet that this is enough to detect cases like GPL code, but I also bet that if this analysis fails instead of falling back to "unknown license, assume proprietary, don't copy" they fall back to "free lunch!". Because reasons.
- angst_ridden 3y ago
  I suspect you're right. Even though even permissive licenses like MIT and BSD require attribution and preservation of copyright notices. Maybe their AI just can't "reliably detect" licenses.
- ryan-c 3y ago
  At least one of my repos with no license/spdx was excluded, though the source files do say "all rights reserved" in them.

xyst 3y ago

Probably some obscure GH legal clause stating “we own your data. Ownership is implied and we may do anything with it. Private vs public is a concept of accessibility over the internet. Not necessarily means it’s not accessible via intranet or other non-public means” It’s the similar legal clauses used for decades on social and video hosting platforms.

angst_ridden 3y ago
I don't think that gets around the code licenses. They may use it as if it does, but I'm not convinced that would hold up if soemone were wealthy enough to make a court case.
ADeerAppeared 3y ago
GH interestingly doesn't grant themselves nor others that many rights. --- You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video. This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program. --- Any User-Generated Content you post publicly, including issues, comments, and contributions to other Users' repositories, may be viewed by others. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and "fork" your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your repositories in repositories they control). If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking). --- They don't even include training for copilot (though a dodgy lawyer will likely try to include that as "part of providing the service). 3rd parties only get a license to fork your repo, seemingly not even a license to do anything with that repo. (And hot take: Github should just let people disable the fork button already.)
- bionhoward 3y ago
  What if we include the Microsoft Services Agreement? GitHub Copilot is a Microsoft AI Service

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

In The Stack FAQ, they claim that they are doing minimal analysis of the LICENSE file and SPDX tags. I'd bet that this is enough to detect cases like GPL code, but I also bet that if this analysis fails instead of falling back to "unknown license, assume proprietary, don't copy" they fall back to "free lunch!". Because reasons.

angst_ridden 3y ago
I suspect you're right. Even though even permissive licenses like MIT and BSD require attribution and preservation of copyright notices. Maybe their AI just can't "reliably detect" licenses.