People keep on talking about the GPL in these cases, but there’s absolutely nothing whatsoever special about the GPL:
any code that is not public domain (or under a public-domain-equivalent license) is equally affected. Any mention of the GPL is a red herring.
Copilot is completely depending on the legal theory of being effectively exempt from copyright, under fair use doctrine; if that legal theory falls apart, the entire space (and a lot of other machine learning stuff) is utterly doomed.
Will it, won’t it, should it, shouldn’t it? Dunno.
(And when people say that it should just say what license the code it generates is under and what attribution or similar is required: Copilot can’t tell whether it’s reproducing copyrightable chunks of code, or indeed where what it produces came from, by the very nature of machine learning techniques. The whole verbatim reproduction issue demonstrates this—they’re trying to avoid such reproductions, which a cynic might say is because it weakens their fair use claim, but it’s not easy to do.)
Copilot is completely depending on the legal theory of being effectively exempt from copyright, under fair use doctrine; if that legal theory falls apart, the entire space (and a lot of other machine learning stuff) is utterly doomed.
Will it, won’t it, should it, shouldn’t it? Dunno.
(And when people say that it should just say what license the code it generates is under and what attribution or similar is required: Copilot can’t tell whether it’s reproducing copyrightable chunks of code, or indeed where what it produces came from, by the very nature of machine learning techniques. The whole verbatim reproduction issue demonstrates this—they’re trying to avoid such reproductions, which a cynic might say is because it weakens their fair use claim, but it’s not easy to do.)