<story><title>GitHub Copilot is not infringing copyright</title><url>https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringing-your-copyright/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>glitchc</author><text>I disagree with this article. GitHub Copilot is indeed infringing copyright and not only in a grey zone, but in a very clear black and white fashion that our corporate taskmasters (Microsoft included) have defended as infringement.&lt;p&gt;The legal debate around copyright infringement has always centered around the rights granted by the owner vs the rights appropriated by the user, with the owner&amp;#x27;s wants superseding user needs&amp;#x2F;wants. Any open-source code available on Github is controlled by the copyright notice of the owner granting specific rights to users. Copilot is a commercial product, therefore, Github can only use code that the owners make available for commercial use. Every other instance of code used is a case of copyright infringement, a clear case by Microsoft&amp;#x27;s own definition of copyright infringement [1][2].&lt;p&gt;Github (and by extension Microsoft) is gambling on the fact that their license agreement granting them a license to the code in exchange for access to the platform supersedes the individual copyright notices attached to each repo. This is a fine line to walk and will likely not survive in a court of law. They are betting on deep lawyer pockets to see them through this, but are more likely than not to lose this battle. I suspect we will see how this plays out in the coming months.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;info&amp;#x2F;Cloud.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;info&amp;#x2F;Cloud.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;contact&amp;#x2F;dmca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;contact&amp;#x2F;dmca&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>j4yav</author><text>The part that feels really obvious to me is that, if I made an AI that could generate music by looking through the entire (copyrighted) back catalog of the Beatles for example, and it would output music that I could control to be very much or even exactly like the original recordings, or I could accidentally do it, that it wouldn’t really be a way to launder the original licenses&amp;#x2F;copyright into the public domain.&lt;p&gt;Or maybe it is, but if so it essentially means the end of licensing because it would be trivial to make an AI that can take an input and produce the same output. Or maybe even cp is good enough to strip the source of its original license in that case.&lt;p&gt;Open source licenses are worth protecting or you break the cycle that helps more software be open.</text></comment>
<story><title>GitHub Copilot is not infringing copyright</title><url>https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringing-your-copyright/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>glitchc</author><text>I disagree with this article. GitHub Copilot is indeed infringing copyright and not only in a grey zone, but in a very clear black and white fashion that our corporate taskmasters (Microsoft included) have defended as infringement.&lt;p&gt;The legal debate around copyright infringement has always centered around the rights granted by the owner vs the rights appropriated by the user, with the owner&amp;#x27;s wants superseding user needs&amp;#x2F;wants. Any open-source code available on Github is controlled by the copyright notice of the owner granting specific rights to users. Copilot is a commercial product, therefore, Github can only use code that the owners make available for commercial use. Every other instance of code used is a case of copyright infringement, a clear case by Microsoft&amp;#x27;s own definition of copyright infringement [1][2].&lt;p&gt;Github (and by extension Microsoft) is gambling on the fact that their license agreement granting them a license to the code in exchange for access to the platform supersedes the individual copyright notices attached to each repo. This is a fine line to walk and will likely not survive in a court of law. They are betting on deep lawyer pockets to see them through this, but are more likely than not to lose this battle. I suspect we will see how this plays out in the coming months.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;info&amp;#x2F;Cloud.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;info&amp;#x2F;Cloud.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;contact&amp;#x2F;dmca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;contact&amp;#x2F;dmca&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lubujackson</author><text>&amp;quot;Copilot is a commercial product, therefore, Github can only use code that the owners make available for commercial use.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;IANAL, but this doesn&amp;#x27;t sound quite right. There is a difference between &amp;quot;using&amp;quot; code (running it in a commercial product) and manipulating it as arbitrary data within a commercial product.&lt;p&gt;It definitely can be a gray area, but let&amp;#x27;s say I use Amazon&amp;#x27;s service where I email a PDF to my Kindle - is it Amazon&amp;#x27;s responsibility to know the copyright status of the PDF, or mine? In both cases a commercial product is manipulating copywritten data for the benefit of a user.</text></comment>