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by mthoms 1813 days ago
You sound quite sure that the outlying instances of direct copying wouldn't be covered by the Fair Use copyright exemption. Any particular reason for that?

I tend to think it would be covered (provided it there were relatively small snippets and not entire functions).
2 comments
jkaplowitz 1813 days ago
I'm not the person you're replying to, but one strong reason is that the global reach and standardization of copyright law is far broader than the global reach and standardization of the fair use exception. A single non-US country in which GitHub Copilot is used in a way that would be infringing without the US fair use exception, and outside the scope of any such exception in that law, would be enough to cause GitHub/MS a legal hassle. There could well be more than one such country.
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mthoms 1812 days ago
Oh, absolutely.

I'm not American, but like others around here — I was just restricting the discussion to American law for simplicity's sake.

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jkaplowitz 1812 days ago
Fair, but GitHub/MS (same company now) can't afford to ignore other countries' law in their internal evaluations of whether globally* available products like Copilot are legal.

* Minus a few countries/regions targeted by US sanctions, I assume, though they've gradually broadened their services in sanctioned countries with the necessary licenses from OFAC.

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shakna 1813 days ago
Precedent. Google v. Oracle found 9 lines, of an "obvious" implementation to be infringing.
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mthoms 1812 days ago
Right, but would 3-4 lines in the middle of a 50 line function also be infringing? What about 2 lines?

I don't know the answer. I was only surprised that the commenter seemed dead sure that any and all copying (no matter how small) would be infringing.

That just doesn't correlate with my understanding of how Fair Use works: The "amount" of the infringement is one (of several) factors in determining if something falls under Fair Use:

>The third factor assesses the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that has been used. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

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