[zarzavat]

You and I have a different understanding of “willful”. If you’ve used copilot you’ll know that the vast majority of the time it’s not infringing anybody’s copyright, it’s creating code that is highly unique to the problem you are trying to solve.

[account42]

All output of machine learning algorithms is derived from the training set. There is no creativity, just lots of complexity. What that means legally has yet to be fully determined.

[zarzavat]

If that were the case, how can models such as DALL-E 2 generate “Homer Simpson in The Godfather” type images. It’s clear that machine learning models are capable of independent creation.

As far as copilot goes, yes it’s possible to get it to recite copyrighted works, but in normal usage it is creating independent works because it is too influenced by the structure of your code around the insertion point to recite anything. It’s auto completing things like the variable names that you already declared, simple loops and function applications, etc.

> What that means legally has yet to be fully determined.

At least in the US, the Supreme Court ruled in Google v Oracle that the entire Java API is not copyrightable. Copilot users are very far from crossing the line, the courts are not going to come after some de minimis 10-line snippet that copilot generated.

Whether Microsoft itself was legally in the right by training copilot is a more interesting legal question that remains unresolved.