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by towelrod 1457 days ago
I should not have to opt out. GitHub should have to respect my license. I already said they can use my code, as long as they keep an attribution intact (via a BSD license, for example)

GitHub is taking my code and ignoring the license. I don’t understand why anyone would think that is ok.

3 comments

No, you're ignoring what you agreed to when you accepted the terms of service. GitHub can display your code, and YOU granted them that license by accepting their terms.

I find the only people making these OSS claims haven't used copilot and tend to lack any real contributions to OSS. What you're describing is just simply not the case for 99.9 percent of the code snippets being produced/generated based on data from GitHub.

I actually care more about putting code into peoples hands versus someone copying a license file, that's probably why I use the unlicense... "Because you have more important things to do than enriching lawyers or imposing petty restrictions on users"

Are you saying the FSF accepted github's terms of service when someone mirrored Emacs into github?
You mean when a maintainer of Emacs setup the mirror?

https://sachachua.com/blog/2015/12/2015-12-10-emacs-chat-joh...

Of course in this case as well, it even says that mirror is not endorsed by the copyright owner.
I have used Copilot in its free phase, and have made substantial OSS contributions to various projects as well as shepherding my own projects (a few of which have attained a degree of success). Building an AI model off the community's code and selling the model (and code generated by rearranging statements and patterns found in the training data) back to the community is odious.
Not everyone who has code at GitHub uploaded it personally. Plenty of code was written before GitHub even existed and that code is still uploaded there.
That’s what fair use doctrine is about. Copyright doesn’t say “you can’t do anything without permission”, it says “you can’t do anything without permission, except for a few categories of things which cannot be forbidden”, and Copilot claims that what they’re doing fits in one of those categories.
Do you not think there are limitations on the copyrights you claim? The courts certainly do!