[blowski]

Say I drew a lovely picture and hung it outside my house for passers by to look at. I say “sure you can take a copy, no problem”, they then sell a billion prints, and don’t credit me at all.

Legally, not stealing. Ethically? I’d call that stealing.

[tducasse]

Except that's not exactly what they are doing, is it? Following on your example, it'd be like selling the advice of someone who has seen a lot of these pictures passing by windows, with a very good memory and understanding of pictures.

Github Copilot is not spitting out code verbatim, it's learning what code is, what shape it usually has, and trying to retrofit your own code onto the shape it thinks code should have.

It's not like it's doing a query like `SELECT * FROM COPIED_CODE WHERE CODE STARTS_WITH "def my_func("`.

[JohnHaugeland]

Legally that actually is stealing. They must have documented reproduction rights. Misunderstanding a verbal comment will not fly in a court.