>We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.
>This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use
I would say they would have a pretty hard time to justify using the content for AI training (and selling) based on that license. Copilot didn't exist at the time when many agreed to that license, so an argument saying Copilot is part of the service would be difficult to pull off. Moreover they don't even provide copilot to people hosting on GitHub.
Note that MS themselves are not claiming that they are allowed to use the code due to their terms of service. They claim they can do it due to fair use.
I would say they've used code they host to train an AI and they charge for a fraction the GPU time required to train and customize their model. they're selling you their model, not the code it produces.
if this is indeed how they charge for Copilot, and I don't know if it is or is not, then they will need to show that they have done their due diligence in making sure that code is not reproduced verbatim when a user requests that it not reproduce code verbatim.
I'm quite sure that GitHub can defend Copilot in court. That's part of the process of offering a new feature to customers; making sure that it is legal and defensible to do so.
All of the armchair attorneys here who think they know better than GitHub's attorneys when operation of the service puts GitHub's ass on the line is ... I wish I had 1 percent of that confidence. I would be a thousand times more confident than I am now.
users of github.com are responsible for their own use of any code they find, however they find it.
GitHub shows code to those who wish to see it. it is up to the person using that code to use it according to the license. when I buy a car, it is up to me to use that car according to the law. when I buy a gun, it is up to me to use that gun according to the law. etc.
> when I buy a car, it is up to me to use that car according to the law.
And yet we (modified) the law to mandate speedometers and seatbelts to make you more aware of the speed and more secure against failure. We require car companies to perform thousands of crash tests to validate that the tool the give you is safe for when you inevitably push “according to the law” a little too far.
We mandate mirrors and backup cameras because we know that those who intend to follow the law closely still have blind spots and it’s in everyone’s best interest to mitigate and increase awareness.
> when I buy a gun, it is up to me to use that gun according to the law. etc.
And yet few laws have caused the US (and other nations) to question this principle quite like gun laws.
Gun laws are really both a perfect example and the worst example of why we’re having a debate around CodePilot. We both expect people to be responsible for their decisions (you need to verify legality of that code snippet before using) while also giving them the notion that they can toe the line as much as possible (why regulate the availability of dangerous tools, crime is illegal, users won’t make a mistake).
Guns are used to kill people despite it being illegal. That’s why people want gun control laws. And in a comparison I never expected I would make, perhaps people want AI to be regulated because it will be (is?) used to circumvent copyright.
Edit: I don’t know if I really have a side I stand on in this debate overall, but I think the argument for why it’s copyright violation today is pretty compelling. We wouldn’t make the progress we’ve made without this violation and perhaps the loss of copyright is a worthy sacrifice?
> I think the argument for why it’s copyright violation today is pretty compelling.
I still don't see how there is any footing for a copyright infringement claim here, given that users who put public code on github.com explicitly grant GitHub a license to use that code to provide services to other GitHub users.
that license grant is above and beyond what any specified license terms the repo itself grants to users of the code.
you literally grant GitHub the right to do this when you put your code on github.com.
Actually no you don’t. The ToS is obviously long, but it’s surprisingly human readable and tech friendly (eg they have verbiage on reproduction of your content for search indexing).
Relevant snippet:
> you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking). You may grant further rights if you adopt a license.
They key parts are the “through GitHub” portion. GitHub is being careful to not give people rights to your content beyond the right to view it through GitHub. Performance refers to multimedia like music and video assets (according to others parts I didn’t reproduce).
No one is gaining a license to use your code through the inclusion on GitHub.
>We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.
>This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use
I would say they would have a pretty hard time to justify using the content for AI training (and selling) based on that license. Copilot didn't exist at the time when many agreed to that license, so an argument saying Copilot is part of the service would be difficult to pull off. Moreover they don't even provide copilot to people hosting on GitHub.
Note that MS themselves are not claiming that they are allowed to use the code due to their terms of service. They claim they can do it due to fair use.