[insanitybit]

Indeed. I had to write a graph traversal iterator in Rust and Copilot wrote the entire thing for me. I could have written it myself, it would have looked similar, but it just... did it. It was trivially to test and verify correctness.

That's minutes of work, maybe even 10 minutes, turned into seconds. That is huge.

The risk here is extremely low. Who is going to sue consumers of Copilot? It makes no sense. They'll sue Microsoft and, in a decade, we'll see if the win or lose (IMO Microsoft will win, but it's not important).

[boxed]

Did it "write it for you"? Or did it "illegally copy it for you"? That's a very big difference.

I'm not claiming that you can't get big productivity boosts by ripping off code like a crazy person. I bet you can! But should you?

[throwaway675309]

Nothing has been decided in a court of law so saying that it's "illegal" is disingenuous.

Even if it's remarkably similar to another function from a completely different code base but some of the symbols or variable names or function name has been changed, I would argue that it still falls under fair use, and is sufficiently transformative.

[boxed]

> Nothing has been decided in a court of law so saying that it's "illegal" is disingenuous.

There are plenty of examples by now of big chunks of code lifted verbatim but without attribution. Pretty clear cut stuff.

> Even if it's remarkably similar to another function from a completely different code base but some of the symbols or variable names or function name has been changed, I would argue that it still falls under fair use, and is sufficiently transformative.

That's BS on many levels. Changing variable names doesn't make copyright go away. It's just trying to hide your violation of it.

I am pretty vocally against copyright, but let's not kid ourselves about the morality of this. No attribution is immoral.

[paulryanrogers]

Microsoft's own FAQ suggests it's on users of Copilot to avoid infringing, and that without a clue of where and how the suggestions came to be.

[cauefcr]

Yes, software copyright and patents are a mistake.

[thesuperbigfrog]

>> Yes, software copyright and patents are a mistake.

Richard Stallman would agree, but there are many of us who make a living writing software.

Is software valuable enough that people will pay money for it?

If you write original software that solves a problem, shouldn't you be able to license it how you want and profit from it?

You are welcome to license the software you create how you want. Let me license the software I create how I want.

If I dual license my software as GPL and commercial and GitHub Copilot reproduces my GPLed code without attribution and without the license, how it that not copyright violation?

[rattlesnakedave]

Do you find meaningful distinction between an individual reading your code and copying patterns vs an AI model doing the same?

[thesuperbigfrog]

No, provided that both give proper attribution and follow the license the code is released under.

[rattlesnakedave]

That's a hilarious expectation. How often do you give attribution to inventors of patterns you use in your software?

[boxed]

Stallman is pretty hard FOR copyright. The strong guarantees of "free software" is 100% based on strong copyright law.

[cauefcr]

That's not what i get from reading him https://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/07/06/richard-m-stallman-co...

My favorite part:

>Copyright Now

>Now with digital data and computer networks, it much easier for us to copy and manipulate information

> Digital technology has changed the effect of copyright law

> Copyright used to be a power that was:

> wielded by authors

> over publishers

> to yield benefits to the public

> Now it’s a power that is:

> wielded by publishers

> to punish the public

> in the name of the authors

> Now the public wants to copy and share — what would a democratic government do?

[insanitybit]

I don't really care, it's a trivial algorithm that I would have written virtually identically.