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.
> 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.
>> 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?
>> How often do you give attribution to inventors of patterns you use in your software?
If GitHub Copilot was only "copying patterns" then it would be a lot harder to call it copyright violation and misappropriation of existing code.
And yet that is exactly what GitHub Copilot has been accused of doing: recreating copyrighted works without attribution and in violation of the licenses that the code was released under:
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.