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by iio7 1309 days ago
There is a major difference between the help you can get from an IDE or editor with a language server running in the background, and then GitHub Copilot stealing away other peoples code.

I sincerely hope Microsoft looses this law suit.
2 comments
tester756 1309 days ago
I'd rather have some "middle-ground" solution instead of losing such a tool

I don't see anything wrong with "stealing" code that was meant to be public

Banning it brings no value in compare to those tools.

Also, how is that different from Google's scraping whole internet?

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paulryanrogers 1309 days ago
What if the "meant to be public" was decided because there could be strings attached, even if only to require attribution?
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ColonelPhantom 1309 days ago
> Also, how is that different from Google's scraping whole internet?

Many reasons: Google Search provides sources, it links to your website. Copilot only gives the content. Google also doesn't suggest including its search results in your product verbatim.

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tester756 1309 days ago
Thus, if Copilot showed original link to the code, then it'd be fine?
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ColonelPhantom 1308 days ago
Sure; companies would expect their employees to check the license. Remember that a lot of them consider GPL (especially AGPL) software "radioactive", so it will still effectively dissuade them.

However, it is likely that many engineers will skip checking their sources. I guess for this to work Copilot should include the attribution automatically in a comment.

The real problem is that doing this is not possible for Copilot, because the tool itself does not know the source.

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throwaway675309 1309 days ago
They won't. They have both the financial resources and honestly probably a legitimate claim that the model produces a sufficiently transformative result that would be considered fair use.

Even if the ruling did go against them, it would likely still be acceptable to train the models since it would be the usage that would be legally suspect.

Which means that in five years anyone will be capable of running these models entirely off-line on their personal machines and no one will ever know the difference.

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