[WithinReason]

"Notwithstanding any other language in your Agreement, GitHub will defend you against any claim by an unaffiliated third-party that your use of GitHub Copilot misappropriated a trade secret or directly infringes a patent, copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right of a third party, up to the greater of $500,000.00 USD or the total amount paid to GitHub for the use of GitHub Copilot during the 12 months preceding the claim."

From here: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-spe...

[fire]

the full segment also includes disclaimers on this so it isn't quite as cut and dry:

> 4. Defense of Third Party Claims.

  Notwithstanding any other language in your Agreement, GitHub will defend you against any claim by an unaffiliated third-party that your use of GitHub Copilot misappropriated a trade secret or directly infringes a patent, copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right of a third party, up to the greater of $500,000.00 USD or the total amount paid to GitHub for the use of GitHub Copilot during the 12 months preceding the claim.  
  GitHub’s defense obligations do not apply if (i) the claim is based on Code that differs from a Suggestion provided by GitHub Copilot, (ii) you fail to follow reasonable software development review practices designed to prevent the intentional or inadvertent use of Code in a way that may violate the intellectual property or other rights of a third party, or (iii) you have not enabled all filtering features available in GitHub Copilot.

and as I understand it:

  • i) means you can't modify copilot suggestions without losing this protection,
  • ii) isn't actually defined; this might mean they can use it as a crutch to avoid providing protection,
  • iii) means you aren't protected if you fail to enable settings that are not on by default but in theory allow you to avoid generations that reference "radioactive" licenses like gpl.

[dx034]

Still sounds pretty friendly to me. Obviously once you modify the code Github cannot be liable anymore for the lines edited. Otherwise you could push all kinds of infringement on them just because Copilot was active.

Reasonable development practices certainly don't include scanning every line for copyright, but should catch the most obvious cases.

Overall I'm surprised they're willing to bet $500k per client on the legality of Copilot.

[Spooky23]

The word “patent” is missing and $500k is nothing. And how are you going to prove that you didn’t modify whatever was suggested by the AI?

[WithinReason]

1. The word "patent" is there

2. By rerunning the network for the same input