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by autarchprinceps 713 days ago
If you have code that is under copyleft, and Copilot suggest part of it to somebody else to embed in their code on the basis of reading that repo, then either that new repo also has to be under that copyleft license, or the person is unknowingly committing a violation based on what Copilot suggested them.

Most of the time it is probably irrelevant, as Copilot doesn't suggest entire files yet, and nobody is going to care about expanding a loop or finishing a line or the likes, but I have seen as much as 14 lines in my tests. Eventually you are going to get to the point where it becomes truly relevant.

1 comments

In general, all AI's have similar issues. Just because data can be looked at publicly, doesn't give you any implicit rights to use it for other products. If there is no specific license agreement, one sided in a specific open license or specifically between the content owner and the AI developer, the owners of whatever type of information used will have the cause to sue them for license fees. I forsee a lot of court cases, certainly once people figure out how to better determine if an AI might have used a certain thing as training data without internal insight. Or governments will go as far as forcing AI companies to provide that way.