Hi,you've certainly raised some interesting and important questions, as well as some deep philosophical comments. Unfortunately they're (obviously) not all things I can help with; however, some clarifications might be useful:
* The corpus of software is not part of the copilot "software" as such; it is only ever used as data, which then gets processed and reprocessed. I'm pretty sure that means it never runs afoul of any version of the (A/L/)GPL.
The main scenario where those licenses are involved is if someone asks copilot for some code and then puts that in a proprietary program.
* There are most definitely sizeable chunks of output reproduced verbatim from elsewhere (notably the fast inverse square root function, comments and all). Whether or not any are sufficiently large to attract copyright is, as you say, the interesting question.
* Simply republishing large amounts of a copyrighted work is not copyright infringement- every English-language book published in the last three decades shares a large portion of its vocabulary with any other! The question, really, is what the "chunks" that define code are.
* Copyright law does indeed differ quite a lot between countries, and you are right to think this could lead to different verdicts (that said, I'm not sure if it will; IANAL).
* GitHub's terms of service allow them to do a variety of things with user submissions only "as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time" (archival is allowed for some other purposes); it seems, depending on future developments, that there might be a case copilot is not covered by these criteria.
That said, I believe the (A/L/)GPL permit GitHub to do what they did anyway; this case might only apply to projects that make don't grant those rights separately under a license.
* It is arguably prudent to avoid hosting any code on GitHub, even perhaps after any legal issues are settled: https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html#GitHub
On 7/10/21 8:58 AM, marc wrote:
Hi The way I understand this (I welcome corrections), is that copilot is a piece of proprietary software which was built using a corpus of software hosted on github. And if I understand it properly, this corpus of software includes code nominally released under the GPL and similar licenses. Is my understanding correct sofar ? I am told that copilot reproduces verbatim identifiable chunks of the code that was loaded into its model. This presents two interesting questions - is the model (which is an algorithmic transformation of copyrighted material) a new, rather than derivative work ? Are the fragments of code reproduced by it sufficiently small to be considered fair use ? If I had to guess, I would answer no to both of these questions: The pasting in is verbatim and automated, and while individual pieces might not be large, there are many. Fundamentally, I also would like to think that being creative is something only a human/real intelligence can be, otherwise the guy who wrote a program to enumerate all melodies shorter than N would be owed sampling fees on all new music... and few notes of music require a royalty then a snippet of code might too ? If somebody writes an "autocompose" equivalent to copilot, trained on existing music, then they could expect legal action from record labels ? And not only for the output of the "autoimprovise" but also the model that forms the core of "autoplay" ? But I am not qualified to provide a final answer on that - I suppose judges will be the ones to make that determination. Note the plural there - I am told fair use and its equivalents differ nontrivially between countries... But assuming a no to those two points, github would then (I think) rely on the terms and conditions on its site which state that by uploading code to its site, you give it the license to re-use your work, even in closed-source products, apparently ? Now: If you upload somebody else's GPLed code to github that then implies that you (and maybe github) have contravened the license, right ? And possibly that means you lose your own permission to hold a copy of the GPLed code ? Alternatively, if you are the legitimate owner of the code, you have just dual licensed your code (with a commercial grant to github, owned by microsoft) which is probably not what you intended ? Note the question marks everywhere - have I gotten my facts wrong ? Is my reasoning incorrect ? Would it be prudent to avoid using github for (A/L/)GPLed code until the legalities have been settled ? regards marc _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
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_______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
