If you steal 10 lines of code from me, the damages will be the greater of:
- The benefit to you (10 minutes programmer time)
- The cost to me ($0)
- Statutory damages (probably $200)
In other words, it's very unlikely to be worth a lawsuit. The most likely outcome is:
- A legal letter is sent
- Infringing code is removed
- As good bedside manner, some nominal amount of money is transferred, mostly in some gesture designed to make the violated party feel good about themselves (e.g. a nice gift).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...
For this content:
a nine-line rangeCheck function, several test files, the structure, sequence and organization (SSO) of the Java (API), and the API documentation.
That's an incomplete view. You're judging the value by the time it'd take to rewrite it.
The real value is in knowing what to type and why.
When Co-pilot suggests you a GPL code, it's main value is the knowledge, not the typing.
That piece of knowledge may have taken a LOT of effort from an OSS team to acquire.
Depending on the context, this knowledge would be worth millions.
Worth a lawsuit.
But it probably won't be worth millions of dollars. And that is why the lawsuit wont be worth it.
> That piece of knowledge may have taken a LOT of effort from an OSS team to acquire.
Anything "may" be possible. But it probably won't be worth that much.
I'd suggest to get more information about the repercussions associated with appropriating GPL code into proprietary closed source.
This is a big deal. You may have to license your entire codebase under GPL if you incorporate GPL code and distribute it.
I would suggest that you actually take your own advice and get more information yourself.
No license can force you to release your code. Nope, not even GPL.
Instead, what a rights holder can do, is sue for damages for the copyright theft, for not following the license. They can't force you to follow the license. Instead, they can say that you didn't follow it, therefore you stole the code, and owe money to them, for stealing the code, depending on how much the code is worth.
The only thing that GPL does, is it gives people permission to use the works, in exchange for releasing code. But, if you infringe, the damages do not depend on whatever the license was, or whatever request the license makes.
To use an example someone else gave, of the "first born child" license, imagine someone writes a simple binary search function, and puts out a license that gives it out for free, in exchange for paying them some absurd price. EX: the joke of the first born child, but more seriously, lets say the license was "1 million dollars".
If someone stole that binary search, couple line function code, and it went to court, they absolutely would not own them 1 million dollars, even though thats what the license said.
Instead, they would owe the rights holders damages. And chances are, a couple line binary search function, or some other example that you could think of, would only be worth a small amount.
And even though the license said "This code is worth 1 million dollars, and you owe us that money if you use it!", it is not true that anyone would owe them a million dollars. Instead they would only owe them damages, which would not be anywhere close to 1 million dollars.
If liability sits somewhere, it's with copilot, github, and Microsoft.
A lot of that might come down to bedside manner. Right now, github isn't super-polite to people whose code it used. That's probably a mistake. They'd be a unsympathetic evil megacorp in a jury trial.
It adds up.
But you know what? I think we'll find that CoPilot will have magically skipped those Oracle repositories and only used code from lowly open source slaves.
It might be possible, I don’t know about “highly”. Have you checked the license exclusions required to use Github? Their terms already carve out a Copyright exception for Github, because they need it on order to host your code. There’s also no reason Github can’t filter certain licenses, or make it impossible to complete entire functions, or build an option for everyone to opt-in to being autocomplete source material regardless of license, right? Any legal challenges are likely to result in changes to the feature before there are ever any serious repercussions.
I think it’s at least as likely, if not more so, that Copyright Law could evolve in response to the growing number of AI auto completers, and we (society) try to allow it within reason by being more specific about what constitutes automated infringement and who’s responsible for it. Fair Use currently exists but is vague and left up to courts to decide. In the meantime, Copyright is primarily intended to foster a balance between business and freedom of expression, and there’s a lot of open source software on Github that cares about freedom of expression and not about business. In any case, we don’t really want Copyright to represent some kind of absolute ownership land-lock over every string of 100 characters, that is a bit antithetical to both Copyright and the FOSS community.
Triply so when Microsoft is involved.
As far as copilot goes, yes it’s possible to get it to recite copyrighted works, but in normal usage it is creating independent works because it is too influenced by the structure of your code around the insertion point to recite anything. It’s auto completing things like the variable names that you already declared, simple loops and function applications, etc.
> What that means legally has yet to be fully determined.
At least in the US, the Supreme Court ruled in Google v Oracle that the entire Java API is not copyrightable. Copilot users are very far from crossing the line, the courts are not going to come after some de minimis 10-line snippet that copilot generated.
Whether Microsoft itself was legally in the right by training copilot is a more interesting legal question that remains unresolved.
No one has won billions of dollars on GPL enforcement. It's not how courts work. Contrary to popular belief, courts also won't compel compliance (e.g. releasing my code); if I break your license, the standard recourse is damages, whether that's GPL or All Rights Reserved.
Otherwise, I'd make the First Born Child license, whereby by using my code, you give me full ownership of your first born child, your home, your car, and your bank account. I could write a license like that right now, but I couldn't force you to give me your child, car, bank account, and home. If you used my code, you'd have the option to accept the license and give me those things. Or you could reject it, in which case, it's a normal copyright violation; in that case, whatever I wrote in the license is moot, and you pay damages (and stop using my code).
The only part which wouldn't be valid in a contract was the first-born child. That was a joke.
Indeed, if the GPL were a contract, courts might compel compliance.
However, the GPL is not a contract, it's a license. The FSF bent over backwards to make sure the GPL/AGPL licenses wouldn't be viewed as a contract, in part to limit liability / damages / risk.
Confusingly, some EULAs are framed contracts, contrary to the acronym, and do expose users to much more risk of liability than the GPL.
The relevant part of the GPL is:
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or
run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work
occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to
receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing
other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify
any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept
this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you
indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.