The entire point of a fair use right is that you don’t need the copyright owner’s permission to be able to exercise it. Fair use allows you to do things that the copyright owner doesn’t like.

Is fair use on a massive scale still fair use? Courts generally think so, otherwise Google would have been out of business a long time ago.

I'm sure the MS lawyers thought long and hard about this and are patiently awaiting any actual lawsuits with confidence in their position. It would be very hard to prove ownership of any snippets. To the point where you can argue that it is just fair use and to the point where companies would think long and hard before committing any resources to fighting MS on this in court at great expense.

I don't think that will happen but it might be interesting if it did.

Do we have any evidence that copilot doesn't check/filter by license?

> from a project that is public but with a non-permissive license

Permissive or not doesn't matter. Public Domain or not is what matters. Permissive licenses still require you to propagate the copyright notice, which Copilot strips.

Unfortunately the way IP law works, at least in the US, is that you can use essentially whatever you want as training data and it's up to the user to make sure none of the generated code violates licensing agreements.

I think you might be missing the point of their frustration.

Lots of companies do not put their code in public repositories, granted I understand the perspective of violating a license, but the point is if you don’t want your code used by someone else (even with the risk of not getting credit, don’t know why that matters) then don’t make your repo public period.

To that point, what’s to stop GitHub from making a policy that states: “All public repositories will be utilized in AI training”?

Owning code snippets sounds ridiculous to me, like can I own this snippet?

    def average(*numbers):
        return sum(numbers)/len(numbers)

if not is it because it is too small? what’s the minimum line number that ownership kicks into? what if I change the function name and the variable names?

It doesn’t really “regurgitate code” all that much in practice though. It’s a super impressive product and these arguments seem more like people looking for an excuse to hate new, scary technology.

In light of this potential new paradigm it's bewildering how people still manage to focus on the license of training material as if it even moved the needle in this context, even a little bit.

OSS knights: THE LICENSE.

MS: Aight, I guess we have a few lines of hq src to help out with…

Github: Same.

Other OSS people: We really don't care one way or the other.

As long as the word of the lincense was upheld for another 2 weeks before it ceased to matter for the rest of all time.

Jesus fucking christ. People. I get that oss licensing is dear to the collective hn heart – but, at best, it's completely irrelevant in regards to where this will inevitably lead, regardless of current questions/issues with license violations. You can (if all the repos of MS and Github are not enough to train this thing on, which is a laughable idea) even fucking buy additional source code if that's what it takes to strengthen Copilots legal foundation. The cost is insignificant. People will be happy to sell for super cheap. It's a non issue.

Why do you wilfully choose to be distracted instead of facing and thinking about the future together?