It's very simple. If it's open source and the license allows re-publishing code (with copyright information intact), people can republish the code. You don't get to discriminate, cherry-pick, etc. Depending on the license, there may be lots of rights and requirements. Especially with GPL style licenses. Especially AGPLv3 seems to impose a lot of restrictions. Which is a reason for that license to not be popular with corporations. But even that license allows republishing code as long as you preserve license and copyright information.
This generally is the whole point of open sourcing code: to allow others to republish with or without modifications. If you don't want that, don't open source your code. Github is a perfectly valid and legal place to publish code. Lots of people have done so.
The jury is still out on whether using open source code as training data is fair use or constitutes a copyright violation. But the safest assumption at this point is that it is a combination of fair use and hard to prove that any violation happened to begin with (i.e. good luck stamping your feet in anger in a court room).
Which will no doubt make for some fun court cases but will also take many many years to come to any kind of conclusion. I would recommend not to get your hopes up on that. Historically, copyright law has not been updated a lot to deal with any kind of technical change. And that's just inside the US. The world is bigger than that of course. A safe assumption is that judges will seek to interpret any new cases under centuries of existing interpretations. Because that's what they do. Any changes to the law would have to go through politicians. And then the interpretation of that relative to other laws is again up to judges. Which is why we have such wonderful things as DMCA and a few other attempts to close loopholes in copright law.
Of course time is not your friend here. By the time this rolls through the courts some years down the line, existing practice will have evolved to be hopelessly dependent on language models for just about anything. Including interpreting the law (e.g. chat gpt seems to be acing exams) and doing all sorts of complicated things in science, engineering and technology. So, any legal outcome that that is somehow illegal is going to be combination of unpopular, economically damaging, and therefore unlikely. Think big corporations ki
That's a big if. Also, this is nearly forty years ago. With chip designs, there was a clear cut case of people taking each other's designs and some of the parties were billion $ chip companies being very grumpy about other companies taking their heavily patented solutions and copying those. Which translates into a lot of political pressure and lobby power and some political action. I don't see that happening for language models.
Most of the people complaining seem to be a narrow subset of open source developers that like open source but not people doing anything for profit with their source code. I.e. not your typical multi billion dollar companies that are worried about their IP getting stolen. So, not a lot of lobbying power or ability to get organized.
>It's very simple. If it's open source and the license allows re-publishing code (with copyright information intact)...
If it is that simple then clearly Copilot need to include the licence of the code when they republish it. Changing GPL'ed code doesn't make it not-GPL code at any point. If it started out as GPL it is still GPL later in the line when a user sees it in Copilot.
This generally is the whole point of open sourcing code: to allow others to republish with or without modifications. If you don't want that, don't open source your code. Github is a perfectly valid and legal place to publish code. Lots of people have done so.
The jury is still out on whether using open source code as training data is fair use or constitutes a copyright violation. But the safest assumption at this point is that it is a combination of fair use and hard to prove that any violation happened to begin with (i.e. good luck stamping your feet in anger in a court room).
Which will no doubt make for some fun court cases but will also take many many years to come to any kind of conclusion. I would recommend not to get your hopes up on that. Historically, copyright law has not been updated a lot to deal with any kind of technical change. And that's just inside the US. The world is bigger than that of course. A safe assumption is that judges will seek to interpret any new cases under centuries of existing interpretations. Because that's what they do. Any changes to the law would have to go through politicians. And then the interpretation of that relative to other laws is again up to judges. Which is why we have such wonderful things as DMCA and a few other attempts to close loopholes in copright law.
Of course time is not your friend here. By the time this rolls through the courts some years down the line, existing practice will have evolved to be hopelessly dependent on language models for just about anything. Including interpreting the law (e.g. chat gpt seems to be acing exams) and doing all sorts of complicated things in science, engineering and technology. So, any legal outcome that that is somehow illegal is going to be combination of unpopular, economically damaging, and therefore unlikely. Think big corporations ki