GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright

GitHub is currently causing a lot of commotion in the Free Software scene with its release of Copilot. Copilot is an artificial intelligence trained on publicly available source code and texts. It produces code suggestions to programmers in real time. Since Copilot also uses the numerous GitHub repositories under copyleft licences such as the GPL as training material, some commentators accuse GitHub of copyright infringement, because Copilot itself is not released under a copyleft licence, but is to be offered as a paid service after a test phase. The controversy touches on several thorny copyright issues at once. What is astonishing about the current debate is that the calls for the broadest possible interpretation of copyright are now coming from within the Free Software community.

Read in full here:

https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringing-your-copyright/

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

3 Likes

Corresponding tweet for this thread:

Share link for this tweet.

2 Likes

I don’t see how it can infringe on copyright anymore than someones memory can (though maybe I should refer to a tom scott video about that, lol), rather that all comes down to the code that is actually generated on a case-by-case basis, as it has always been. Though I’m still entirely of the opinion that code should not be copyrightable, it’s too algorithmic.

2 Likes