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