Why is Copilot so bad?

Posted Jul 2, 2022 23:11 UTC (Sat) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
In reply to: Why is Copilot so bad? by SLi
Parent article: Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Would you say that a human brain is in some sense certainly more magic than that?

I would say that the human brain is legally distinct from computer software, in a way that calling the computer software "AI" does not change.

Copyright does not, in general, work so that everything that uses a work as input and produces an output necessarily would 1) either need a specific license to do so

I thought I specifically pointed out that I do not think this, when I said that a program which takes code as input and produces bug reports as output, would not have issues. (Because "code" and "bug reports" are different things.) A tool that takes code as input and outputs lines-of-code metrics, or cyclomatic complexity metrics, would also not need a specific license to do so. (Even though some proprietary software licenses attempt to deny the rights to that sort of activity!)

Copyright does not, in general, work so that everything that uses a work as input and produces an output necessarily would [...] produce outputs that are legally derived works [...] of the input

Not in general, or necessarily, no. But in the case of Copilot, which takes code as inputs, processes it, and then outputs more code which is generated from the processing of those inputs, what possible definition of "derived work" could there be that excludes it? The outputs are a result of the inputs - change the inputs and you get different outputs. Take the "training" inputs out, and you get no output at all. And, the outputs are the same type of thing as the inputs - code. The output code is generated from - derived from - the input code.

Why is Copilot so bad?

Posted Jul 3, 2022 0:15 UTC (Sun) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link] (1 responses)

I believe there are quite a few very possible way of it not being a derivative work—in the legal sense (I don't really care about the common meaning of the word). For example, if the copying of expression, as opposed to ideas, from any single work protected by copyright is de minimis, then the new work is not a derivative work of the original work. So, some amount of copying of expression can happen without copyright implications.

Another way is that where essentially no copying of expression, but only copying of ideas, is going on.

Why is Copilot so bad?

Posted Jul 3, 2022 22:41 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> For example, if the copying of expression, as opposed to ideas, from any single work protected by copyright is de minimis, then the new work is not a derivative work of the original work. So, some amount of copying of expression can happen without copyright implications.

Just to clarify for other commenters, this is a very complicated and jurisdiction-dependent legal analysis. As an example, in the 2nd Circuit of the US, they would do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comp...

But in other jurisdictions, other tests will be used instead.