My understanding is that when Copilot automatically inserts some GPL licensed code fragment into your project, your project automatically has to become GPL licensed, whether you want and realize or not.
>your project, your project automatically has to become GPL licensed, whether you want and realize or not.
This is not exactly true, GPL is not magic that automatically re-licenses your code behind your back. What actually happens is your are in violation of the GPL , one way to solve the violation is that you re-license your code (so you have to do it, it is not happening behind your back automatically). I am not aware of any case where someone did not want to GPL the software and a judge forced him to do it. This kind of problems are also happening with proprietary license, some developer copy-pastes some properietary code and in the end you have to make ti right remove the code and make a deal with the party you damaged.
> The C compiler in use at the time was GCC, which was released under the GPL. To avoid the restrictions of this code, NeXT provided its front end as a library that end users would link against GCC, thereby avoiding the GPL (which only applies to distribution of the software, not how you use it). This little legal maneuver didn't work, however, so NeXT was forced to release the code.
Can you provide a link on the "forced" part ? Maybe they realized that is fucking OK to respect the license , they would not like it if someone fucks with their proprietary code either.
But from a quick check those are the reverse of the OP implication, in this cases someone takes a big GPL project and inserts a small proprietary thing on top , I would like to see an example where someone had a bit proprietary project, a dev inserted 5 lines GPL code and a judge forced them to GPL everything.
If you are looking for the smallest case, then look at Oracle vs Google multibillion debate about this function:
private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}
That big case was about APIs but I found that of course copy pasting code is a lcense violation, but the judge/jury did not force any re-licensing
"Alsup did agree with the jury that the rangeCheck function and eight security files were a copyright infringement, but the only relief available was statutory damages up to a maximum of US$150,000"
So your argument is exactly my point, the license is not infecting your product, you have to pay damages or in case of GPL you have the OPTION to comply with the license and release the code.
Again, copy -pasting some GPL code is not magicaly transforming your other code into GPL. Or the reverse copy pasting some Oracle/Microsoft or Google code in yoru project does not make your project Oracle or MS property.
Of course, it's not a magic, because everything is written in clear text, but it works:
> However, in this case, Donald writes, "with Cisco, years of trying to work through their predecessor's compliance problems didn't generate the progress we were hoping for, so we had filed a lawsuit. It was quickly settled, and compliance was achieved."
>
> There’s an even brighter silver lining to this story: Cisco later became a contributor to the GNU Project. "It really is a success story in bringing a violator into the free software community," Donald wrote.
For a proprietary code, it doesn't work because a commercial company is looking for profit.
>For a proprietary code, it doesn't work because a commercial company is looking for profit.
So you would prefer you had by mistake infringed on MS/Google or Oracle code then some dude's GPL shitty left pad ? For me it seems that the license is not important but who exactly you upset.
Anyway the point is the license did not infected Google code, Google had to pay damages and it could have been GPL or other proprietary license.
It's worse than this: Even permissive licenses like MIT require you credit the original author. Copilot regurgitates code without recognizing the original author at all, violating pretty much any and all licenses.
The GPL license is license-viral, the BSD license is just attribution-viral, as I understand it.
For BSD licensed code, you must reproduce the license and attribution for that code, but the rest of the code can be licensed as you want. For GPL code there are additional requirements.
I don't think so, which makes the resulting amalgamation in violation of the original source in that respect for both of them. Beyond that, even if you add the license and attribution manually, the GPL is still not satisfied, and may require the entire source it was used in be released depending on whether you've shipped that product to customers or used it in specific ways. That's an entirely different class of problem than just needing to go back and add some comments to your code to note where some of it came from.
Yes, technically they do. But if the problem is discovered, it is very easy to comply with the BSD terms by adding proper attribution. With GPLed code it is much more difficult.
The default shouldn't be "you can violate people's licenses until you notice or get caught". Sure, in practice it probably won't cause anyone legal trouble: it would be really hard for, say, the author of some BSD-licensed code to prove that a user of Copilot actually caused them monetary damages by not providing attribution.
But this isn't really a world I want to live in; we shouldn't treat other people's work with such entitlement. Copilot should be able to trace the provenance of a suggestion it makes, and notify the author of their licensing obligations.
If that's not possible, then Copilot should not exist.
> If that's not possible, then Copilot should not exist
Github and Microsoft should have trained it on their own code because they could make it public domain. Using other peoples code with various licences and many different requirements is just going to be a complete shitshow.
All of these issues have existed since GPT-2, maybe earlier. I remember the AI dungeon guys narrowly avoided a lawsuit from training on copyrighted novels. I find it amusing that the tech community was very pro GPT, but anti-copilot. Now that it affects them personally. Especially ironic because this place is usually very skeptical of copyright matters.
All AIs are trained on copyrighted data scraped from the internet. What you guys want effectively amounts to making most AI illegal. At least outside of big tech companies with large private datasets. Is that the world you prefer to live in?
Yes, in this case the licence is violated by default, by all code that CoPilot generates.
The point was that you can fix attribution errors pretty simply once they are uncovered, its a lot harder to pull GPL code out of your project to prevent you from having to relicence.
