I don't think most people are concerned that Copilot is going to be reproducing verbatim copyrighted code, it's more that it sucks that a giant corporation is going to make a billion dollars from a tool that is entirely built off of millions of peoples' work who were never asked permission and will never be compensated.
Maybe but it also uses those index cards that show a summary of information so you don't need to navigate to the actual website that contain the original content, there might be a link there but it's usually small and practically unnoticeable.
If Copilot provided a “small and practically unnoticeable” attribution to the code used, it would definitely improve the situation, especially for licenses like MIT that require attribution and nothing else.
When you ask it a question, it will often simply construct an answer from the pages it indexed, so people don't have to click. Sure, it links it, but for what? Thankfully, the answers are almost always useless.
It should be noted that some juristictions are starting to restrict this (e.g. Australia). Also I would argue if Google would randomly display content of full websites and never post links to the original content it would be in a lot more legal trouble.
> The answer to a factual question is not copyrightable, so while you may have moral problems with that, there is no legal argument.
Correct.
>The same applies to all realistic use-cases for copilot by the way. Whatever is produces is not copyrightable.
That's a pretty bold statement to make. How do you know how people use copilot? Also IIRC Oracle vs Google essentially determined 3 lines of code can be copyrightable. So I think you statement fails on two points, you can't really predict how people use copilot and you cannot predict what a court would decide is copyrightable (this is much less straight forward than statement of facts).
My guess is the act of production that is passed as original content tends to have more avenues to harm producers than consumption.
Alarm bells of this magnitude haven't been rung about people torrenting films for decades; it's a given that some people are just going to do it and there's little that can be done to stop it.
Producing new data from original data of questionable lineage makes the questionable acts visible. Copilot and the like actively encourage this creation.
If it were possible to peek into the rooms of everyone who downloaded a torrent to admonish them then maybe pirating would have been made a modicum more taboo. But those consumers never intended to leave their rooms. Copilot forces them to leave their rooms if they want their derivative work to be used.
That's true, and when Google started extracting information from web pages and displaying it in results pages without driving any traffic to the original websites, the authors of those pages were justifiably upset.
Google Search is ethically acceptable because for the most part website creators like being in search results and are "compensated" in the form of more visitors, and if they don't like it they can easily exclude themselves. Website creators famously do NOT like it when Google indexes their content and then serves it up independently.
Google makes money from ads. When you strip those away, purely indexing the web and offering a search engine is probably costing them money, not earning.
I don’t think anyone really cares about that kind of stuff, though. Like, there are loads of examples of similar things which no one (rightfully) bags an eye at. Like if I take a photograph of you out in the public and sell the photo for $1 million, would you expect compensation? Or if someone compiles a list of the best restaurants in the world and sells that list, do you think the restaurants should be compensated?
The value that is being derived here is in the curation of the material, not the material itself.
Bad example. A better example is I am a vendor across the street giving away free books. However, to comply and get a free book I require you to keep the book's bibliography intact.
You don't do this. You get my books, cut out the bibliography, glue all the pages together, and then sell the book as your own.
It is my book and all you did is derive some work from it.
Curation companies have the same problem and there are plenty of high profile lawsuits about it.
> if I take a photograph of you out in the public and sell the photo for $1 million, would you expect compensation?
I mean I wouldn't expect it, but I think I'd be pretty annoyed if you didn't ask permission and then made a bunch of money off my image. It's easy to find stories from the subjects of famous photographs who feel like they've been exploited. Just off the top of my head there's Afghan Girl, the kid from the Nirvana album, Harvard's collection of photos of enslaved people, and Henrietta Lacks is sort of a similar case.
> if someone compiles a list of the best restaurants in the world and sells that list, do you think the restaurants should be compensated?
No, but here's a better example: you make friends with a bunch of food critics, collect their thoughts and opinions and favorite secret spots, and then publish a book based on that stuff without ever telling them what you were doing or compensating or crediting them.
I'll give a concrete example: I was rock climbing recently and met an old guy who was sort of the local expert, and he told me how some other non-locals had come in and kind of mined him for information about the area, all the routes, etc. and then published a guidebook without crediting him at all. He felt pretty upset and exploited by that, and I felt bad for buying the guidebook because I had assumed it was written by some local climbers and didn't realize they got most of their info from someone else.
If Copilot makes a billion dollars, it is only because it is generating at least a billion dollars worth of value to the community of developers who want to use it.
The people painting Microsoft as a big, greedy trust conveniently ignore that Copilot would actually be empowering the ecosystem of tech companies to develop services that compete with Microsoft faster and more easily.
When OSS code gets ripped off and people are mad: "Anti progressive luddites".
When closed source code leaks: "Copyright infringement by criminals".
What's the difference? There's plenty the world could learn from the source code of Windows or GTA6 and having access to the source of these large projects would move society forward faster. So why are OSS contributors protecting their rights "Anti progressive luddites", while the large copyright owners who guard their proprietary code like a dragon guarding gold are let off the hook?
You can't give someone a dime (that they could have easily picked up from any of your competitors too) and then break into their house claiming they had been compensated. In this case they even steal code authored by people who never used GitHub at all, but had someone else mirror it or publish it on GitHub.
