Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 2, 2022 7:11 UTC (Sat) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
Parent article: Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Coming from Australia -- a "fair dealing" country rather than a "fair use" country -- I can't see how Copilot is not making unauthorised reproductions of my work. Fair dealing is a 'black-letter law' list of uses of works for which you do not need a copyright license, and training an AI simply is not on that list. Without fair dealing, the only way to reproduce the code to train the AI is via a license, and if that is a license like the GPL then the AI output must meet the terms of the license.

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Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 6, 2022 3:02 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> Coming from Australia -- a "fair dealing" country rather than a "fair use" country -- I can't see how Copilot is not making unauthorised reproductions of my work.

Copilot isn't relying on "fair use" in countries where that applies either; it's relying on the fact that it isn't designed to reproduce the works it was trained on at all. Despite a few noteworthy corner-cases where Copilot did not work as intended, which are being addressed with filters, the goal of the system is extraction of common (i.e., not creative) elements and synthesis from many sources—not storage and retrieval of specific works.