This is a great point. If I recall correctly, prior to Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin, Mono had to go out of its way to avoid accepting contributions from anyone who'd looked at the (public but non-FOSS) source code of .NET, for fear that they might reproduce some of what they'd seen rather than genuinely reverse engineering.
Is this not subject to the same concern, but at a much greater scale? What happens when a large entity with a legal department discovers an instance of Copilot-generated copyright infringement? Is the project owner liable, is GitHub/Microsoft liable, or would a court ultimately tell the infringee to deal with it and eat whatever losses occur as a result?
In any case, I hope that GitHub is at least limiting any training data to a sensible whitelist of licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache, and similar). Otherwise, I think it would probably be too much risk to use this for anything important/revenue-generating.
> In any case, I hope that GitHub is at least limiting any training data to a sensible whitelist of licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache, and similar). Otherwise, I think it would probably be too much risk to use this for anything important/revenue-generating.
I'm going to assume that there is no sensible whitelist of licenses until someone at GitHub is willing to go on the record that this is the case.
> I hope that GitHub is at least limiting any training data to a sensible whitelist of licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache, and similar)
Yes, and even those licences require preservation of the original copyright attribution and licence. MIT gives some wiggle room with the phrase "substantial portions", so it might just be MIT and WTFPL
Is this not subject to the same concern, but at a much greater scale? What happens when a large entity with a legal department discovers an instance of Copilot-generated copyright infringement? Is the project owner liable, is GitHub/Microsoft liable, or would a court ultimately tell the infringee to deal with it and eat whatever losses occur as a result?
In any case, I hope that GitHub is at least limiting any training data to a sensible whitelist of licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache, and similar). Otherwise, I think it would probably be too much risk to use this for anything important/revenue-generating.