Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]> writes:
>> From: Richard Stallman <[email protected]>
>> Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2021 21:14:23 -0400
>> Cc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected],
>> [email protected]
>>
>> > > That's not what happens with these services: they don't _copy_ code
>> > > from other software (that won't work, because the probability of the
>> > > variables being called by other names is 100%, and thus such code, if
>> > > pasted into your program, will not compile). What they do, they
>> > > extract ideas and algorithms from those other places, and express them
>> > > in terms of your variables and your data types. So licenses are not
>> > > relevant here.
>>
>> > According to online reviews chunks of code is copied even verbatim and
>> > people find from where. Even if modified, it still requires licensing
>> > compliance.
>>
>> From what I have read, it seems that the behavior of copilot runs on a
>> spectrum from the first description to the second description. I
>> expect that in many cases, nothing copyrightable has been copied, but
>> in some cases copilot does copy a substantial amount from a
>> copyrighted work.
>
> It cannot be a verbatim copy, because at least the variables, and
> sometimes also the data types, need to be renamed. Whether the result
> is still under the original copyright cannot be established without
> actually comparing the two versions of the code. So any general
> flat rejection of the idea of these services on these grounds is not
> serious, IMO.
Not necessarily, if it generates a pure, top-level function. Someone
could type something like "Sort list of postcodes" and it generates a
Radix Sort function. And if this is part of some code that was copied a
lot, the model might tend to generate this verbatim even more likely.
Or that is at least my understanding.
--
Philip Kaludercic
