See, that's the thing. When humans copy work, we have laws that step in and allow the owner of the work to say "No, you can't do that". Humans could copy anything they see, but there are legal consequences if they copy the wrong thing - especially if they gain financially by doing so. This is very much an argument about whether what these tools are doing is sufficiently like what a human could do for the laws that apply to humans to apply.
If copilot for instance generates code that (were a human to write it) would be legally considered (likely after a long and damaging lawsuit) to be a derived work of something licensed under the GPL, then that derived work must also legally be licensed undrr the GPL.
What's more, there is no clear authorial provenance. Say you find a github repo that contains what looks like a near-perfect copy of some code you own and which you released under a license of your choice. If a human wrote it, that's a legal issue.
Fundamentally, we're arguing here if it's okay in a situation like this to say "Oh, no, it's legal because software did it for me". And remember, there's no way to prove how much of a text file was written by a human and how much by software once it's saved.
oscarhocklee t1_j6i3ohl wrote
Reply to comment by poo2thegeek in Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI ask court to throw out AI copyright lawsuit by Tooskee
See, that's the thing. When humans copy work, we have laws that step in and allow the owner of the work to say "No, you can't do that". Humans could copy anything they see, but there are legal consequences if they copy the wrong thing - especially if they gain financially by doing so. This is very much an argument about whether what these tools are doing is sufficiently like what a human could do for the laws that apply to humans to apply.
If copilot for instance generates code that (were a human to write it) would be legally considered (likely after a long and damaging lawsuit) to be a derived work of something licensed under the GPL, then that derived work must also legally be licensed undrr the GPL.
What's more, there is no clear authorial provenance. Say you find a github repo that contains what looks like a near-perfect copy of some code you own and which you released under a license of your choice. If a human wrote it, that's a legal issue.
Fundamentally, we're arguing here if it's okay in a situation like this to say "Oh, no, it's legal because software did it for me". And remember, there's no way to prove how much of a text file was written by a human and how much by software once it's saved.