The tool was developed in conjunction with OpenAI by training the system on publically available source code of different projects. On paper, this feels like any other AI project’s training method. But several people took to Twitter criticizing GitHub’s move and calling it a copyright violation.
— Armin Ronacher (@mitsuhiko) July 3, 2021
— Jake Williams (@MalwareJake) July 3, 2021 However, Julia Reda — researcher and former Member of the European Parliament — has argued on her blog that GitHub’s tool doesn’t violate copyrights. She also added that text and data mining is not against copyright laws. Plus, machine-generated work — in this case, code snippets generated by the Copilot tool — can’t be called derivative work, and is not covered under intellectual property rules: There’s a lot of debate going on around the world related to tweaking IP-related policies when it comes to machine-generated work, but it’ll take a while till these arguments will be put to bed. In the meantime, you’ll just have to keep tweeting out your frustrations.
